How One Ramen Shop Turned Three Blocks of Bloomfield Avenue Into Sushi Row

Stand at the corner of Bloomfield Avenue and Glenridge Avenue in downtown Montclair and you're within a five-minute walk of four places serving sushi, and that's before you count the ramen counters that added rolls to their menus almost as an afterthought. Nami Nori is at 378 Bloomfield. Ani Ramen sits at 511. Ju-Ichi Japanese Restaurant opened directly across from it at 512. Half a block up Glenridge, Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto's first New Jersey restaurant occupies 12,779 square feet that used to hold something else entirely.

None of this happened by accident, and it didn't happen all at once either. The story of how this particular stretch of Bloomfield Avenue became Montclair's unofficial sushi row starts with a ramen shop that opened more than a decade ago, and it tells you something about how food scenes actually cluster that a simple "best sushi in Montclair" list never will.

The Corridor Started With Ramen, Not Sushi

Montclair Hospitality Group opened its first restaurant, Ani Ramen, on Bloomfield Avenue in 2014. Founder Luck Sarabhayavanija built the company from that single storefront, and it's easy to forget now, with the neighborhood's Japanese food options multiplying every few months, that the whole thing started as one ramen shop making a bet on a stretch of avenue that wasn't yet known for anything in particular.

That bet paid off slowly and then all at once. By 2025, Montclair Hospitality Group had grown enough of a footprint, and enough of a reputation, that it became the local partner for a chef most towns of this size could never land.

What Changed When an Iron Chef Picked Glenridge Avenue

MM by Morimoto opened on July 31, 2025, at 193 Glenridge Avenue, marking Chef Masaharu Morimoto's first restaurant in New Jersey. The space is enormous by local standards, and the partnership behind it matters as much as the square footage. Morimoto didn't scout Montclair cold. He partnered directly with Montclair Hospitality Group, the same company behind Ani Ramen and pastaRAMEN, and he said as much when the restaurant was announced, telling Forbes that Montclair "isn't just a suburb in New Jersey, it's become a real food destination," and pointing specifically to Ani Ramen and pastaRAMEN as evidence.

That's the detail worth sitting with. A chef with restaurants in New York, Napa, Honolulu, Mumbai, and Tokyo chose a Montclair address in large part because a decade-old ramen shop and its sibling restaurant had already done the work of proving the corridor could support ambitious dining. Sarabhayavanija called it a milestone a decade in the making, saying the opening came just over ten years after he first opened Ani Ramen on Bloomfield Avenue, in comments reported by Montclair Local around the opening. The Iron Chef didn't create the food destination. He confirmed one that already existed, then added a 12,779-square-foot exclamation point to it.

The Same Week, Two Doors Down

If MM by Morimoto proved the corridor had arrived, what happened in June 2026 proved something else: that other operators were now racing to claim a piece of the same three blocks before anyone else could.

In early June 2026, Ju-Ichi Japanese Restaurant opened at 512 Bloomfield Avenue, its fourth location for a family-owned group with roots in Morristown and outposts in State College, Pennsylvania. The same week, just across the street at 511 Bloomfield, Ani Ramen soft-launched its own sushi program, adding rolls and nigiri to a menu that had spent more than a decade focused on ramen bowls and pork buns. Montclair Local reported both moves in the same story, because they landed in the same news cycle, on the same block, days apart.

That timing is the tell. Ani Ramen didn't need to add sushi to survive. It's the flagship of the group that built the corridor. Adding a sushi program the same week a direct competitor opened across the street looks less like organic menu evolution and more like a company defending its own turf. Ju-Ichi, for its part, chose to plant its fourth location directly across from an established Montclair Hospitality Group restaurant rather than somewhere else in town, which suggests the operators saw the foot traffic Ani Ramen and its neighbors had already built and wanted in on it rather than trying to generate demand somewhere untested.

This is how restaurant clusters actually form. It's rarely a wave of independent operators noticing the same gap in the market at the same time. More often it's one anchor tenant proving a location works, a marquee name validating it further, and then a rush of competitors converging on the exact same blocks because that's where the customers already are.

A Timeline of the Cluster

Notice what's missing from that table: the town's older, more scattered sushi spots. Minoru, in Upper Montclair at 608 Valley Road, has been serving Japanese food well outside this corridor for years. Chef Chen's opened in May 2025 in the former Le Salbuen space, also apart from the Bloomfield and Glenridge cluster. Those restaurants are part of Montclair's broader Japanese food scene, but they aren't part of this particular story. The compression is the point. Four restaurants inside a few blocks, three of them arriving or transforming within the last twelve months, is a different phenomenon than a town having good sushi in several neighborhoods.

What This Means If You're Deciding Where To Eat This Month

If you're picking a spot on this stretch, a few practical distinctions are worth knowing before you go.

Nami Nori is BYOB, specializes in open-style hand rolls rather than traditional nigiri, and keeps a gluten-free menu throughout. Ju-Ichi is also BYOB and leans into a broader menu, ramen, udon, and donburi alongside sushi, with a broth the kitchen simmers for roughly 24 hours. Ani Ramen's sushi program launched softly in June, layered onto the ramen bowls and pork buns the kitchen has served for over a decade, so it's worth asking what's currently on the roll list before you go in expecting a full sushi bar. MM by Morimoto is the one to book ahead for. It runs a full bar and sake program, an omakase bar with fish flown in daily, and a much higher price point than its neighbors, more special occasion than weeknight stop.

None of this required a citywide sushi craze to happen. It required one company willing to open a ramen shop on an unproven block in 2014, patient enough to build a reputation over a decade, and connected enough to eventually land a chef whose name alone changes how a street gets talked about. Everything since has been other operators reading that same signal and deciding they wanted to be standing on the same three blocks when the next person walked by looking for dinner.

That's worth knowing the next time someone tells you Montclair just happens to have a lot of good sushi right now. It doesn't happen. Somebody built it, on purpose, one storefront at a time.

Montclair keeps changing shape like this, one corridor at a time, in ways that reward the people who are paying close attention. The Mumoli Collective spends as much time tracking what's opening on Bloomfield Avenue as we do tracking what's closing escrow, because the two aren't as separate as they look. If you're curious what else is shifting in this neighborhood, reach out. We're happy to talk food, or real estate, or both.