The One Name Behind Half of Downtown Tenafly's New Storefronts

"Everybody's basically a young family with kids, but the downtown offerings were horrible." That's how Jon Krieger described Tenafly the year he moved his family from Manhattan into the borough's tree-lined blocks. He wasn't complaining from the sidelines. Within a few years he'd become president of the Tenafly Chamber of Commerce, opened a restaurant inside the town's oldest house, launched a padel club, brought in a kosher smokehouse and a wood-fired rotisserie chicken spot, and started work on a members-only club a few towns over. If you've noticed how many new signs have gone up around West Clinton Avenue and wondered whether they're connected, they are. They're the same plan, executed one storefront at a time.

The Restaurant in the Oldest House in Town

Spring House sits at 91 West Clinton Avenue in a stone mansion the Demarest and Lyle families built in the 1790s, one of the oldest homes in Tenafly and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Krieger has said he ran into a "don't-rock-the-boat" attitude from the borough's civic establishment when he first pitched turning the property into an all-day restaurant and gathering spot. His workaround was to run for the Chamber of Commerce presidency himself, win it, and use the position to move the project forward.

Spring House opened in May 2025 with chef Pasquale "Paco" Frola in the kitchen, previously of Sofia in Englewood, serving a Mediterranean menu across the mansion's dining rooms, an Art Deco lounge, and a backyard beer garden. One detail that made the local press write about it twice: the house's original owners were John and Julia Lyle, and Krieger's wife happens to be named Julia. He's said that coincidence is part of why the name stuck.

One Owner, an Eight-Minute Loop

Spring House wasn't the start of Krieger's Tenafly project. It came after Padel United Sports Club, the padel and wellness facility he opened first, and it's since been joined by three more concepts, all run under his holding company, Cure Companies. Krieger has described the strategy plainly: he wants to "curate towns with a trusted, recognizable ecosystem," one where a resident's whole week, meals, workouts, socializing, can happen inside a handful of connected addresses. He's even talked about eventually folding all of it into one membership platform, so a single account covers your padel court reservation, your dinner table, and a wine tasting.

Here's what's actually part of that loop right now:

• Padel United Sports Club — the original anchor, built around the racquet sport
• Spring House — restaurant, bar, and event space inside the 1790s Demarest-Lyle House
• The Wandering Que — a kosher smokehouse and catering operation
• Rosto — wood-fired rotisserie chicken at 4 Highwood Avenue, which opened in mid-March 2026 under chef Nitzan Raz, whose résumé includes stints at Mesa Grill, Nobu Tribeca, Jean-Georges, and Sushi Samba
• Blackwood Club — an indoor shooting range and members' social club

Krieger's own explanation for why this works in Tenafly rather than somewhere else comes down to a mismatch he says he spotted early: a town of roughly 15,500 people with an average household income around $280,000, full of young families, and a downtown that hadn't caught up to what those households wanted to spend money on locally.

The Piece That Isn't Actually in Tenafly

Here's where a lot of casual mentions of this story get sloppy. Blackwood Club isn't downtown, and it isn't in Tenafly at all. It sits on five acres in Northvale, at 266 Union Street, close enough to be part of the same short drive Krieger talks about but geographically its own address in a neighboring borough. Inside, the club combines a firing range with a martial arts studio offering Krav Maga, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and Muay Thai, plus a sauna, cold plunge, cigar lounge, and its own bar and restaurant. It's members-only, with a vetting process for anyone applying, and guests need to be signed in by a member ahead of time.

If you've heard secondhand that "the padel guy opened a gun club in Tenafly," the more accurate version is that he opened one a short drive away, aimed at the same members who already show up for padel, dinner at Spring House, or a rotisserie chicken pickup on a Tuesday night.

The Borough's Own Calendar Is Starting to Match His

Once Krieger became Chamber president, the line between what's a private business calendar and what's an official Tenafly event started to blur a little. Two dated examples make that visible. In July, the Chamber partnered with the Borough on a FIFA World Cup Viewing Weekend downtown, complete with a passport challenge encouraging people to visit local businesses for a chance at prizes, exactly the kind of cross-promotion that benefits a Chamber president who also owns several of the businesses on that passport.

The next one is coming up fast. The Borough's own procurement records show it solicited bids this past June for a vendor to run its Fall Festival 2026 street fair, set for Thursday, October 15, from 4 to 10 p.m. at Downtown and Huyler Park, with a rain date the following week. That's three and a half weeks from today. The bid documents specifically call for an artisan vendor market marketed toward shopping local businesses, and for any press materials to name both the Borough and the Tenafly Chamber of Commerce as partners. None of that means the festival exists because of Krieger's businesses. It means the town's own civic calendar has increasingly adopted the same "get everyone downtown at once" logic he's been building privately for the past few years.

What to Watch Next

Krieger has talked publicly about wanting to add a boutique hotel to the mix eventually, which would round out the ecosystem with a place for visitors to stay rather than just a place for residents to spend their evenings. That one's still just a stated plan, not a project with a location or a timeline attached, so it's worth treating as an idea rather than a fact on the ground.

What is already true is that the four businesses that do exist, Padel United, Spring House, The Wandering Que, and Rosto, sit close enough together that a Tenafly resident can move through most of a week without leaving the same short loop of addresses. Whether that turns out to be a genuine downtown revival or a single owner's very well-executed thesis probably depends on what happens over the next year or two, as more of the plan either fills in or doesn't.

For now, the pattern is worth knowing if you live here, because it explains something that otherwise looks like coincidence: why so many new storefronts on the same few blocks keep sharing a similar polish, a similar "come as you are, stay a while" pitch, and, if you look closely enough, the same name somewhere in the fine print.

If you're weighing what a town like Tenafly, or another Bergen County main street going through its own version of this, actually means for your own next move, Tyler Pontier spends a lot of time tracking these shifts block by block. Let's Connect.