For twenty-some years, a certain kind of Weehawken family used the Chart House the same way: birthdays in the spring, Mother's Day reservations booked weeks out, Easter dinner with a server who knew your order before you sat down. When the restaurant at 1700 Harbor Boulevard shut its doors for good in mid-May 2026, the reaction on local social media wasn't about the food. It was people trading stories about the last time they were there, some of them realizing only after the fact that their most recent visit had been their final one.
If you live in Lincoln Harbor or anywhere near it, you've probably already noticed the empty building. What you may not have connected is that this isn't the first time a major restaurant on this exact stretch of Harbor Boulevard has gone dark, and the last time it happened, the neighborhood came out ahead. The building two doors down at 1200 Harbor Boulevard already ran this exact play. It's worth looking at what happened there before deciding what the Chart House's closing means for the rest of the strip.
What actually closed, and who's replacing it
The Chart House wasn't a local independent. It was part of a national chain with roots going back to 1961, and the Weehawken location had been a fixture on Lincoln Harbor for nearly four decades, known for its seafood, prime rib, and one of the most reliable skyline views in Hudson County. The company that owns it, Landry's, also owns Mastro's Steakhouse, and Landry's has already confirmed the plan: the Chart House space is being gutted and rebuilt as Mastro's first New Jersey location, targeted to open sometime in 2027.
Mastro's isn't a downgrade or a placeholder concept. It's a 26-location national steakhouse chain built around USDA Prime beef, a raw bar, and the kind of glossy, piano-bar atmosphere that draws special-occasion diners the same way the Chart House did. In its own statement announcing the move, the company put it plainly:
"We are excited to be bringing the Mastro's experience to Weehawken!"
The relevant question for the neighborhood is what the change in concept will mean for the waterfront dining scene.
The precedent is two doors down
If you want a preview of how this typically plays out on Harbor Boulevard, look at what happened at 1200 Harbor Boulevard, the space that used to be Houlihan's. That casual chain restaurant closed and sat vacant starting in 2019. It took five years, but the site eventually reopened in late 2024 as Drift, a 17,000-square-foot restaurant with a rotating dining platform that completes a full turn every hour, giving each of the 24 seated guests a rotation through the Manhattan skyline view over the course of a meal. It's the only restaurant of its kind in New Jersey, and it made New Jersey Monthly's list of the best new restaurants in the state the year it opened.
Here's the number that actually matters, not as an isolated fact but as a comparison. Houlihan's to Drift took five years, as an independent redevelopment. The Chart House to Mastro's transition is already running on a different clock. Landry's owns both restaurants outright, has already announced the timeline publicly, and is targeting a 2027 opening for a space that closed in May 2026. That target timeline is shorter than the five years between Houlihan's closing and Drift's opening.
| Former tenant | Vacant since | New concept | Reopened / targeted | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1200 Harbor Blvd | Houlihan's | 2019 | Drift | Late 2024 |
| 1700 Harbor Blvd | Chart House | May 2026 | Mastro's Steakhouse | 2027 (targeted) |
If the pattern holds, the empty building you're driving past right now on Harbor Boulevard is closer to a renovation with a longer-than-usual permit timeline than it is to a genuine loss of a dining option on the waterfront.
What's still open while the building sits empty
None of this means the strip is in flux everywhere at once. A few anchors on this stretch haven't moved.
- Blu on the Hudson is still running its full calendar, including the seafood-and-steak dinner menu it's known for, a Thanksgiving buffet, and a New Year's Eve prix-fixe with a Ball Drop celebration and live entertainment overlooking the skyline. The restaurant recently added a more intimate private dining space, the "Blu room," for smaller gatherings.
- Faubourg continues to operate its Weehawken location, one of the restaurants that Drift's opening was explicitly framed alongside when it launched in 2024.
- Drift itself is well past its opening buzz at this point and has settled into a regular rotation of brunch, happy hour, and the rotating dinner seating that made it notable in the first place.
The strip isn't emptying out. One high-profile legacy tenant is mid-transition, and everything around it is business as usual.
What this looks like from your kitchen window this fall
If you live close enough to Lincoln Harbor to have an opinion about what's happening on Harbor Boulevard, here's what's realistic to expect between now and next year. The Chart House building will likely stay under construction through the rest of 2026 and into 2027, based on Landry's own stated timeline. There's no indication the company is behind schedule yet, but renovations on a waterfront property this size rarely finish early. Expect scaffolding and permit signage to be part of the view for a while.
In the meantime, if you're the kind of person who used the Chart House for a family occasion once a year, the honest answer is that there isn't a direct replacement open right now. Drift and Blu on the Hudson both cover similar territory, upscale seafood and steak with skyline views, and both are already taking reservations for the kind of milestone dinners the Chart House used to host. Neither one will feel like a one-to-one swap, and that's fine. The neighborhood isn't required to preserve every restaurant exactly as it was.
What the last five years on this one stretch of Harbor Boulevard actually shows is that Weehawken's waterfront dining scene doesn't shrink when a legacy tenant closes. It upgrades, on a delay. The delay is the part worth watching, not the closure itself.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property values or timing along the Lincoln Harbor corridor, that's a longer conversation, and one worth having with someone who tracks this stretch of Weehawken block by block. Staci Manoukian has been doing exactly that for buyers, sellers, and landlords across Hoboken, Jersey City, and Weehawken for more than two decades. Reach out anytime you want a read on what's actually happening in this part of town, whether it's a restaurant renovation or a listing decision.
