Our Story

Where We Started

Paragon has always been a Clark restaurant first. Long before the new name, before the renovation, before any of it — this was the place where regulars knew the bartender by name, where the same booth hosted a decade of birthdays, where a night out didn't need to be anywhere fancier than right here. That neighborhood feeling was never something we wanted to lose. It's the reason we're still on Central Avenue.

But a restaurant, like anyone, gets the chance to grow up.

Coming Back to Where It Started

12 years before we became Paragon American + Italian Gastropub, Chef Eric LeVine, with his partners Purvi + Akik Shah, helped build the original Paragon from the ground up. He moved on. The restaurant kept going. And when we started asking what the next chapter should look like, there was really only one person to call.

Eric trained at the Culinary Institute of America, came up under Chef David Burke at the River Café, and ran the kitchen as Chef de Cuisine at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square before most people in Clark ever knew his name. Since then, he's cooked on national television, won a Food Network Chopped championship, written four cookbooks, and never stopped coming back to the same question: what does it actually taste like to cook the food you grew up on *and* the food that built your career, on the same plate, without picking one?

That question is the whole reason Paragon looks the way it does today.

Who We Are Now

We didn't want to be an Italian restaurant with a burger bolted on the side, and we didn't want to be a gastropub with pasta as an afterthought. So we didn't build it that way. Sunday gravy and slow-braised short rib run straight through our menu — into the pizza, into the mac and cheese, into a Sunday brunch built on the same identity as dinner instead of just eggs added on top. Right alongside it, you'll find the burgers, the wings, the truffle fries, and the cocktails that make a gastropub feel like a gastropub. One kitchen, cooking both, without either half apologizing for the other.

That's not a tagline for us. It's genuinely how the menu got built.

What Hasn't Changed

The building looks different. The name is different. But walk in on a Tuesday night and you'll still find exactly what this restaurant has always been for Clark, Westfield, Rahway, Cranford, Scotch Plains, and everyone in between: a place to sit down, order something you actually want to eat, and stay a while. We renovated the space and rebuilt the menu because we believed this neighborhood deserved a better version of what was already here.

Pull Up a Chair

We're still the restaurant where you bring your family on a Sunday. We're still the bar where you catch a game with a good beer in hand. We just also happen to be the place where the short rib took four hours, the pasta is made with real technique, and the chef in the kitchen has spent his whole career learning how to do both things right.

That's who we were. That's who we've become.
Come taste the difference for yourself.

Paragon an American + Italian Gastropub
77 Central Avenue, Clark, NJ 07066