Real-Life Cliffhangers
A family business is tested, the hopping NJ film scene, and more Gold Coast gold
🥥🌸🌴 Aloha!🍍🌺🏄♀️
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The Oak Bends But Does Not Break
The family that owns Oak Street Liquors and Deli built it with love, baked up a storm, and weathered difficult times — together.
If you’ve stopped into The Oak, the Weehawken deli and liquor store at the corner of Gregory Avenue and Oak Street since it reopened in 2020, you may have noticed some unique touches.
Among other items, a toy train sits atop the ice cream freezer, and President Eisenhower glowers down at the cash register from his portrait across the room. The decor was placed there by Josh Haba, the former manager, whose vision for a local gathering place and eatery in his parents’ neighborhood drove a years-long campaign by his father, Rami Haba, to acquire the building.
These days, customers aren’t likely to see Josh at The Oak. Rami, whose primary venture is a textile business, took over its day-to-day operations in 2024 after a medical crisis left Josh incapacitated for months.
While the situation could easily have sunk the small business, The Oak is still standing almost two years later, an accomplishment no one understands better than Rami.
“I thought this area could be nice for a cafe,” Rami told me one recent afternoon on The Oak’s sunny terrace, pausing his conversation with a supplier peddling French-style ham. “ I didn’t know so much work [was] involved.”
Putting Down Roots
Rami bought the building at 100 Oak St., just north of the Gregory Park playground, in 2017, the same year he and his wife Mary moved to the neighborhood from North Caldwell. Together, Rami and Josh spent almost three years renovating the space, work that included digging a basement and updating the store inside and out.
When the refurbished Oak opened, mid-pandemic, in November 2020, the vision was all Josh’s. The younger Haba, a trained sommelier and the longtime manager of much-missed Tribeca mainstay the Reade Street Pub, aimed to create something with a similar social gravity in his parents’ neighborhood.
“ I just kind of wanted to start a little community place,” Josh said in a phone conversation. “Definitely, the community was really starving for that kind of establishment, and I wanted to have really good sandwiches.”
Mission accomplished. Today, Google reviews extoll The Oak’s “All the Way” bagel, a classic lox and sour cream combination with capers and onions. Two customers I spoke to rated its breakfast burrito the best in town. Personally, my husband and I love to split a Hobo breakfast sandwich with turkey.
Josh also brought a secret weapon to his new enterprise: wife Mara Haba, a professional baker, and her unfailingly perfect, melt-in-your-mouth, salty-sweet, chocolate chip cookies.
The shop sells anywhere from 1,200 cookies a month in the summer, to upwards of 2,000 once the cooler weather hits, according to Mara, who co-created the recipe with her business partner, Chef Lindsey Farr. The pair now run Kitchen Confidence Live, an in-depth, interactive online course for home bakers.
While Mara won’t divulge the secret to the shop’s standout confection, she did offer a pro tip for Weehawken Gazette readers: Freeze your cookie dough.
“ You get a thicker, chewier cookie when you bake them from frozen,” she said.
Weathering a Storm
The revitalized space, good eats, choice booze offerings and initiatives like Saturday morning music on the patio — tastefully landscaped with new flowers each season by Josh’s mom, Mary — made the store an immediate hit with the locals. But as every small business owner knows, trouble is never far off.
Two days before Halloween in 2024, Josh woke up feeling off. Facing a combination of work and personal stressors, he’d been experiencing brain fog. That day was slightly different, though.
“It almost felt like I slept on my hand,” Josh recalled. It wasn’t until Rami saw him that the situation started to become clear.
“Something’s wrong with your face,” his father said. While Josh tried to brush it off as fatigue, Rami insisted they go to the hospital.
Josh was having a stroke. Not only that, but brain scans revealed that the “brain fog” he’d been experiencing was the result of a series of mini-strokes leading up to it. A previously undiagnosed blood disorder, along with stress and the constant work of keeping up the shop were likely culprits.
“I had to relearn math from 1+1,” Josh said.
With his son out of commission, Rami stepped in.
The Oak Endures & Grows
Mara and Josh describe the handover as “pretty seamless,” but Rami, now almost two years into managing the shop, offered a different view.
“I don’t know how to run it,” he said. “Everything I do is a mistake, but I have a lot of help.”
Rami says he tries to follow Josh’s example, and he credits The Oak’s staff with keeping the place on track.
Cooks Juan Morales and Johan Morales (no relation) keep the eats coming, with weekly specials attuned to the season. Adrian Huerta keeps the shop sparkling, and a team of cashiers led by Tatiana Ramos keeps the vibes right.
Today, Josh has fully passed the baton to his dad and moved on to a new career with FedEx, a pivot that has him working in Lower Manhattan once again.
Regarding Josh’s involvement in The Oak, “ He actually just helps me make the cookies now,” Mara said with a laugh. The pair spoke to me from the road on their way to Mara’s parents’ house, their new baby girl, Dallas, born earlier this year.
The couple cleared out The Oak’s freezer and stocked it with two months’ worth of cookie dough just before Dallas’ arrival. On their first day back after a short parental leave, the baby snoozed while her parents made a fresh batch, and the store welcomed the third generation to the family business.
The Oak is open daily 8a to 8p 📍 100 Oak St, Weehawken, New Jersey 07086
instagram.com/theoakliquoranddeli
🎬 The Garden State Grows A Bumper Crop Of Film & TV Projects
When you think film, you think Hollywood, but in fact, the very idea of celluloid film was thanks to Hannibal Goodwin, a minister in Newark, NJ. The first film camera was made by a Edison lab assistant in West Orange, NJ, which is also where the first studio was erected by Edison in 1893. Heck, the term “cliffhanger” comes from the early films shot on the Palisades! And as a reminder, we wrote about Harry Houdini’s failed film lab, which now houses a successful cafe in Union City.
With all this history, how is it that New Jersey misses out on the respect? Jay Stern, feature film director, Iron Mule Film Festival producer/co-host, and professor of film and television at Rider University, agreed that NJ film history is often ignored, but told the Gazette it might be because “when film began it wasn’t taken seriously as an art, it was like a parlor trick, a novelty.”
The good news is it’s not just ye olden days seeing ACTION! Spielberg’s recent release Disclosure Day and the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown (see a story about the filming we shared here) are just two recent blockbusters that shot heavily in New Jersey.
And according to the Hollywood Reporter, film shoots have dropped across the U.S. everywhere except New Jersey. California is still #1 in production, but they are down 14% year over year. New Jersey is #3, right behind New York. But NY is also down 14% while New Jersey production is up a whopping 45%.
No doubt production venues are popping thanks to the state’s film incentives and our deep reserves of on-and-off screen talent. Paramount is said to be coming to Bayonne’s 1888 Studios, and Netflix is slated to build a $1 billion complex in Fort Monmouth that might be open by 2028, and there are studios in the works in Carteret and Newark, according to CoStar. Stern told us, “We’ve seen growth in our department and are planning to expand. There’s some great film programs in New Jersey, happening around the same time we are seeing this growth in productions. If I was just starting out, I wouldn’t go to LA — I’d consider New Jersey.”
So speaking of all this excitement, we found a series that was shot right in our own backyard…
🎥 Local Actor & Screenwriter Makes A Scene In Hudson County
A working-class man with a dark past uncovers a deadly conspiracy tied to his city’s beloved mayor. With nothing to lose, he becomes an unstoppable vigilante, igniting a movement for justice in the streets. —logline for ROMAN
ROMAN is an original dramatic thriller created, co-produced, and starring Alfredo Diaz, a screenwriter, performer, and producer whose recent acting work includes Dexter: Resurrection, Power, and the feature film Rumba Love.
Of course we were thrilled to learn that his recent project was filmed throughout Weehawken, Union City, Hoboken, Jersey City, and surrounding Hudson County areas, and used many local cast and crew members.
With this project, Diaz has created a story with roots that run deep. Asking about his connection to the area, he said, “I spent my childhood between Union City and Jersey City, and many of my closest friends were from Weehawken and Hoboken. I even worked at the old Pathmark in Weehawken years ago.”
But the shoot in Hudson County was more than just a convenient location for a gritty series. It was inspired by the changing landscape and real tensions affecting working-class communities in our area — challenges Diaz says he knows well:
“My upbringing was complicated, and I struggled with addiction and behavioral issues when I was younger, which eventually led me to leave Hudson County and move to New York City. Thankfully, I was able to turn my life around. I’ve now been clean and sober for 16 years, and some years ago I moved back to the area with my family. In many ways, creating Roman felt like coming home and telling a story rooted in the communities that shaped me.”
They recently held a screening of the pilot at the Angelika Film Center in NYC, pictured above, and are currently seeking distribution and development opportunities as they expand the project into a full series.
Follow Roman the Series on YouTube and Diaz on Instagram to keep up with the project’s developments and cheer on this local boy who has come home to create art, good jobs, and a brilliant way to shine a light on our area.
In Brief: Burgers, Benches & More
🎭 Eagle Scout and recent Weehawken High School graduate Eddie Fox recently won a coveted 2026 Rising Star award from Paper Mill Playhouse. 114 high schools participated. See all winners here. According to the Weehawken Class of 26 Instagram, Eddie is off to Rutgers in the fall to study environmental science.
🍔 White Manna Hamburgers in Hackensack has been serving up burgers since 1946 and it’s moving, literally, about a half a mile north and then getting an extension and extra parking. Story here on Jersey Digs.
💬 Montclair unveiled two “Happy to Chat” benches outside their public library, where by sitting on them, you are signaling that you are ready to speak to whoever sits down. The project is spearheaded by Ken Waitz, a business professor at Montclair State. Story here, and yes, we want one.
👋 🌊 A Hui Hou Kākou
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