Dan Campeas and Dayanna Ordonez are doing three hard things at once. They run Dan & Day’s Burgers and Shakes at the corner of Valley and Bellevue, are launching Farmhouse Fried Chicken, their new restaurant just across the street, and at the same time, they’re trying to find 85 more volunteers for the music festival they built from a single Instagram post.
All projects come from the same drive to make Upper Montclair – or “uptown” as they like to say – a real destination.
“Everything happens downtown, nothing happens uptown, and that’s something I think we felt even before we opened Dan & Day’s,” Campeas said on The Montclair Pod.
FARMHOUSE FRIED CHICKEN IS OPEN ON BELLEVUE AVENUE
The idea for the new restaurant came together nine months ago, on vacation, nowhere near Montclair.
“August 2025, we were at lunch eating fried chicken on like one of our last days, I think, in Yellowstone… we were like, ‘Oh, this is what we should do,’ you know? There’s no fried chicken uptown,” Campeas said.
There actually is fried chicken uptown – both Turtle and the Wolf and The Montclair Diner serve it, but there isn’t a dedicated fast/casual fried chicken restaurant in the area. Farmhouse happened to soft launch on Mike’s birthday, a coincidence that raised some eyebrows on the show, though Mike insists it wasn’t orchestrated.
Campeas built the menu around one rule: don’t make anyone choose. Farmhouse will serve chicken by the piece, wings, hand-breaded tenders and four different sandwiches, plus family-style buckets with biscuits and sides like mac and cheese, mashed potatoes, coleslaw and waffle fries.
“I came to the conclusion that the best way for us to be most successful is to just offer everything, um, so that you’re covering as many people as possible,” Campeas said.
If you want more details on the prep, from the pressure fryers to the Bell & Evans chicken, read our earlier piece on Farmhouse’s design and menu buildout.
HOW UPTOWN SOUND WENT FROM SILENCE TO $76,000 IN SPONSORSHIPS
The festival Campeas and Ordonez are throwing this fall, Uptown Sound, started as a summer stage idea and grew from there. It was originally called Dan and Day’s Music Festival, but as it has moved toward nonprofit status, meaning any money raised goes back into the event rather than to the couple, the math around asking people for money changed.
“Big reason was this was obviously becoming community ran and funded, and it felt really weird going to people asking for money and sponsorships and potentially donations in the future when our names were on it,” Campeas said. “So it just didn’t feel right. It felt very actually disingenuous.”
Their first sponsorship deck priced everything too low. A local business owner told them, bluntly, they were leaving money on the table.
“We’re super thankful for that conversation,” Campeas said. “So we went back to the drawing board… and we jacked up all the prices.”
Then the decks went out and nothing happened.
“It was, like, dead silence for, like, a week and a half… when we gave out the sponsor decks. And just nobody. Java Love, I think, was one, they were the first ones. Cornerstone,” Campeas said.
Then the phone rang. The general manager at Frederic’s Fine Jewelers, the Bellevue Avenue jeweler that has anchored the corner of Valley and Bellevue since the 1930s, called about becoming the festival’s presenting sponsor, the top-billed tier at $15,000.
“She’s just like, ‘Hey, Dan,’ like, ‘we’re gonna have a meeting’… ‘We’re interested for the presenting sponsor which was a $15k sponsor,'” Campeas said.
Ordonez remembers walking over to that meeting convinced it would fall apart.
“We were so nervous… it was like 10:02, it was like a 10:00 AM meeting, and they weren’t there yet, so we walked over here. We were freaking out… and the first five minutes they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re in,'” she said.
“Frederic’s opened the floodgates. We like literally got one after another after that. It was like within a few weeks we raised like $45,000. It was insane,” Campeas said.
Ordonez puts the running total higher now, though she is the first to say the number keeps moving. “We’ve raised 75, I think 76,000, is where we’re at right now,” she said.
UPTOWN SOUND STILL NEEDS 85 VOLUNTEERS BEFORE SEPTEMBER 26
Money bought Uptown Sound a headliner and a stage. It didn’t buy a crew.
Before the festival lands in Anderson Park on September 26, Campeas and Ordonez need about 100 volunteers to run it. As of this taping, they had fewer than 15. Anyone who wants to help can email info@uptownsoundfest.org or fill out this form.
The team already has a trial run under its belt. Uptown Sound’s Summer Stage series, free Friday night concerts at St. James Episcopal Church, has been running all summer as a smaller-scale test of the same organizing muscle the September festival will need.
The September lineup is still coming together, but as of this taping it includes Kevin March and Rocking for Inclusion opening, a salsa band, Mike’s own group BARD and a closing set from Waterbury Road. Campeas is already thinking past this year.
“We’re big fans of a band called Fantastic Cat… the kind of told us, like, in a very nice way, like, prove to us… because this is your first festival, prove to us you know what you’re doing, and then get back to us,” Campeas said.
For Ordonez, the goal was never just the music.
“The mission of Uptown Sound, which not only is to bring music, but also to help make Uptown more beautiful. So if that means donations to Friends of Anderson Park so they could upkeep Anderson Park in a nicer way, or if that means, I don’t know, planting flowers around Uptown or just making this area nicer in any way we can help,” she said.
WHY DAN AND DAY ARE BUILDING TWO BUSINESSES AT ONCE
Underneath the three projects is the same math. Montclair is an expensive place to plant a life, and Campeas and Ordonez don’t have kids yet, but that’s part of why they’re building here now.
“Part of our motivation of opening, um, another restaurant also was we wanna raise our kids in Montclair. And… the housing pricing here is literally insane,” Ordonez said.
People ask the couple constantly what it’s like to run all of this together, as business partners and as spouses.
“We get this a lot, even to me, how can you, like, deal with him every day?” Ordonez said.
Campeas doesn’t treat it as a hard question. “If you can’t deal with your significant other, you shouldn’t be there… it works for us, that’s all. We wouldn’t want it any other way,” he said.
Farmhouse is open on Bellevue Avenue now, so stop by and check their Instagram for current hours while they settle in. Uptown Sound’s Summer Stage keeps going every Friday night at St. James Episcopal Church, and the festival lands in Anderson Park on September 26, so come out for either one, and if you can spare a shift, sign up to volunteer at uptownsoundfest.org. And while you’re on Bellevue Avenue, Dan & Day’s Burgers and Shakes, the place that started all of this, is still right across the street.
Image credit: Dan and Day’s Instagram
