I prefer express, async, jade

Express is very solid and production ready, it's a good balance of magically handling the default things and not having to code for a totally unique system

Async lets you organize your code really well, and works well with the patterns of node.js code.

I also like commander for making console interfaces to apps, this can help with testing and administration

We use node+express for everything at MileWise. I put together a starter project for quickly bootstrapping new projects that's ready to go using our favorite set of tools:

Expres, Jade, Stylus+Bootstrap-Stylus, Passport (for auth), Mongode (MongoDb-native wrapper)

Maybe it'll help you get started! It's ready to be deployed to heroku or node-jitsu etc. And I use mongohq for new projects until they get bigger.

EDIT: link... https://github.com/milewise/sideproject

Awesome! Taking a look.

Meteor (http://meteor.com/) seems to be pretty popular these days. It's not labeled production ready but it is showing a lot of promise and is under active development. Checkout their screencasts to see what it can do.

I've heard of meteor. Wish I could find more documentation on it. Going to take a closer look.

I'm working on a project using Restify (http://mcavage.github.com/node-restify/). It was a quick way to get a ReST API up and running to interface with MongoDB. The routing is very intuitive (server.get, server.post, etc.), and I like the minimal approach. I didn't need all of the templating that frameworks like Express have since I'm using Backbone on the front end for a single page app.

Use connect middleware and small, focused, interoperable modules instead of a "do-it-all" framework.

I would recommend starting with Connect and using middleware specific to your needs.

http://www.senchalabs.org/connect/

As far as frameworks go, Express is stable, tested, fast and the perfect level of abstraction.