There's no built-in way to do this. You'll have to write your own JsonSerializer. Something like

class ModelSerializer extends JsonSerializer<List<Model>> {

    @Override
    public void serialize(List<Model> value, JsonGenerator jgen,
            SerializerProvider provider) throws IOException {
        jgen.writeStartArray();
        for (Model model : value) {
            jgen.writeStartObject();
            jgen.writeObjectField("model", model);
            jgen.writeEndObject();    
        }
        jgen.writeEndArray();
    }

}

and then annotate the models field so that it uses it

@JsonSerialize(using = ModelSerializer.class)
private List<Model> models;

This would serialize as

{
    "status": "success",
    "models": [
        {
            "model": {
                "id": 1,
                "color": "red"
            }
        },
        {
            "model": {
                "id": 2,
                "color": "green"
            }
        }
    ]
}

If you're both serializing and deserializing this, you'll need a custom deserializer as well.

JSON input in your example is an object not an array. For your JSON data, this would work:

List<Restaurant> all= Arrays.asList(objectMapper.readValue(json,Restaurant.class));

A JSON like this is an array of objects and your original code would work:

String json = "[{..data1 goes here....}, {..data2 goes here....}]";
List<Restaurant> all= Arrays.asList(objectMapper.readValue(json,Restaurant[].class));

I am able to achieve this by modifying the Customer class in following way.

@Data
public class Customer implements Serializable {

    private long customerId;

    private String name;

    private String taxId;

    private String phone;

    private String address;

    private String emailId;

    private Date created;

    @JsonIdentityInfo(generator= ObjectIdGenerators.PropertyGenerator.class, property="invoiceId")
    @JsonIdentityReference(alwaysAsId=true)
    private List<Invoice> invoices;
}

The answer is inspired from https://stackoverflow.com/a/17583175/1365340

With this I can generate Customer json with invoice Id list. The Invoice object when serialized separately gets all values from all its fields in json.

I got it working by adding a custom serializer:

class Foo {
    @JsonSerialize(using = MySerializer.class)
    private List<String> fooElements;
}

public class MySerializer extends JsonSerializer<Object> {

    @Override
    public void serialize(Object value, JsonGenerator jgen, SerializerProvider provider)
            throws IOException, JsonProcessingException {
        List<String> fooList = (List<String>) value;

        if (fooList.isEmpty()) {
            return;
        }

        String fooValue = fooList.get(0);
        String[] fooElements = fooValue.split(",");

        jgen.writeStartArray();
        for (String fooValue : fooElements) {
            jgen.writeString(fooValue);
        }
        jgen.writeEndArray();
    }
}

First create a mapper :

import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;// in play 2.3
ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();

As Array:

MyClass[] myObjects = mapper.readValue(json, MyClass[].class);

As List:

List<MyClass> myObjects = mapper.readValue(jsonInput, new TypeReference<List<MyClass>>(){});

Another way to specify the List type:

List<MyClass> myObjects = mapper.readValue(jsonInput, mapper.getTypeFactory().constructCollectionType(List.class, MyClass.class));