I don't think that one could say whether any specific pattern is "optimal" for something as broad as RESTful service development. Whether that pattern is optimal depends on your business needs, design, and whether it solves a problem for you.
That said, the MVC concept can be very useful in REST development. The mindset of separating your business logic (models, controllers) away from the HTTP protocol details (view) can keep your code more flexible/reusable. It would allow you to add other protocols on top of your service more easily. For example, you could support SOAP, REST, and a custom binary socket protocol as your "views" which all use the same core logic.
As far as comparing frameworks (JAX-RS, Apache CXF, other MVC frameworks), that's more of an issue of finding one that meets your needs. You'd have to consider factors like maturity, how familiar your developers are with it, community, etc. It's important to not conflate frameworks and patterns (even though many frameworks define themselves on an implementation of a pattern).