Best Restaurants in Asbury Park
Five essential tables, ranked by occasion.
$ Under $20 | $$ $20–45 | $$$ $45–90 | $$$$ Over $90
Asbury Park’s Top 5
Porta
Porta was among the first restaurants to bet on Asbury Park's revival and won that bet decisively — a Neapolitan pizza restaurant in a massive converted garage space that has become one of the shore's most reliably anima...
Barrio Cantina
Barrio Cantina is the restaurant that Asbury Park's creative community made its own — a Mexican-inspired kitchen with serious mezcal program that serves the borough's year-round population as faithfully as its summer vis...
The Butcher's Block
The Butcher's Block is Asbury Park's most technically accomplished restaurant — a meat-focused kitchen that sources from New Jersey farms with the specificity that serious sourcing requires and pairs the results with a n...
Langosta Lounge
Langosta Lounge sits directly on the Asbury Park boardwalk — a position that provides ocean views from every seat and the ambient sound of the Atlantic through the windows. The Latin-Caribbean menu is the culinary person...
Asbury Festhalle & Biergarten
Asbury Festhalle & Biergarten is one of the largest indoor-outdoor biergarten operations on the Jersey Shore — a combination of enclosed hall and outdoor garden that handles the full range of Asbury Park weather while ma...
Moonstruck
Moonstruck has been a serious presence in Asbury Park's dining scene long enough to predate the revival — one of the restaurants that held quality standards through the city's difficult decades and benefited from the ren...
Dining in Asbury Park
Asbury Park is the Jersey Shore's most improbable success story. A city that fell into genuine disrepair after the 1970 race riots, survived decades of abandonment, and then — starting in the early 2000s — began an improbable revival driven by the arts community, the LGBTQ community, and the young New Yorkers who discovered that the Shore was an hour from Penn Station. Today Asbury Park is one of the East Coast's most creative small cities, and its restaurant scene reflects the creative class that rebuilt it.
The Revival Story
The restaurants that came first in Asbury Park's revival — Porta in the converted garage, Langosta on the boardwalk — were bets on a city that hadn't proved itself yet. Their success validated the proposition and attracted the subsequent wave of serious kitchens. Today the city has more good restaurants per capita than most Shore towns ten times its size.
The Boardwalk
Asbury Park's historic boardwalk — the centerpiece of the city's 19th-century resort era, largely abandoned through the decline decades, and now partially restored — provides the most atmospheric outdoor dining environment on the Jersey Shore. The combination of the Atlantic Ocean, the century-old Convention Hall, and the eclectic mix of restaurants and bars that have colonized the boardwalk creates an evening culture unlike anything else on the Shore.
Practical Notes
Asbury Park is served by NJ Transit's North Jersey Coast Line (90 minutes from Penn Station, New York). Summer parking is competitive; train access is recommended. The city is year-round, with different energy in the off-season. Most restaurants are open year-round; the boardwalk venues are seasonal.