GUT JOB: The Smith partners—from left, Meg Brunette, Jim Watt, Jason Watt and Kyle Lepree—survey the old Burlington City firehouse they aim to transform into a stylish eatery.
(Continued on page 138)
RESTAURANTS TO THE RESCUE
The ultra-creative Smith group helped revitalize Asbury Park with a daring take on
dining. Burlington City is their new canvas. By Leslie Garisto Pfa;
y August 2013, the Endeavor Fire
Company firehouse in Burlington
City had been decommissioned for
more than a decade. Around the block,
Café Gallery, a longtime restaurant on High
Street, was nearly bereft of patrons and
would close in a few months. Nearby, the
215-year-old building that housed Temple
B’nai Israel was also vacant, flooded by
Hurricane Irene in 2011. The city’s once-bustling downtown was scarred by shuttered storefronts and boarded-up row
houses. To the four founding partners of
the Smith restaurant group—Kyle Lepree;
her spouse, Meg Brunette; architect Jim
Watt; and Watt’s brother, Jason—it looked
like opportunity.
The four had come to Burlington at the
behest of Jim Kennedy, an economic redevelopment consultant hired by the city to
jump-start the revitalization of its historic
downtown. On that summer afternoon,
the historic city of 9,800 on the banks of
the Delaware River appeared in desperate
need of a renaissance.
That was, in fact, why Kennedy had
thought of Smith, whose partners had
developed a reputation as visionaries with
a penchant for flouting conventional wis-
dom. “They’re on the cutting edge,” says
Kennedy, “and the restaurant industry is a
crucial part of urban redevelopment.”
Since 2006, Smith has opened six
imaginative and varied restaurants in
Asbury Park (the group refers to them as
brands) helping launch that city’s ongo-
ing comeback. As they toured Burlington,
the partners couldn’t help seeing it
as another Asbury Park. It didn’t have
the ocean, but it did have the glisten-
ing Delaware. It also had proximity to
Philadelphia and its well-heeled suburbs.
Smith bought in, figuratively and literally,
purchasing four homes and the decommissioned firehouse. In its 141-year-old
façade and echoing, 16,000-square-foot
interior, others might have seen only an
architectural relic. The Smith partners
saw a vibrant restaurant and social hub
begging to be born.
Their first restaurant had begun with
a similar vision. It was 2004, and Asbury
Park was a boulevard of broken dreams. In
their eighth-floor o;ce on Bangs Avenue,
Lepree and Brunette, founding partners
in the graphic design and production firm
Knockout, and their employee Jason Watt,
now a partner in the firm, were entertain-
ing a fantasy of Asbury Park’s future. “We
asked ourselves, ‘What do we dream, if we
could have anything?’” says Brunette.
Because it was midday, and because
there was nowhere nearby to eat lunch,
what they conjured was a really cool res-
taurant. There was little reason to think
they might make that dream come true.
Only Lepree had anything like a restau-
rant background, having run her family’s
luncheonette in Elizabeth, where she grew
up. And then there was Asbury Park itself.
Earlier attempts at resuscitation had
flopped. Brunette recalls being told: “You
might as well just go down to the beach
and throw your money into the ocean.”
In 2006, Lepree, Brunette and the Watt
brothers—Jim came on as the project’s
architect—opened Brickwall Tavern, a
place whose design and ambience foretold the zeitgeist of today’s Asbury Park.
With its exposed-brick wall, wry signage
and oversized portraits of workers by the
early 20th-century Austrian photographer August Sander—plus a vast number
of craft beers and a menu of elevated pub
fare—Brickwall began to catch on with
longtime locals, arriviste hipsters and
Shore day-trippers. It took two years to
turn a profit, but Brickwall’s debut nonetheless marked what many cite as the start
of Asbury Park’s turnaround.
“It was a breakthrough,” says Tom
Gilmour, Asbury Park’s director of eco-
nomic development. “We were still at
the point where we had the reputation
of being unsafe and not a great place to
come to, and the success of that restau-
rant helped us jump the hurdle—people
wanted to come and check it out.”
The following year, the partners
launched the Annex—an adjacent exten-
sion of Brickwall that presented bands and
spoken-word artists—with the idea that
patrons could bounce from one room to
the other. (It would be redesigned in 2012
“to shake up the brand, making it a stron-
