The Jersey Shore hospitality group that opens restaurants and, somehow, reopens whole downtowns.
Filed from 601 Bangs Ave - where a French brasserie sits on a block that used to be a rumor.
It is 7 p.m. on a summer Friday in Asbury Park. A line forms outside Porta for Neapolitan pizza pulled from a wood oven. Two doors down, Lovesick pours natural wine into a room the size of a generous closet. Around the corner at Pascal & Sabine, a French brasserie hums at full volume, and somewhere in the back of Porta, under a cluster of disco balls, a DJ is setting up inside what is technically an art installation. All of it - the pizza, the wine, the disco balls, the block itself - is Smith.
Smith is a hospitality group: Porta, Pascal & Sabine, Homesick, and Lovesick, plus a catering and events business that books weddings, buyouts, and corporate parties across New Jersey. That is the easy description. The harder, more accurate one is that Smith is a group of designers who decided the most interesting thing they could design was a downtown - and chose restaurants as the tool.
"Smith is Homesick, Lovesick, Porta, and Pascal & Sabine."
The company's own one-line bio, which leaves out the most ambitious partAsbury Park in the early 2000s was a cautionary tale: a faded resort town with grand architecture, a famous boardwalk, and a downtown that locals avoided after dark. The waterfront had been promised redevelopment for decades and delivered mostly empty lots. Cookman Avenue, the main commercial spine, was close to a dead zone. The problem was not a lack of charm. The problem was that nobody wanted to be the first one in.
This is the quiet tension underneath everything Smith does. A neighborhood does not recover because someone writes a check; it recovers because someone opens a door and stays open. Restaurants are risky, low-margin, and unforgiving - which is exactly why a good one signals to everyone else that a place is safe to bet on. Smith's founders understood that a dining room could be a piece of civic infrastructure. The trouble with infrastructure is that you usually have to build it before anyone agrees it was needed.
"People still considered it a little dangerous - but it was also cool."
How the founders described the block when Brickwall Tavern opened in 2006Here is the part that should not work. Smith did not begin in a kitchen. It began in 1990 as Knockout, a printing company founded by Meg Brunette with partners Jason Watt and Kyle Lepree. By 1996 the firm had moved to Asbury Park and grown into graphic design and branding. The people who would later make your mozzarella spent their first decade making logos.
That background turned out to be the whole point. When Brunette, Lepree, and the Watt brothers - Jim came on as architect - opened Brickwall Tavern & Dining Room on Cookman Avenue in 2006, they did not approach it as operators chasing covers. They approached it as designers approaching a brief: concept, identity, interior, atmosphere, all considered together. The bet was that a restaurant designed with that level of care would do more than feed people. It would change how the block felt. Brickwall opened, the city's director of economic development called it "a breakthrough," and the dead zone started to come back to life.
"Transforming great American cities through hospitality."
Smith's stated mission - the design brief that never endsWhat Smith sells is dinner. What Smith builds is rooms. Each concept is developed end to end in-house - branding, interior, menu, and operations - and each one is pointed at a different reason to leave the house. The unglamorous backbone is consistency: dough, mozzarella, and ricotta made fresh daily; a scratch kitchen; chefs who rotate between restaurants on purpose, to keep them, in the group's words, creative and passionate.
Rustic Italian and Neapolitan pizza by day, dance club by night. The Asbury Park flagship's Abbot Room hangs disco balls over a DJ booth built as an art installation. Also in Jersey City and Montclair.
A French brasserie at 601 Bangs Ave, named for the children in the film "The Red Balloon." Good food, warm drink, friends - the European idea, done sincerely.
A scratch kitchen built around seasonal ingredients. The kind of menu that changes because the produce did, not because marketing said so.
A quirky little wine bar next to Homesick, for people who like their list interesting and their room small.
Caption: yes, the disco balls are load-bearing - emotionally, if not structurally.
A printing company founded by Meg Brunette with partners Jason Watt and Kyle Lepree. No food in sight.
The firm relocates and expands into graphic design and branding - and meets the city it will spend decades on.
The gastropub anchors a near-dead Cookman Avenue. The city calls it "a breakthrough." Asbury Park's turnaround dates from here.
Neapolitan pizza meets dance floor. The disco-ball flagship becomes a Jersey Shore landmark.
The French brasserie opens, and Porta earns an "excellent" review from The New York Times.
The concept travels north - first proof that the Asbury playbook can be exported.
Smith targets another faded NJ downtown, acquiring a 16,000-sq-ft former firehouse to convert.
Skepticism is fair here. "We revitalized a downtown" is the kind of claim every developer makes and few earn. So look at what is checkable. Porta has run continuously since 2011 and earned an "excellent" from The New York Times in 2013. The Porta concept has been replicated in Jersey City and Montclair - replication being the market's way of saying something works. And the group now runs a portfolio of distinct, full-volume venues plus an events business booking weddings and corporate buyouts across the state.
Illustrative timeline of public openings. Approximate; bars sized for the eye, not the ledger.
Caption: the most radical number here is "2006" - the year someone went first.
"Chefs rotate between restaurants to keep them creative and passionate."
The Smith approach to running a kitchen - and to not getting boredMost companies write a mission statement and then go do something narrower. Smith wrote "transforming great American cities through hospitality" and then proceeded to take it embarrassingly literally. The group operates with a deliberately title-light structure and a methodology - call it brand development, call it Fishbird - aimed at a single question: what should this place want to become? Then it builds the room that answers.
The Burlington City move in 2015 made the thesis explicit. Smith did not look for the busiest corner in the richest suburb. It looked for another faded downtown with good bones, bought a 16,000-square-foot former firehouse, and started over. The pattern is the product: find a great American city that has been counted out, open something genuinely good, and stay until the block believes in itself again.
"It creates a space to have a very open and free conversation around what you want to go after in your future."
A Smith partner on the group's brand-development methodThe reason Smith is worth watching is not the pizza, excellent as it is. It is the model. There are faded downtowns in every state - good architecture, real history, no anchor tenant willing to go first. The conventional fix is a subsidy and a press release. Smith's fix is slower and harder to fake: a real business, designed with care, that people actually want to go to, opened on the block that needed it most. If that model travels, the disco balls are beside the point.
So return to that summer Friday on Cookman Avenue. The line outside Porta, the full brasserie, the closet-sized wine bar with a wait - none of it was inevitable. Twenty years ago this was the block you were warned about. Smith did not lecture it back to life or wait for permission. It opened a door, made the mozzarella that morning, and kept the lights on until the rest of the street caught up. The argument is the block. The block is busy now.
Sources: smithmade.org, Edible Jersey, New Jersey Monthly, Asbury Park Sun. Some figures approximate.