A seafood supper club began with a small lesson in making guests feel welcome. Its history shows how much depends on the room, the catch and the customer’s willingness to celebrate.
The family-owned California steakhouse has spent 58 years making dinner feel familiar. Behind the cowboy décor is a business willing to move, rebuild and find its next neighborhood.
BOKA built a national hospitality business by making each restaurant feel singular. Behind the scenes, a shared operating machine lets chefs, designers and service teams do the visible work.
Smith is an Asbury Park-based hospitality group that grew out of a 1990s branding and design studio. Beginning in 2006 with Brickwall Tavern, its partners helped restart a stalled downtown, then built a collective of restaurants and bars - Porta, Pascal & Sabine, Homesick, and Lovesick - that pair scratch kitchens with art-filled rooms. Smith treats hospitality as an instrument of urban renewal, designing, branding, and operating each venue in-house.
Patricia Smith is listed as a Group Chief Executive Officer associated with Smith, the Asbury Park hospitality collective behind Porta, Pascal & Sabine, Homesick, and Lovesick. Her public footprint is thin; her affiliation places her inside one of New Jersey's most recognizable restaurant groups, an operation that helped re-light Asbury Park's main streets after 2006.