ASBURY PARK - Restaurateur and musician Tim McLoone plans to open Blue Heron in spring 2024, his fourth restaurant on Asbury Park's iconic boardwalk.
The soon-to-be restaurant is located in a 7,341-square-foot space above McLoone's Iron Whale, which is part of the Fifth Avenue Pavilion. Construction is expected to begin in October, with a projected opening around April or May, McLoone said.
It will join McLoone's other restaurants on the boardwalk: Iron Whale, The Robinson's Ale House and McLoone's Supper Club. "We have to make sure it's very distinctive from those places," McLoone said. "We're not going to try to replicate that."
McLoone's Restaurants owns nine restaurants in New Jersey. Beside the spots in Asbury Park, it also has CJ McLoone's in Tinton Falls, McLoone's Pier House in Long Branch, The Robinson's Ale House in Long Branch and Red Bank and The Rum Runner in Sea Bright.
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The plans for Blue Heron are "almost completed," McLoone said.
"My initial thoughts about it was that it would be a meeting place," he said. It's a restaurant where customers can come in for a drink and an appetizer, and stay for dinner or go elsewhere for their full meal if they choose, he added
The menu is still in the works. "It's going to be sharing foods for the most part," McLoone said. For instance, there will be a pizza oven and food such as sushi, a raw bar and "a lot of appetizers" as well as entrees and seafood, he said.
"We're trying to keep it from being a formal, sit-down kind of place," he said. "It gonna have a lot of casual seating."
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The restaurant has been years in the making, but the pandemic and other issues got in the way, McLoone said. Now he has signed leases with Madison Marquette for the restaurant space and the adjacent Arthur Pryor Bandshell.
"We worked our way through everything, so we are good to go," McLoone said.
"Our landlord and we have a great relationship and we're all absolutely on the same page with stuff so we're just trying to get it done," McLoone said. "Once we get the thing fully activated, with the bandshell, it's going to be a real jewel, right on the boardwalk."
This past summer, the Asbury Park Concert Band performed free weekly concerts, put on by the Asbury Park Music Foundation, at the bandshell, an arrangement that McLoone said will not be affected by the lease.