New Jersey has been a blind spot on the Red Sauce Map, which is a little embarrassing given I live close enough to smell the gravy simmering from across the water. Or is it sauce. That’s the debate, and Jersey’s half the reason it exists.
There’s too much ground to cover in one shot — red sauce joints, pizzerias, delis stacked three deep in towns most people only know from a Springsteen lyric. So I’m starting small. This week: Monmouth County.
Everyone knows Asbury Park. Fewer know what’s simmering in the towns around it. So here are three spots worth the drive — two new school, one old school — and if you’re anywhere near the Parkway, go find them.
Diane and Jimmy Marrucca opened a windowless, white-tablecloth Italian restaurant in Asbury Park in 1982, back when nobody with sense was opening anything in Asbury Park. Forty-plus years, one dead husband, two boom-and-bust cycles of the city around it, and Jimmy’s has barely blinked. Nina plum tomatoes, no substitutions, a decision Diane made decades ago and never revisited. Buffy’s crumb-stuffed artichokes, a recipe that came by way of Danny DeVito’s aunt, who worked the kitchen here for years. Frank Sinatra ate here. So did Springsteen, McCartney, Reagan. Not because anyone was chasing a scene. Because the food never gave anyone a reason to leave. Diane’s daughter and son run it alongside her now, which is really just the restaurant continuing to do the one thing it’s always done.
Nettie’s House of Spaghetti doesn’t let kids under ten through the door, which is a strange rule for a restaurant named after somebody’s grandmother. Chris Calabrese learned to cook from Nettie before he ever wore a chef’s coat, then went and did the unfashionable thing, an economics degree, a finance track, a life aimed at a cubicle. He walked away from it for line cook shifts up and down the Shore, eventually running the kitchen at Porta, before taking over a sixty-year-old tavern called Luigi’s and gutting it down to the bones. What came out the other side is Italian-American food with the training wheels off. Chicken parm on a house-ground patty. Zucchini sliced thin as pasta. Elevated nostalgia, they call it, which sounds like a mission statement or an apology depending on the night you’re having. Nettie probably would’ve set a place for the kid anyway. The restaurant just doesn’t have to.
Judy Rosenblum never opened a restaurant. Her daughter opened one for her. Neilly Robinson grew up watching her mother, an Eastern European Jewish woman, cook red sauce like she’d been born into it, no apology, no explanation. Now that woman has a restaurant with her name on it inside The St. Laurent hotel, and the whole menu is an argument for how close two food cultures actually sit. Ricotta-stuffed matzo balls in dill pistou. Reuben-style tuna crudo. A Roast Chicken Savoy borrowed from the Belmont Tavern’s sixty-year-old playbook, reheated under a Jewish woman’s roof. David Viana, a Portuguese chef out of Newark, runs the kitchen with total technical commitment and zero editorial distance, because his job here isn’t to cook his own food. It’s to cook someone else’s mother.
A monthly gathering around red sauce, tradition and family.
This map is filled with recommendations from people just like you. If there’s a red sauce joint, pizzeria, or Italian-American institution you love — click here to submit it.
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More stories coming soon.
More pins every week.
-Janello
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