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Just a few years ago, Marilyn Schlossbach was sitting at the top of the Jersey Shore food chain. Her wildly popular restaurant Langosta Lounge, which she’d opened in 2008, had elevated Asbury Park’s red-sauce food scene practically overnight and been a driving force in the town’s renaissance. Her other ventures there included the Salt Water Market, Asbury Park Yacht Club, Pop’s Garage, the Berkeley Hotel, and Market in the Middle. Labrador Lounge, which she’d opened in Normandy in 2005, was always packed, too. She seemed to have the Midas touch.
But things were not as they seemed. She was deep in debt. The borrowing had started with a million-dollar loan to rebuild after Hurricane Sandy. With high rents, low margins and the seasonality of the restaurant business, she couldn’t get ahead. The profits were so slim that it seemed like a choice between dumbing down the food or making money. “To create the kind of food we wanted, with quality service and labor, we were borrowing money all the time,” she says.
She and her husband, Scott Szegeski, an artist, had no college fund for their middle school age twins, and no time with them in the summer. In 2023, she sold Labrador Lounge, Langosta Lounge and the rest of her Asbury properties.
But Schlossbach, born and raised in Belmar, didn’t give up on the Shore. She’s set her sights on Long Branch, which she calls the “last undeveloped ocean-adjacent area around here.” She teamed up with Preston Casertano on the Whitechapel Projects, which she calls a “cultural, communal center for food, drink, arts and entertainment” in the Lower Broadway area. “I want to help shape what Long Branch can become,” she says.
“Long Branch has a big identity crisis; people don’t realize all the good things that are happening and all the good things that could potentially happen here,” she says. “We’re reactivating the Arts Council and have been meeting with administrators, the mayor and the business leaders. I learned in Asbury that it takes a business village to create a community.”
Schlossbach at Whitechapel Projects in Long Branch Photo: Krista Schlueter
The Whitechapel Projects, in a 120-year-old former warehouse complex, is a restaurant and venue for weddings and events, including those open to the community, such as White Lotus-themed dinners and comedy magic shows. Buzz is building, but it’s been harder than anticipated. “We have no foot traffic whatsoever,” she says. “We are literally 200 feet from Pier Village, but no one leaves there to come over here.”
She has her fingers in many other pies, too. She runs a catering business, is a consultant for the Faherty clothing brand, and helps her husband with his business, Two River Gourmet Mushrooms. Two new restaurants are in the works, both with Bret Morgan of Asbury Fresh, which runs the local farm markets. One is in Avon-By-The-Sea, and the other in the former Wells Fargo bank building in Spring Lake.
A venture all her own is her skincare brand, Oshin Love; its signature product, Oshin Oil, is made from the Moringa oleifera tree. The oil, which she discovered on a relief trip to Haiti, cured her daughter’s eczema, she says. Oshin Oil has been written up in Forbes, Cosmopolitan and People.
Then there’s her humanitarian work. Since her early days in Asbury, she’s partnered with the nonprofit Interfaith Neighbors, giving out food every Tuesday from a van parked on a notoriously dangerous corner, and starting the Kula Café to train young people from the inner cities of Neptune and Asbury to work the front of the house in restaurants. She still provides most of the food given out at Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter at Trinity Church in Asbury.
But her real passion project is Whitechapel, which she hopes will help turn the Lower Broadway area into an arts district. “Our building is probably one of the most art-driven spaces at the Jersey Shore,” she says. “We have murals and music and history. We have the beams from Andy Warhol’s Factory. There are already art galleries on Broadway; we want to be an anchor for the art to spread up Broadway,” Schlossbach says.
“It’s a major undertaking,” she admits, but she knows the drill. “We were pioneers on Cookman. We were scared we’d get looted. There was no police presence,” she says. Already things are changing; 400 condos are in the works across the street from Whitechapel.
“We can be an impetus for change in this neighborhood and community,” she says. “We want to give, to share. My whole career, I have enjoyed collaboration rather than telling everyone how it will be. This model allows me to do that.”
