The Best Restaurants In & Around Point Pleasant 2024 - Jersey Shore - The Infatuation (2024)

Point Pleasant is among the most recognizable summertime destinations along the east coast. Perhaps that’s attributable to the town’s iconic boardwalk, or an active commercial fishing industry that’s helped preserve it as one of the state’s few dockside seafood destinations. Or maybe, it’s the fact that a night at Jenkinson’s feels like a New Jersey rite of passage in your 20s. Whatever the reason, it’s inevitable that you may not feel like you’ve had a true Jersey Shore experience unless you’ve visited.

Of course, with boardwalks and tourism comes scores of overpriced and underwhelming dining options. To help, we’ve compiled some of the best lobster shacks, sit-down BYOs, old-school seaside haunts, and grab-and-go sandwiches around Point and its surrounding towns—like Spring Lake, Manasquan, and Bay Head—to have a meal and wait out the Sunday traffic back North. And if you’re looking for the best places to eat in and around Asbury Park and Long Beach Island, we’ve got guides for those, too.

THE SPOTS

We can only tell you two certainties about the Jersey Shore: If the winds are blowing from the west, the greenhead flies will make a sunny day feel like the bowels of hell. And if you pull up to Rosie’s after 8pm, they’re either going to be out of pizza or closed for the night. This place makes some of New Jersey’s best pizza south of the Driscoll Bridge, and we especially like the round pie with pepperoni and the square pie with spinach. The Rosie’s menu won’t overwhelm you with options, since they only offer meatballs and a single salad in addition to their pizza. For the full experience, get both. One of their co-founders recently opened ‘Lucci in Belmar, a spot further north, which is a great option for anyone who’s been known to travel 30+ minutes for a Rosie’s pie.

Joe Leone’s is far and away our favorite place in Ocean County to fill the cooler for the day or stock up for a weekend of hanging out poolside. This place serves bread and fresh mozzarella as good as you’ll find in North Jersey, and the whole place is packed with the best specialty items on the coast. It’s impossible to go wrong here, but the sandwiches, eggplant pie, or any of their daily specials from the chef’s case are what you want. Although they closed their long-time Sea Girt shop, the Joe Leone’s empire continues to be ever-expanding, with a newer location now open in Downtown Manasquan that has a variety of JL’s classics.

If you roast in the Jersey sun all day, by 6pm you’re either greasy or burnt, which is how we’d also describe most of the Shore’s burger options. But Frankie’s Bar & Grill is an exception, and they make one of the best burgers in Ocean County. These huge, simple burgers are cooked at the bar and seared with a perfect char—just know that they usually go one temperature rarer than you order, so if you’re a medium-rare person, go medium. And if you’re a medium-well person, you might actually be in luck and learn what a good burger tastes like.

We consider the official Jersey Shore 12-course meal to be a six-pack and half a dozen lobster rolls from Point Lobster Company. They’re served hot with butter, the perfect amount of celery salt, and crispy, seasoned fries. Point Lobster Company opened a Bar & Grill-style tavern a few years ago, but the recently renovated marina-side BYOB restaurant and fish market is where you want to experience this seafood. Since they provide many restaurants in the state with their fresh lobsters, there’s a good chance you’ve had one before, but this is the only place to get their signature roll straight from the source.

After a day of accidentally swallowing too much salt water, you’ll likely be craving oysters, clams, maybe some lobster for good measure, and a plastic bib. Red’s in Point Pleasant is one of the best places in the area to get all of these things. This super-popular dockside seafood shack offers raw seafood, fried fish, sandwiches, lobster mac and cheese, seafood pastas, and whatever got pulled out of the local waters that morning. For the first time, Red’s is now offering both a full-bar and reservations. While we’ll miss the BYO option, this could prove helpful, as waits to get a table have historically been long.

Although the juice and acai bowl shops have grown in popularity, the Jersey Shore breakfast scene hasn’t changed much over the years. There are still plenty of bagel shops to stop at for egg sandwiches, marina-side cafes that serve as one-stop shops for fisherman to get omelets and bait and tackle, and of course, tchotchke-filled pancake houses. And in Pt. Pleasant, we’ve yet to find any pancakes that beat the ones at John and Elaine’s. Pair those hotcakes with their juicy breakfast sausage, which, if snapped loud enough, can drown out the political opinions blaring from the TV above their counter that you definitely didn’t order with your eggs.

Maybe New Jersey is called the “Garden State” because most shore-goers consider ice cream to be a vegetable. Or maybe that’s just us. You’ll no doubt see dozens of ice cream shops as you drive town-to-town along Route 35, but Hoffman’s is the one you’ll be thinking about in your office on Monday. We’d like to believe that it’s some cream-to-sugar ratio that they’ve nailed, but scientists are still trying to prove that. It’s been around for more than 60 years and serves more than 40 varieties of rich and dense ice cream, including signature flavors like mint cookie and coffee Oreo. If you’re not heading to Pt. Pleasant, Hoffman’s has a shop in Spring Lake, too.

The lack of great seafood restaurants along the Monmouth County coast is almost as disappointing as missing that once-a-season whale sighting because you ran off the beach to refill the cooler. Thankfully, Spring Lake Seafood bucked that trend a few years back when this BYOB option opened its doors. The ahi tuna with house-made lo mein noodles, a crisp arugula topped fluke milanese, and their whole fried fish are among the menu highlights. Perhaps the biggest surprise you’ll find at Spring Lake Seafood is their thoughtfully curated, high-quality sushi menu—you won’t find any of the overly saucy sushi rolls that have taken over every convenience store and local tavern these days. We recommend the bluefin tuna flight and ora king salmon options for the table.

Much of the population boom of Monmouth County can be attributed to a significant number of New York transplants, but only one we’re aware of came bearing the gift of croissants. is a well known Brooklyn bakery that operates an alternate location in downtown Spring Lake. The menu is simple, but overflowing with flakey croissants and bakery staples broken down by sweet and savory varieties. We love their ham and cheese or za’taar croissants, but suggest grabbing one of the rotating sweet baked goods, especially the cinnamon roll. And grab it early and fast—or you’ll only be left with the crumbs.

Buoy’s has evolved from a pop-up experiment into one of the Jersey Shore’s most versatile restaurants. By day, sandwiches like their club sub or crispy fried chicken on soft brioche are a perfect antidote to wear off the late night that you spent at nearby legendary bars Leggets or The Osprey. And now, Buoy’s-By-Night offers a really well executed five-course pop-up style dinner, in a casual but cute BYOB outdoor space. The weekly menu consists of appetizers like a shareable mix of crudos and tartare (we recently had a memorable octopus with white soy under fennel and mustard greens), a pasta (we loved the burrata topped cappelletti in an nduja-tomato sauce), a protein-based entree for each guest, and dessert. $95 per person can feel a bit steep given the casual atmosphere, but we think Buoy’s is offering a really unique and high-quality experience where it’s least expected.

You’re on vacation, and on vacation, you get to eat cake for breakfast. Mueller’s is one of our favorite places to stop by because of their incredible crumb cake. They make other pastries too, and we’re sure they’re good, but you can go ahead and waste your time on those while we pick every sweet, meatball-sized crumb off your piece when you’re not looking.