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Plans for a restaurant with a rooftop beer garden at the corner of Lake Avenue and Press Plaza were given the planning board’s final stamp of approval Monday.

“We’ve been waiting a long time, and it finally feels like it is going to be happening,” said restauranteur Andy Ivanov.

“I’ve wanted to be here for nine years, so for me it’s very exciting,” said Jennifer Lampert, Ivanov’s business partner. “I have known Carter Sackman for 18 years and have been coming down here and watching him develop [Asbury Park] and fell in love with it before he even did the Steinbach building.”

Ivanov also owns a beer garden in Hoboken called Pilsener Haus. He and Lampert have plans to name the Asbury Park endeavor the Asbury Festhalle Biergarden.

When all is said and done, the building at the corner of Lake Avenue and Press Plaza will resemble an authentic 1920’s Austrio-Hungarian beer garden. Slovakian artist Jan Pecharka will handle the signage on the outside of the building, which will be distressed to provide an aesthetic that will make it look like a building that has been there for decades. Pecharka also worked on the signage for Radegast beer garden in Brooklyn and almost all of Hoboken’s Pilsener Haus distressing and signage, Ivanov said.

“The intention is to make the building look like it’s been there forever, to bring the building back to a certain time period,” said Ivanov’s attorney, Andrew Karas.

For now, they’ve started interior demolition and have tentative plans top open by the late spring or early summer of 2014, according to Lampert.

[The photo at top is of a rendering provided to the Asbury Park planning board of what the Lake Avenue facade will look like. The same brick facade is depicted in the smaller photo above.]

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