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Local restaurateur Marilyn Schlossbach is set to open her very first food-free bar to the public this weekend.

The bar will be called Asbury Park Yacht Club, a tongue-in-cheek nod to boating culture found in other parts of New Jersey.

Schlossbach and her husband Scott divide their time between Asbury Park and Normandy Beach, and belong to a yacht club near their southernmost home.

“We’ve always loved that culture of yacht clubs and commodores and all the fun things you can do with that concept,” Schlossbach said. “There’s obviously no yachting in Asbury because we don’t have access to a water source [such as a bay or river] to yacht in, but we do have water right in front of us.”

Asbury Park Yacht Club will be located on the strip of the boardwalk [pictured above] that’s already home to three of Schlossbach’s other businesses — Langosta Lounge restaurant, the more casual Pop’s Garage eatery and Lightly Salted Surf Mercado. Her group also owns Dauphin Grille in the Berkeley Carteret Hotel and Trinity and the Pope downtown, as well as a handful of restaurants in other Monmouth and Ocean county locales.

The new bar will be Schlossbach’s first business to sell drinks and no food, although customers can buy food in Pop’s Garage or Langosta and bring it in to eat at the Yacht Club. The bar will function as an extension of Lightly Salted during the day, with retail clothes that will be hidden at night.

“It’s just going to be a cool hang for people like us — surfers, water enthusiasts, beach people,” Schlossbach said. “It’s not going to be an expensive place to hang out. We want a kind of local vibe.”

The liquor license is not set in stone yet, so Schlossbach is opening this weekend for a few days with a temporary extension of Schlossbach’s license at Langosta. She expects to have a permanent license in effect there by November.

TIKI WEEKEND

The opening of the Asbury Park Yacht Club is coinciding with the Endless Summer Tiki Weekend festival at the waterfront, which starts tomorrow, Sept. 28.

The bar will host a surf-inspired art show in honor of Tiki Weekend, and will also take part in the Lightly Salted Surf Rodeo on Saturday. The 16-person surf contest offers a first-place prize of $1,000 — and the rank of commodore at Asbury Park Yacht Club for one year.

At traditional yacht clubs, the commodore functions as the chairperson of the club. At Asbury Park Yacht Club, the commodore will be a sort of social director who receives discounted drinks for the whole year and attends all the big events — “kind of like the mayor of the bar,” Schlossbach said.

They will also name a junior commodore this weekend, taken from Schlossbach’s summer surf school for children from the Boys and Girls Club.

Schlossbach pitched the idea for Tiki Weekend several years ago. This is the second annual event.

“I think tiki really fits Asbury Park,” she said. “The demographic of tiki is everything from hipsters to rockabilly to surfers, and it also fits the urban, creative quirkiness of Asbury and extends the summer in our minds.”

Tiki culture has a large following throughout the country and the world, and Schlossbach hopes this weekend’s event will grow in the future to attract people from all over. The Asbury Park Yacht Club will host music and art all weekend.

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