The owner of seven restaurants, four in Asbury Park, Marilyn
Schlossbach is a canny businesswoman with a passion for surfing—and helping the
less fortunate.
Posted May 9, 2011 by Caren
Chesler
New Year’s Eve 2009, Marilyn Schlossbach had just opened Langosta Lounge and was
operating with a skeleton staff—her husband, Scott Szegeski, and one other
person. Then 400 customers showed up. As the order tickets began to back up,
Schlossbach stood in the kitchen and cried.
“We couldn’t catch our
breath,” she says. When her landlord happened into the kitchen, she pleaded,
“Can you sell this place for me?”
Three and a half years later, Langosta
now serves 1,000 people on a good night and has 13 people assigned to the
kitchen. It’s one of four restaurants Schlossbach co-owns in Asbury Park—of
seven total. She started with Labrador Lounge in 2003 and added Pop’s Garage in
2006, both in Normandy Beach. In 2009, she opened Langosta Lounge in Asbury Park
and another Pop’s Garage, then Trinity and the Pope and Dauphin Grille last
year. A third Pop’s Garage is opening in Shrewsbury.
Schlossbach, 46,
owns the controlling interest in all seven. Her husband, 37, and her brothers,
Richard, 56, and Arthur, 57, and Brian and Shannon Furey, a father-daughter team
of investors, have varying degrees of ownership.
Schlossbach’s ambitions,
her funky style and her ability to draw a crowd have made her the go-to
restaurateur for developers down the Shore. While her restaurants serve
different cuisines, from Cajun-Creole (Trinity and the Pope) to Mexican (Pop’s
Garage) to what she calls vacation cuisine, food one finds in popular
destinations like Jamaica or Thailand (Labrador Lounge and Langosta Lounge), all
bear the stamp of her eclectic persona—part chef, part entrepreneur, part surfer
and part Mother Teresa.
A self-proclaimed Buddhist—she tried everything
from Unitarian to Quaker before hearing the Dalai Lama speak on a visit to New
Jersey in 1998 and becoming hooked—Schlossbach closes Langosta Lounge every year
on Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter to serve meals to the needy. She gives
free surf lessons to the local community; started the Asbury Park Film
Initiative, a free summer movie series on the beach; and hosts wine tastings to
benefit the local food bank and a doggie fashion show for the Humane Society.
She hires local youth to work in the kitchen and learn the restaurant
industry. Twice a week, she stands on Springwood Avenue in Asbury Park at an
outdoor soup kitchen handing out hot food and coffee.
“For as long as I’ve
known her, she’s used her businesses to support nonprofit organizations, and
she’s taken that to a whole new level in Asbury Park,” says Cindy Zipf,
executive director of the environmental advocacy group Clean Ocean Action and a
longtime friend of Schlossbach.
While Schlossbach’s restaurants fund her
charitable work, her philanthropic interests sometimes help her businesses. She
started a weekly farmer’s market on Asbury Park’s boardwalk and promised
participants she would buy whatever didn’t sell. As a result, she gets produce
that’s fresher and cheaper than she might find through a restaurant supplier.
When Clean Ocean Action celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2009, Schlossbach
hosted the event for free at Langosta Lounge. That meant plenty of publicity for
the restaurant, which had just opened.
Schlossbach says her business
philosophy is to worry less about money and more about her impact on those
around her—and she tries to hire employees who share that sensibility. She
rewards them with opportunities to manage and bonuses if they perform well.
“We don’t tolerate drama, and we’re a hard company to work for if you’re
not a self-structuring person,” Schlossbach says. “You have to be responsible
and act like an adult and care about what we’re trying to
accomplish.”
Schlossbach was just 20 when she got her start as a chef in
1985 at Oshin, a sushi restaurant in Avon owned by her brother. The siblings
wanted a restaurant that served healthy food after they witnessed their mother,
Marion Nagy, temporarily stave off uterine cancer by adopting a macrobiotic
diet. Nagy eventually succumbed to the disease, but Schlossbach emerged
convinced of the healing power of food.
At Oshin, Schlossbach worked the
front of the establishment until her brother went away one weekend and the chef
walked out, leaving Schlossbach to feed a restaurant full of patrons.
Schlossbach had never cooked before. She threw on an apron, strode into the
kitchen and took charge, while her brother coached her over the phone on how to
cook.
Among her culinary influences, Schlossbach names Tommy Tang, a
Thai chef with whom she traveled across Southeast Asia in 2006 for his cooking
show on PBS. But she says she can find inspiration anywhere. While vacationing
in Jamaica in 2001, for example, she tasted a sweetbread in a restaurant that
she liked and asked for the recipe. When she was told it came from someone’s
aunt, she knocked on the woman’s door to ask her how to make it.
Her
biggest project now is Asbury Park, where she has more charitable endeavors and
sits on more boards than she has restaurants. Trip Brooks, who manages property
for developer Carter Sackman, says Schlossbach has her finger on the pulse in
Asbury Park—as well as great connections. This prompted Brooks to seek her
counsel on a 600-seat movie and performance theater. The project is currently
under construction.
“She has a very good feel for the community and
about what works and doesn’t work,” Brooks says.
Brooks and Schlossbach share
a vision for Asbury Park: a thriving downtown that would funnel people to the
beachfront, and a resulting prosperity that would benefit the city’s rundown
neighborhoods, generally on the west side of town. For now, redevelopment has
nearly ground to a halt—a victim of the economic downturn.
Schlossbach
has seen her share of adversity. In 1985, she lost a bundle on her first Asbury
Park investment. Her parents had left her a property in Neptune, which she sold,
using the proceeds to put a $50,000 down payment on a building she wanted to
purchase in Asbury Park. When the building’s owner went bankrupt, Schlossbach
lost her entire deposit.
Then there was Market in the Middle,
Schlossbach’s first restaurant in Asbury Park and one that many associate with
the city’s emergence as a dining destination. Schlossbach met one of her two
partners in the summer of 2005 while working as a cook at Cafe La Playa in
Mantoloking. She had just come out of the kitchen when she heard two men talking
about property in Asbury Park. At the time, she and her husband wanted to open a
store that sold furniture from Bali—so they could travel there to surf. When she
asked the men what they knew about investing in Asbury Park, one of them
suggested she open a restaurant there and offered to fund it.
The
restaurant opened in June 2006, but after three years of suffering what she
claims were broken promises and a generally bad attitude, she picked up her
Cuisinarts and walked out. Market in the Middle closed on January 1 this year.
Her former partners, Steven and Robert Ranuro, could not be reached for
comment.
Over the last year, the weak economy and bad winter weather hurt
sales, but Schlossbach believes her mini-empire has turned a corner. Revenues
for her restaurants as a group rose from $3.25 million in 2009 to more than $5
million in 2010. Despite the snow and cold of this past winter, she finally
turned a profit.
But it took getting close to the brink to get there. She
says her restaurant MO is to limit upfront costs when opening a new restaurant;
then, as revenues rise, start spending on the business. But in the case of
Langosta, the restaurant did so well so quickly, far exceeding expectations,
that Schlossbach needed to pour money back into the business almost immediately
just to handle the volume. She had to upgrade wiring and plumbing, buy a larger
refrigerator and three more dishwashers and fix the floor, which was not done
properly at the outset. But right after making all those capital outlays last
fall, sales fell off a cliff, leaving her with big debts and few
customers.
“We almost went under this winter,” she admits. “We were
overextended. And if one restaurant went down, they were all going to go down.”
She had no choice but to drastically cut costs. Her chefs are now on
tight budgets, and she has combed her menus to remove items that weren’t
profitable. She’s also using her multiple locations to achieve economies of
scale. During a recent restaurant week, for instance, she put halibut on the
menu at almost all her restaurants so she could buy it in bulk and negotiate a
cheaper price. She also shares staff among her restaurants, which enables her to
cut payroll and place people where they are most needed.
Politics is next
on Schlossbach’s agenda. She says she plans to run for Assembly as a Democrat in
the newly redrawn 11th district. She sees herself like Kevin Kline’s character
in the movie Dave—an outsider who brings a breath of political fresh
air.
“Politicians spend too much time politicking, bashing people and
running for office,” she says. “How do they possibly have time to do anything to
realistically help people?”
She acknowledges time will be an issue for
her, too, but she says she’s already largely removed herself from her kitchen
duties, and she hopes to farm out some of her administrative tasks.
“Time
is going to be tough,” she says, “but time is tough anyway.”
On a recent
Friday, Schlossbach returned from Washington, DC, where, as a member of the New
Jersey Restaurant Industry Association’s board, she attended the association’s
national conference and lobbied lawmakers. Sitting in her makeshift office at
Langosta (the booth nearest the door), her skin was tan and weathered from sun
and salt, her blonde hair was pulled into a disheveled bun, and she was wearing
green army pants and a gray T-shirt but still had on the pearls she wore earlier
in the day to meet with legislators. She was talking to a meat salesman who had
been trying to win her business for months. Meanwhile, her bar manager
interrupted to talk about some outstanding invoices that were put into the
computer incorrectly; a man who had installed a new concrete floor at her new
restaurant in Shrewsbury had come to collect a check, and a woman who had heard
about her run for Assembly wanted to congratulate her.
Schlossbach later
says that the meat salesman was trying to sell her on the fact that he supplies
meat to famous restaurateur Stephen Starr, who owns Buddakan, among others. She
wasn’t impressed. She says loyalty means more to her than status. Besides, to
her long-time suppliers, who have stayed with her through thick and thin, she is
a Stephen Starr.
“I thought, ‘Where were you 10 years ago?’” she says. “I
wasn’t famous until Asbury started to come back and put Marilyn Schlossbach on
the map.”
Caren Chesler is a frequent contributor.
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