Two Years In, Spiaggia e Luna Owner Still Over the Moon About Serving Barnegat

Jon Serpico spent a lot of time in restaurants over the years, but he couldn’t call any of them his own – until two years ago.

The owner of Jon’s Spiaggia e Luna, a pizza and fine dining restaurant in downtown Barnegat, grew up running his family’s third-generation junkyard in Brooklyn. But in 2009, after years of eating at his friends’ restaurants and talking and dreaming about opening his own Italian joint, Serpico and his wife sold their Staten Island home, moved the family to Forked River and threw their efforts into a new venture.

It wasn’t an easy time to go into the restaurant business, but Serpico said that without the economic downturn, he never would have made the move.

When times were flush, he said, “my junkyard was so busy, I would have never been able to leave.” But business in Canarsie dropped off, and with a smaller operation, Serpico could leave the work in his brothers’ hands.

“It actually freed me up to start looking at this place,” he said, and the price was right in Barnegat. They were nervous; restuarant ownership was a whole new world for them, and they would be moving into a location that had seen three pizza places close down in quick succession.

Still, Serpico said, "it’s one of those things where you know you’re going to be able to do this. You know if you build it, they will come."

And so they took the plunge. They rallied their restaurateur friends around them, getting the inside scoop on their favorite recipes: the perfect pizza dough made from a proprietary blend of regular and superfine flour, a just-right marinara sauce, an especially memorable chicken Parmigiana.

From the start, there was an emphasis on making everything they could from scratch, Serpico said.

“You need something that makes you stand out,” he said, and when it comes to food, that means putting in time and effort.

“You start with a plum tomato in a can, but it’s how you treat that tomato afterwards that sets you apart,” he said. At Spiaggia, every morning starts with sauce: They grind down tomatoes, fresh garlic and basil into their signature pizza topping.

After all, he said, if you can’t nail the essentials, you might as well forget it.

“How are you going to be a good Italian restaurant if you don’t have a good marinara sauce or a good meatball?” he said. “No matter how much you see Chilean seabass and tuna piccata, at the end of the week I run my reports and chicken cutlet is the biggest seller. If you don’t make the basics good, how are you going to make the specials good?”

And two years in, Spiaggia e Luna is more than a place to get a great meatball. Serpico said he loves that his restaurant has become an anchoring business in Barnegat’s downtown, a place where officials and police officers and neighbors show up for everything from casual lunches to parties. 

He never knew that kind of community closeness in Brooklyn, he said. Here, he sees the mayor every day, knows the officers by name and got to fill the governor’s takeout order when he came to town.

But ultimately, he said, his secret to running a successful business is the same as it’s always been. It’s about the customers.

“People are people,” he said. “Whether you’re selling a piece of pizza or you’re selling a transmission, you’ve got to give them a good product, you’ve got to give it to them at a decent price and you’ve got to stand behind your item.”