Chiropractor in Allenhurst, NJ

A few weeks ago, I put together a list of 10 Jersey Shore restaurants that I still need to eat at. Beloved eateries like Grandma's Meatballs in Manasquan and Anjelica's in Sea Bright are on the list. One of the top suggested spots on the list was The Butcher's Block in Long Branch, New Jersey.

People literally go crazy for this place. Many will say that they offer the best steak not only at the Jersey Shore, but in all of New Jersey. The reviews are incredible, and somehow someway my girlfriend was able to make reservations for six. The other night It was me, my girlfriend, my cousin, his fiancé, my best friend and his girlfriend. For all six of us, it was our first time ever eating at The Butcher's Block...

It's pretty simple, The Butcher's Block is incredible. I am giving this Monmouth County restaurant 5 solid stars. First, the newly renovated building is fantastic inside and out. The ambiance is top of the line. Before even talking about the food, I want to give a shoutout to The Butcher Block workers. It was one of the best dining experiences I ever had. The service was incredible, you can really see that the workers take pride in what they do.

Now the food, to be honest, I don't even know where to start. For appetizers we got the steak tartare, margherita pizza, and a Caeser salad. All of the starters were tremendous, but I think the best thing was the wagyu rigatoni Bolognese. Good god almighty, it was easily the best Bolognese I ever had.

After that we got a couple of steaks. We ordered the wagyu tomahawk and the ribeye. Just two steaks, but they are so big that they can easily feed a hungry table of six. Hands down some of the best steaks I ever had. I think I would have asked for it to be cooked a little more next time, but I know I know, that would be insulting. All in all, an A+ meal.

The Butcher's Block is located at 235 West Ave, Long Branch, NJ 07740. I highly recommend you trying to get reservations for a special night out. Is it expensive? Yes, but it's totally worth it! The six of us already made reservations to go back in September. I can't wait!! SEE YOU THERE.

ALLENHURST - Tony Tamburello, owner of Allenhurst Station Salon, is now a well-established barber and businessman, but it took a great deal of exposure and experience to get to where he is today.

“I acquired much of the attention for my barber shop from the Jersey Shore Basketball League,” Tamburello said. “I got the idea, as a longtime basketball fan, to sponsor a team of professional athletes to play in this league, and over time, as the league got bigger and more well known, so did our business. This was the way we grew and grew.”

Tamburello came from a family of plumbers, including a set of uncles on both his mother’s and father’s side. He started working in the business at 15, but soon decided it was not for him

“I didn’t like it,” Tamburello said. “I wasn’t cut out for blue collar work and it didn’t help that the cast iron pipes weighed a ton. It was heavy work and It just wasn’t for me. It was my background, but it didn’t suit me.”

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After graduating from Belleville High School in 1956, Tamburello joined the army and rode a train to Fort Knox, Kentucky, where he served six months active duty and three years in the reserves.

“I was still 20 years old when I finished my military duty,” Tamburello said. “I spent most of my time as a clerk typist. It was just the job I was appointed and I did it without any objection, but to tell the truth, I didn’t like that either. I did it willingly just because I wanted to put my time in and move on with my life.”

'I had a knack for it'

After getting out of the army, Tamburello was unsure of what to do with his life. His mother noticed that he was particularly fussy about the way his hair looked, so she recommended that he try out barber school.

“I did six months of schooling,” Tamburello said. “It was all about shaving and cutting hair. It’s not like you’re reading a book here. You are working on actual people. As time goes on, you get better and better. I was fortunate to work in some of the busiest shops around at that time. It’s more self-taught than it is looking at something on paper. The real hard part is performing the haircuts and doing a hands-on job. Either you have it or you don’t.”

Tamburello graduated from barber school and worked where he could to gain experience.

“My first job out of school was around the corner from the barber school that I attended and I was there for six months,” Tamburello said. “It was a great notch under my belt and I kept cutting hair as well as doing what I loved at the same time. I couldn’t be happier. I had a knack for it.

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“After doing that for some time, I got another job opportunity to cut hair at Newark Airport, where I came into contact with a lot of celebrities who would be passing through. It was a busy shop with a very exciting atmosphere. It was a great place to work.”

Tamburello bounced around different barber jobs, honing his craft.

“I eventually moved on with a job in Lavalette,” Tamburello said. "I worked there for three summers, continued to practice my trade and did what I could to make some good money.

“It was very apparent that the more work I put in, the better I got at giving haircuts, but I was also establishing a name for myself around the New Jersey area. That was my main motivation. I just wanted to do what I loved and have other people value my work as well. It was all about achieving my goals, which always came true.”

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Opening his own shop

In 1960, Tamburello was married and opened his first shop in Union. He worked that job for a few months, but later sold it when he moved with his wife to Manasquan. He worked at a men’s hair styling shop called Man’s World, which offered men’s hairstyling in addition to just haircuts.

“I started delving into hair styling,” Tamburello said. “It was not a difficult change of pace for me, but it was different than what I was used to. Nonetheless, I kept doing it and got the hang of it before long. I added it to my repertoire. Everywhere you work, you gain experience.”

After a couple of years with Man’s World, Tamburello moved to Asbury Park and bought Sixth Avenue Barber Shop and ran it for about three years.

“Although I valued my time in Asbury Park, I found a great spot in Allenhurst, which I bought and opened,” Tamburello said. “It was a shop that I could truly call my own. I hired a full staff that included seven barbers, two manicurists, and a shoe shine employee. I also jumped around to a couple of different spots in Allenhurst, but I ultimately ended up in my current one along Spier Avenue. I have been in Allenhurst for the last 50 years and I have really enjoyed my time here.

“Once opening Allenhurst Sation Salon, we had immediate success,” Tamburello said. “We all know what we’re doing and we have been co-workers and friends for so long. It’s a family atmosphere and we maintain that with the way that we treat our customers. People know that they will be taken care of the minute they walk into our establishment. That’s the kind of business that I always wanted to run and now I have it.”

Tamburello and his staff don't focus on trendy haircuts. It’s more about what the customer wants when they enter the shop.

“It’s hard to put a name on a specific type of haircut these days,” Tamburello said. "We try to just go off of what the customer wants and we let our hands do the talking. In the end, it comes out great and our customers are always happy with the end product.”

Tamburello's business also had to battle being shut down for months in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We really had no control over what was happening,” Tamburello said. “Basically, our customers were just spreading out the times they chose to come and get their haircuts. We did not want to force the issue, so we just had to wait. We are still going through it now. No one knows when we will return to normal. We are still doing nice business here and we have a nice crew to work with right now. We’ll see what happens.”

Tamburello has been in the game for so long, it’s hard for him to imagine doing anything else.

“Although I have done everything under the sun, I don’t see myself retiring anytime soon,” Tamburello said. “It’s just not an option. It’s not work for me, it’s pleasure.”

Owner: Tony Tamburello

Location: 415 Spier Ave., Allenhurst

Phone: 732-531-3033

Website: www.allenhurststationsalon.com

Hours: 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Mondays

Traditionally, the Allenhurst Beach Club bids adieu to summer with an emerald spectacle.

The ocean is dyed lime green on Labor Day weekend, colored with an eco-friendly chemical mix that gives the sea a neon glow.

Youngsters splash around in water that looks borderline radioactive. Some bottle up the salty green potion and bring it home for good luck.

The custom of coloring the ocean as a summer coda dates to 1943, when a club member put green dye in the water to celebrate his daughter’s first birthday.

What began as a whim has evolved into an institution that draws hundreds of swimmers and spectators. Organizers, Jack Lehmann and Gail Matarazzo are set to pour two vats of green pigment into the sea today.

The event is always bittersweet, said Lehmann, as folks prep to shutter their cabanas, shelve the sunblock and retire their bathing suits for the season.

This year, folks in Allenhurst are say they’re feeling end-of-summer ennui coupled with the beach replenishment blues.

The club’s swimming cove, where the green dye goes into the water annually, will be gone next summer after the Army Corps of Engineers completes its work.

Truckloads of sediment are going to transform an idyllic half moon of placid water into a dry sprawl of sand, according to Lehmann. The Army Corps also plans to fill in a historic lagoon nearby, Lehmann said.

Commemorative T-shirts are being printed up with the slogan, “Old memories never dye.” To say farewell to the lagoon, folks are gathering a final group portrait today.

“The lagoon was built in 1917 or 1918 to keep children safe after the famous Matawan shark attacks,” said Lehmann, manager of the club. “The beach club made a lagoon lined with huge rocks to keep bathers safe from sharks. Every kid that’s ever graced this beach club has played in that lagoon. You’re literally talking almost a hundred years of history that’s going to vanish when the Army Corps fills it in.”

Army Corps spokesman Chris Gardner acknowledged that some swimming areas are going to be eliminated but building a barrier of sand is integral to protecting the coastline. Flooding from Hurricane Sandy destroyed the restaurant at the Allenhurst Beach Club and damaged cabanas.

“The upcoming Corps of Engineers coastal storm risk management project being implemented, in partnership with the state of New Jersey, will involve the placement of sand to construct a wide, flat, elevated beach berm that may extend past the (cove and lagoon),” said Gardner, via email. “The work will help reduce coastal storm risks to the area from waves, inundation and erosion, and while it may impact the recreational area, a secondary benefit of the coastal storm risk management work will be the creation of a new, wide beach for recreation.”

Lehmann said he and Matarazzo intend to continue dyeing the ocean on Labor Day weekend but say the event will be decidedly less dazzling without the cove. An L-shaped jetty prevents the dye from washing out to sea.

“The cove holds the color really nice,” said Lehmann. “Next year, we’ll be pouring the dye into the open ocean whereas now we have this friendly, intimate cove that keeps the dye in and protects the kids from the waves. We’ll dye the ocean but we’re going to be vulnerable to whatever the tides are. The tide could take the green out in five or ten minutes. It’s not going to be as spectacular.”

The replenishment project, which spans from Loch Arbour to Elberon, stirred up controversy because steep new beaches could create dangers for bathers, surfers and anglers. In response to an outcry from the community, the Army Corps scaled back its plan. Three jetties originally targeted for removal will be preserved.

Matarazzo said she understands the need to step up storm protection but she is concerned about the loss of the swimming holes for kids. The cove and the lagoon were havens away from the churning waves, Matarazzo said.

“The whole landscape of the coast is going to be different,” said Matarazzo. “The ocean is a very volatile thing and you don’t know what it’s going to look like year to year but the mainstays have been the lagoon and the cove area. It’s going to be weird after they replenish. I don’t know what to expect.”

Matarazzo’s late grandfather, Robert Fountain started the ocean-dyeing tradition. He owned an Asbury Park boardwalk amusement park called Bubble Land. In order to hide the motors that powered a boat ride, he put psychedelic green colorant in the water.

Fountain often found himself with a surplus of dye at the end of the season and one year, the stars aligned. He was celebrating his daughter Susan’s first birthday at the beach club on Labor Day in 1943 when he got an idea. There was a container of leftover green dye in his car and he decided to surprise his daughter by changing the color of the ocean, Matarazzo said.

“It was just a lark but everybody liked it so much that he did it again and again year after year,” said Matarazzo. “People think it’s an Irish thing but my grandfather wasn’t even Irish. It’s funny because so many people don’t know why it’s done but they’ll walk all the way from Asbury Park and Loch Arbour just to watch. Kids bottle up the water because they think they’re bottling up good luck.”

Matarazzo said they’ve never skipped a year, even pouring dye on wet, windy days with only handful of diehards in the water.

They use 10 pounds of a Coast Guard-approved colorant called Uranine that simulates oil spills and enables boaters to signal distress. Lehmann notifies the Environmental Protection Agency annually ahead of the event.

“We tell the EPA in advance because they get calls on the day of the event,” said Lehmann. “People are driving their boats by or planes are flying over. They call the EPA to say, ‘There’s something going on. There’s green water in Allenhurst, New Jersey.’”

The sea will be dyed on Labor Day weekend in Allenhurst for decades to come, Lehmann predicted. They got a big crowd last year even though portions of the club were closed for Sandy repairs. Their slogan was “Greener than the storm.”

The tradition endures because it has become a part of the town’s identity.

“If you talk about the dyeing of the ocean, everybody knows that it’s Allenhurst, New Jersey,” said Lehmann.

Next summer, the color may be murky without the cove but the spirit of whimsy that drives the event will be undiluted, Lehmann said.

“People start screaming and getting excited and the minute you put one drop of that stuff in, everybody flies into the ocean,” said Lehmann. “The little kids are the ones who really love it and they’re like, ‘Why don’t you do pink? Why don’t you do blue?’ I tell them we have a vote every year and green comes up every year. The little kids who love it now, one day they’ll have children of their own and 20 or 30 years from now, their kids will be jumping in, too.”

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LOCH ARBOUR – Over the objections of some environmentalists, a $24 million beach fill project has started here and is expected to be completed by March 1, pending major weather delays.

Three Jersey Shore towns — Loch Arbour, Allenhurst and Deal — will get sand in the beach replenishment project, which is being carried out by the Army Corps of Engineers. It will restore more than 1.1 million cubic yards of sand to the towns’ beaches. The amount of fill is equivalent to 51 football fields.

The federal investment in the project is $16.9 million, which is 65% of the total cost. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-New Jersey, said state and local funds will make up the remaining cost.

Pallone, who has been a longtime advocate for beach replenishment along the Jersey Shore, called the project critical to protecting the beach and local communities.

“Coastal restoration projects like beach replenishment ensure that our beaches and infrastructure remain resilient to bad weather events. I would like to thank the Army Corps of Engineers for their continued dedication to this important project in our state," Pallone said.

The project received pushback from a coalition of environmental and beach access groups led by local chapters of the Surfrider Foundation and Sierra Club, who met on the beach in Deal in October to oppose it, a week after the replenishment was announced.

The coalition contends that beach replenishment does more to protect wealthy homeowners, damages the coastal ecology, and, ultimately, the added sand washes back into the sea and has to be replaced.

The group wants New Jersey lawmakers to reject a bill that would double the amount of money the state puts toward shore protection projects each year from $25 million to $50 million.

'No end in sight':Coalition argues $1.5B in NJ beach replenishment has been a waste

The bill passed the state Senate and currently sits in committee in the state Assembly.

At the very least, the coalition wants a new funding formula that would require beachfront property owners to pay the lion's share of the costs instead of putting the burden on taxpayers. By the coalition's count, over $1.5 billion has been spent on New Jersey beach replenishment dating back to the 1980s.

This new round of beach fill follows a federal beach renewal project that stretched from Manasquan Inlet to Sea Bright that started in 1994 and finished in 2001.

That project area was replenished again following superstorm Sandy, using 8 million cubic yards of sand.

In 2015, the area from southern Deal to Loch Arbour, which wasn't included in the original project, was filled.

Pallone said beaches where replenishment has been done get new fill about every six years on average.

When Jersey Shore native Dan Radel is not reporting the news, you can find him in a college classroom where he is a history professor. Reach him @danielradelapp; 732-643-4072; dradel@gannettnj.com.

A century ago, Deal, a seaside resort carved from New Jersey farmland, was known as a playground for tycoons and magnates like Isidor Straus and Benjamin Guggenheim and celebrities who visited, including Mark Twain. At lavish “summer cottages,” garden parties raised money for the favorite charities of residents, predominantly Irish Catholics and Ashkenazic Jews who summered there.

By the 1940s, some of the shine had worn off, and the fabulously rich were replaced by the merely wealthy. In the late 1960s, Sephardic Jews who lived in Brooklyn and spent summers in nearby Bradley Beach began buying land in Deal; by 1973, more than 100 families had bought property in the town. By the mid-1990s, thousands of Sephardic Jews were flocking to the town during the summers, and today, local historians estimate, they make up 80 percent of the population.

That influx has led to occasional tensions with people outside their insular community. The Sephardim in Deal, many of whom call themselves Syrian Jews, include Solomon Dwek, the failed real estate mogul who is believed to have been the government informant who helped bring charges against New Jersey politicians and rabbis in a corruption and money laundering scandal this week. Before this case, Mr. Dwek was a central figure in a community built quickly and from scratch by the Syrian Jews in Deal and nearby towns.

Today, in a town of 1,000 people that swells to many times that size in the summer, there are synagogues and yeshivas, Jewish social service agencies and a main street lined with kosher delis and Syrian Jewish grocers.

Thirty-five years ago, those institutions and businesses hardly existed, said Poopa Dweck, a longtime resident and the author of a cookbook on Syrian Jewish cuisine. Ms. Dweck, who is not related to Mr. Dwek, was part of what she called a “pioneering group” that moved from Brooklyn to Deal not to summer, but to live.

“We loved the life here,” she said. “We were able to maintain our Orthodox Jewish religion and bring up our children. It was beautiful.”

Quickly, she and the other new arrivals started building the structures of their community. “We didn’t even wait,” she said, describing how she helped found the Sephardic Women’s Organization of the Jersey Shore. “We had the first meeting in my living room.”

Dr. Richard G. Fernicola, a physician and local historian, said the first Sephardic Jew in the area might well have been Benjamin N. Cardozo, the Supreme Court justice, who had a house in neighboring Allenhurst in the 1930s. The first Syrian Jewish family in Deal arrived in 1939, moving into a home that the singer Enrico Caruso had once regularly visited, said Jim Foley, the town’s historian.

Fifty years later, when Sephardic Jews started moving to Deal in large numbers, there were occasional fights for control. In the mid-1990s, a dispute over a plan to build a synagogue on the site of a house on Main Street underscored growing divisions between the Sephardim and other residents, including other Jews. Today, some of those strains persist: in interviews, some non-Jewish residents professed resentment of the Sephardim, largely because of the crowds that descend on Deal every summer.

Generally, however, residents interact peacefully, many mingling at the Deal Casino, a historic beach club that only recently started allowing out-of-towners to become members. Much of the Sephardic summer social scene takes place in huge houses set on gigantic lawns where Victorians and Queen Annes once stood.

A generation still speaks Arabic, though some of the earliest Sephardic settlers have moved away, tired of the commute back to Brooklyn.

Some of their children have been shaped by the town’s seaside charms. Henry Garfield, 19, a Syrian Jew who called himself “somewhat religious,” ate a slice of pizza Friday afternoon along Norwood Avenue and seemed not to notice the tension that has developed in Deal. This might as well have been Malibu.

“It’s a very laid-back atmosphere,” he said. “Everyone is chilled out. We surf all day.”