DB-

Jimmy's in Asbury Park is a great Italian restaurant. Check it out and let me know how you like it. I highly recommend it. Grab a drink at the bar before you take your seat as well (they put out cold antipasto trays for free to munch on), last time I was in there I met a lot of cool and interesting people at the bar when we were having some carafes of wine before sitting down to supper.

Asbury Park on the Westside (where Jimmy's is located) is a run down ghetto still with A MAJOR street narcotics sales scene (a lot of people from the suburbs of the Jersey Shore drive into Asbury to get their heroin as opposed to driving to Camden, Trenton, or Newark for it), it also has a gay section, and a major waterfront development with great bars/clubs/restaurants. The gays have a lot of art galleries, coffee shops, etc there in the nice section of Asbury. It is starting to turn around from the days I remember as a kid driving through there in the 1990s were it looked like "Sarajevo by the Sea". I vividly remember driving through Asbury Park with my father as a kid in the 1990s and it looked like post Word War II Europe (hence why it used to be nicknamed Sarajevo by the Sea).

On a side note- you can see the pre-redevelopment days of the 1990s in Asbury Park in the DeNiro movie "City by the Sea" and a few scenes from episodes of the Sopranos were filmed in Asbury Park just before all the major redevelopment came into play.