New 'Fire on the Beach' Burns Bright on Asbury Avenue

Since opening in April, Fire on the Beach has earned a reputation for original cuisine cooked with ingredients from local farms. By Tim Zatzariny Jr. For OCNJ Daily Charles Coburn does not need to tell you his life story. It’s on the menu at his new Ocean City restaurant, Fire on the Beach. “I can walk you through all of my menus and I can tell you a story about how each item came to be,’ said Coburn, 57, during a recent interview at the restaurant on Asbury Avenue. For example, in the mid-1970s, Coburn had a girlfriend who worked at the Taylor Pork Roll stand on the Boardwalk, “So I ate a lot of pork roll.” The Jersey Devil (Taylor pork roll, cheddar, poached eggs and Dijon Hollandaise on an open-faced, fresh-baked biscuit) from Fire on the Beach’s breakfast menu, is Coburn’s tribute to that long-ago summer. Charles and Judith Coburn are the owners and operators of the new Fire on the Beach restaurant on the 900 block of Asbury Avenue in Ocean City, NJ. And the PBBJ French Toast (stuffed with peanut butter and bananas, and covered with warm, house-made fruit preserves) honors a family member. “My father swore by the fact that he could eat a peanut-butter sandwich for breakfast, lunch and dinner and never miss any other food,” Coburn recalled with a laugh. The Pleasantville High School graduate takes pride in bucking typical shore fare such as pizza and fries, in favor of an offbeat menu built on ingredients sourced mostly from area farms and dairies. __________ Fire on the Beach 949 Asbury Ave., Ocean City (609) 840-6822 fireonthebeachnj.com Hours: 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday (closed Monday) Dinner reservations accepted __________ The burgers at Fire on the Beach are made with a house blend of beef ground especially for the restaurant, Coburn said. And the seafood items on the menu’s “Gallery Bites” small-plates section, such as sake-poached scallops and buttermilk oysters, come from local purveyors. Coburn admits that trying something different in a town steeped in tradition is a big risk, but one he says is paying off since Fire on the Beach opened April 17. “Now, you can’t even come here to dinner unless you have reservations,” he said of the 58-seat restaurant he runs with his wife of four years, Judith. The focus at Fire on the Beach, he said, is on an overall experience, not just stuffing one’s face. “Dining involves ambience. It involves the artwork, the music, the temperature, the color of the walls what your server’s wearing, how they treat you,” he said. “It involves how the food is presented. It involves a story behind everything.” The dining room at Fire on the Beach doubles as an art gallery — its walls covered with paintings and photographs by local artists. All the artwork is for sale. Charles Coburn, a self-proclaimed “foodie,” has spent most of his adult life in the culinary industry, as a well-traveled consultant, chef and restaurant owner (he’s worked everywhere from Florida to the island of Dominica in the Caribbean.) That is, when he wasn’t behind a drum kit. Coburn spent decades keeping the beat in area rock bands, and he hasn’t lost the look: granny-glasses, mustache, soul patch. Nor has he lost his sense of showmanship. As a group of diners left the restaurant on a recent morning, Coburn shouted after them, ““Come back a couple hundred more times this week, huh?” Charles Coburn was working in the kitchen at the Princeton in Avalon last year when he learned through a co-worker that the building at 949 Asbury Ave. was available (the spot formerly housed Sunrise Café, which relocated to 12th Street and Asbury Avenue earlier this year.) The Coburns, who live in Egg Harbor Township, decided they’d try to make Ocean City a “culinary destination,” even though it’s a dry town, Charles Coburn said. The challenge he said, was to create “a whole concept so different that you could justify driving from Vineland, from Hammonton, from Cape May, making it a point to come here.” And he’s willing to go out of his way for the right ingredients. Coburn buys organic, made-to-order grits, oatmeal, grains and flour directly from Anson Mills in South Carolina. Irish oatmeal (slow-cooked steel cut oats, apples, cinnamon, lavender, butter and sweet cream) is the runaway customer favorite on the breakfast menu at Fire on the Beach, Coburn said.   NAMED FOR A BOOK ABOUT THE LIFE SAVING SERVICE Even the restaurant’s name comes from left of center. Charles Coburn said he chose it, in part, after reading “Fire on the Beach,” a 2001 book about the only all-black unit in the U.S. Life Saving Service, which performed dangerous rescues in the surf along the East Coast, and eventually became part of the U.S. Coast Guard. And the restaurant’s distinctive logo, a colorful fish, is based on a drawing by the late Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia. Charles Coburn calls Fire on the Beach a “farm-to-fork” restaurant, and he boasts “80 percent of my menu comes from within a hundred miles of here.” Baked goods come from Wards Pastry, nearby on Asbury Avenue. Fire on the Beach uses coffee beans roasted by Crescent Moon Coffee in Mullica Hill, Gloucester County. And Coburn buys seasonal vegetables from Blue Moon Acres in Pennington, Mercer County. (The Coburns grown some of their own ingredients, such as basil and kale, in three aeroponic Tower Gardens in the restaurant’s dining room.) Judith Coburn, a breast-cancer survivor who teaches chemistry and physics at Atlantic County Institute of Technology when she’s not at the restaurant, said there’s a benefit to using locally sourced ingredients. “It’s recycling money,” she said. “If you put money in your neighbor’s pocket, they’re going to put it back in yours.” Charles Coburn hopes that sense of community will carry Fire on the Beach beyond Labor Day and through the lean winter months. Except for a three-week vacation in January, Coburn plans to keep the restaurant open year-round. He’s planning a series of private tasting events during the fall and winter to benefit local charities such as Cape-Atlantic C.A.T.S. (Citizens Altering the Strays), an Ocean City-based organization that helps find homes for roughly 400 stray cats and kittens from the area each year. Local artists have offered to donate pieces of their work to be auctioned off during the events, Coburn said. And this fall, Fire on the Beach will start hosting regular open-mike nights featuring area musicians. Asked if he sees any similarities between being a rock ’n’ roll drummer and running a restaurant, Coburn said: “You have an audience. It’s a performance. For me, it’s performance art. The actual making of (the food), the stories behind it, the entertainment value. “I’ve been on stage since I was in second grade. I see no reason to get off now.”