Wedding DJ at Cross & Orange in Asbury Park, NJ

The Space

Cross & Orange occupies a building in downtown Asbury Park that used to be a steakhouse until brothers Bob and Chris Fahey, both former New York City restaurateurs, took it over and reopened it in 2015. Rather than starting from a blank shell, they kept exposed brick and rustic lighting fixtures from the building’s earlier life, so the room reads as renovated rather than built new, with the bones of the old steakhouse still visible in the walls.

The Faheys expanded into weddings in 2016, a year after opening, once the restaurant itself was established. They now run three other spots along the Jersey Shore, Reef & Barrel, opened the same year as Cross & Orange in 2015, Joe’s Surf Shack from 2019, and Boatyard401, added in 2022, which gives a sense of a restaurant group with real staying power in the area rather than a single venue trying out weddings on the side.

Capacity & Layout

No published guest capacity is listed for Cross & Orange’s wedding events, so a couple should confirm room size directly when booking rather than assuming a number. What is known is that the space includes both indoor dining and bar areas and outdoor seating, giving a wedding here the option to split a day between an inside room and an outdoor setting rather than committing the whole event to one or the other.

The setting description for the venue notes park and lakeside views near the Atlantic Ocean, which places any outdoor portion of a wedding here in view of that water rather than a parking lot or a plain patio. That combination, downtown restaurant with exposed brick inside and open water views outside, gives a couple two genuinely different backdrops for photos and different parts of the day without leaving the property.

Amenities

As a working restaurant and bar, Cross & Orange brings scratch-made cuisine and full bar service to a wedding without a couple needing to bring in outside catering, an advantage of booking a working kitchen rather than an empty hall. The restaurant has earned Best Brunch recognition in Central New Jersey and Best of Weddings recognition from The Knot, along with the Central New Jersey Brunch category in New Jersey Monthly’s 2026 Reader’s Choice Awards.

The Fahey Restaurant Group also received Fulfill Food Bank’s Strategic Service Award in 2024 for its community partnership work, one indicator of how the ownership operates beyond the dining room itself. Beyond food and bar service, the venue’s identity as a restored steakhouse space, exposed brick, rustic lighting, gives it a built-in character that a couple does not need to add through outside decor or rented backdrops.

Location & Getting There

Cross & Orange sits in downtown Asbury Park, less than a ten-minute walk from the Asbury Park train station on NJ Transit, which makes it one of the more transit-accessible venues for guests coming from New York or elsewhere along the rail line without needing a car. The downtown setting also puts the venue within walking distance of the rest of Asbury Park for a rehearsal dinner or an after-party.

We have worked two weddings at Cross & Orange, and the mix of exposed brick walls and hard restaurant surfaces means sound carries and reflects more than it would in a carpeted ballroom, so a DJ setup here benefits from careful leveling indoors, while moving part of the night out to the outdoor seating near the water opens that same sound up into open air.