Wedding DJ at Josie Kelly’s Public House in Somers point, NJ

The Space

This Irish pub occupies a building on Shore Road that started as a grocery store in 1908, became Mac’s restaurant under Harold McGronigle in 1924, then passed to the Previti family in the 1940s, who added the banquet room and the lobster sign still on the roof. Dermot and Kathleen Lloyd bought and fully renovated the building, opening Josie Kelly’s, named for Dermot’s grandmother Josephine Kelly, on August 15, 2018.

The main event space is the Adare Ballroom, which has a stage for rotating live bands, a full dance floor, and its own bar, so a wedding reception there is working in a room already built around live entertainment rather than a repurposed dining room. Upstairs, the Whiskey Room offers a smaller, more private setting, and Grandma Josie’s own clock from 1856 still hangs above the hostess stand as a piece of the building’s real history.

Capacity & Layout

The full pub seats 260 across two levels, bi-level in layout, which gives a couple room to spread a larger wedding across floors rather than cramming everyone into one room. The Whiskey Room upstairs holds about 45 to 50 people on its own, useful for a rehearsal dinner or a smaller private gathering separate from the main floor.

The Adare Ballroom itself can expand to 90 or more, likely where a mid-size wedding reception would land, with the stage and dance floor already built in rather than added for the night. Multiple dining rooms and bars run throughout the building, so even a smaller private event has room to breathe without guests bunched into a single doorway or hallway between spaces.

Amenities

Four full-service bars run throughout the venue, which means a couple is not relying on one bar to serve 260 guests during a reception, drink lines stay manageable because service is spread across the building. On-site catering is available for private events, so food and the room come from the same source rather than coordinating an outside caterer into a restaurant kitchen.

The building already hosts live bands regularly, Thursday through Saturday with open mic on Mondays, which tells you the Adare Ballroom’s sound setup and stage are used to hosting real performers, not just background music. That existing infrastructure, the stage, the dance floor, the bar built into the room, is already part of the venue rather than something brought in and struck at the end of the night.

Location & Getting There

Josie Kelly’s sits in Somers Point, New Jersey, in a building whose lobster sign on the roof has marked the corner for decades under several different names before this one. Guests coming from around the shore towns are arriving at a recognizable local landmark, not a venue they need directions to find twice.

We have worked an event here before, so we know the Adare Ballroom’s stage and dance floor are built for a working sound system already, which makes setup for a DJ straightforward: the room expects music and expects a crowd moving on the floor. The bi-level layout with the quieter Whiskey Room upstairs means a couple can keep the loudest part of the night, the dance floor, separate from any conversation happening one flight up.