Wedding DJ at Stone Harbor Pizza Pub in Stone Harbor, NJ

The Space

Stone Harbor Pizza Pub opened on May 4, 2017 as the fifth dining concept from the team behind the Reeds at Shelter Haven, a 37-room resort next door built around the beach and the Shelter Haven basin. The pub sits right on the bay, and its two floors split the building’s personality in two: a casual pizzeria and bar downstairs, and a private event space, the Crew Room, upstairs.

Because the pub is a working restaurant rather than a dedicated banquet hall, it comes with a built-in identity most wedding venues do not: a full bar with 12 draft beers on tap, a first-floor dining room, and a second-floor room that runs live music Thursday through Sunday nights and an Open Mic Night on Wednesdays when it is not booked for a private event, so a couple renting the Crew Room is booking into a space with its own regular nightlife.

Capacity & Layout

The Crew Room seats up to 100 guests, a scale suited to a rehearsal dinner, a welcome party, or a smaller wedding reception rather than a large-guest-list affair. It comes with its own private bathrooms and its own private entrance, both separate from the main downstairs dining room, so a private event upstairs does not mix with walk-in restaurant traffic below.

The first floor keeps its own separate layout, indoor seating plus an outdoor back deck that looks over the basin, and that space stays open for regular restaurant service even when the Crew Room is booked upstairs. That split matters for planning: a couple’s private 100-guest event runs independently of the restaurant’s normal dinner service happening one floor down, without either one disrupting the other.

Amenities

The Crew Room comes with six HD flat-screen Samsung televisions, useful for a slideshow, a sports-watching cocktail hour, or simply keeping the room from feeling like a bare function hall. Downstairs, the full bar and 12 rotating draft beers give a couple a built-in beverage program with real variety rather than a standard banquet bar pouring a handful of set options.

Because the building sits directly on Shelter Haven basin, the outdoor back deck on the first floor gives guests a genuine bayside setting for cocktail hour or casual dining, a view most inland pizza-and-pub venues cannot offer. The Crew Room’s regular live music bookings Thursday through Sunday also mean the space is wired and set up for bands and performers as a matter of course, not as a special request.

Location & Getting There

Stone Harbor Pizza Pub sits on 96th Street next to the Reeds at Shelter Haven, putting it directly beside one of Stone Harbor’s beachfront resorts and on the water at the Shelter Haven basin. Guests staying at the Reeds or elsewhere in Stone Harbor have a short walk to the pub, and the basin-front setting gives out-of-town guests an easy sense of place, right on the water, in the middle of a small beach town.

With a hard-surfaced upstairs Crew Room built for live bands most nights of the week, the space already carries real sound infrastructure, and a DJ working a private event there is working in a room used to amplified music rather than converting a quiet function room for the first time, while the first-floor deck’s open-air bayside setting calls for a different, more exposed setup if any part of the event moves downstairs and outside.