Lakewood, NJ’s upscale restaurant boom has hit a sobering peak, with the recent closure of SEARED Steakhouse. The beautiful restaurant only opened in mid-2023, but several factors likely contributed to the restaurant’s closure – of which we can’t possibly know all the reasons.
Before discussing some reflections on the closure of Seared, we can announce that Bordeaux Steakhouse of Midwood, Brooklyn, will be taking over the Seared restaurant space soon. This is the second kosher steakhouse brand from Brooklyn that’ll have a Lakewood outpost after The Loft’s addition to the area last year.
After reflecting on this unique restaurant and the circumstances around its closure, I asked a few locals and foodies for their thoughts on the restaurant and specific nuances to the Lakewood community, of which I am not a member. The following feedback is a combination of my thoughts and observations, as well as others in NJ.
1) The current economic climate likely cannot support every high-end restaurant that opens, be it in Lakewood or anywhere. Lakewood alone has seen a lot of restaurants opening and closing of late, and it’s practically impossible for them to all be viable. South Florida is going through similar things as well. Additionally, restaurants have always been a difficult business to succeed in. That hasn’t changed.
2) Lakewood is a tight-knit community and Seared came in (presumably) without close local ties (according to locals) or an established brand name; compared to another new upscale place like The Loft that has brand name recognition, for example.
3) The “receipt” situation is interesting. It likely played a role in the negative perceptions of the restaurant, but it is rare for a single bad PR situation to cause a company to fold. Usually, other issues compound the PR one. I don’t know enough about the business or people behind it so I can’t judge. However, what I can say is that people need to be careful about what they share online, and with whom. Content often finds its way out of private WhatsApp groups, and outsiders often make judgments without context. Individually, we need to be more cognizant of what we say and how we talk about other people and businesses. This is something I’ve been guilty of in the past and I’ve been working hard on learning from those mistakes.
For background on the receipt situation – a receipt of a dinner at Seared was shared and it made its way around social media, leading to an uproar due to high prices. More on the background of this by one of the restaurant’s vendors (posted to LinkedIn), and the receipt itself, shared here.
4) Businesses need to pay closer attention to public sentiment and take a more hands-on approach to what content they are putting online. The overall community spends plenty of time on WhatsApp (status) or Facebook, and Instagram to ignore these platforms and be able to tell their own story versus having a story told about them (that they can’t control). I don’t expect most restauranteurs to also be marketing or PR experts, but they should hire people or companies to help them with these efforts early on, before they have a problem.
Others in the food world chimed in with related commentary to both the receipt situation and the restaurant’s closure overall:
- One local business owner commented that the restaurant had other issues at hand: “The issue was far greater than that receipt. There was zero consideration put into operational efficiency, The “basement seating” with a low ceiling many demising walls and columns, no elevator for ada, a party room that was in the basement that you had to walk through the seating area, a massive coat closet in the center of the dining room taking up prime real estate among other operational issues and ultimately Hashem decided this wasn’t a restaurant for a town of Torah! IMHO way too much money was put into the construction of the place, the designers and contractors did an amazing job building a drop-dead gorgeous space with the most expensive finishes, however, this does not make a restaurant successful. Ask yourself did you have the experience building a restaurant of this caliber and did you have the knowledge to guide the owner who was also clueless wabout hat he was getting into and only had a vision but not a game plan and went along with the absurd design, layout, finishes and more, followed by hiring a chef who made him spend a 100s of thousand’s replacing the brand new equipment for the equipment he thought was better suited. The restaurant started in the hole and unfortunately never recovered.”
- Nati Burnside, a kosher restaurant writer and frequent YeahThatsKosher contributor, added: “While the receipt certainly did a good amount of damage, the cuisine was an issue. Many people just aren’t interested in that kind of cuisine and they don’t appreciate what goes into making it. That leads to the prices being gawked at, even when it’s unfair. While the $16 bottles of water were obviously an issue, those things were fixed fairly quickly. By the time Seared closed, it was quite possibly the best restaurant in Lakewood and not the most expensive. The restaurant was attempting Michelin-star type dishes and it was a mismatch to the demands of the local community.”
Ultimately, so much can go wrong in the restaurant space, and often even more so in the kosher world. Having a vision, plan, and understanding the local community seem to be integral parts to opening a successful kosher business, particularly one that is uber upscale. Wishing the former owners of Seared success in their future endeavors, as well as all the current kosher entrepreneurs out there.
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