For almost eleven years, Little Silver held a liquor license nobody could use. The borough approved it by a two-to-one margin in November 2015, after voters had rejected the same idea back in 1981 and a similar push had failed in 1976. And then the license sat. Kelly Builders & Developers held it, but no bar opened, no restaurant poured a glass of wine with dinner. If you wanted a drink out in Little Silver, you drove to Red Bank or Rumson.
That changed when construction started at 51 Oceanport Ave, the old Pix Shoes storefront tucked between the NJ Transit parking lot and Brave New World Surf and Snow. The project became Locale, an Italian restaurant and bar built by brothers Matthew and Michael Kelly in partnership with the Ottaiano family, longtime New Jersey restaurateurs. It opened in December 2024 with a fireplace, indoor and outdoor seating, and a bar pouring the license the town had been sitting on since Obama's second term.
The story people tell about this is simple: Little Silver finally got comfortable with the idea of a bar. That story is incomplete. Read the fine print on how the project got approved, and a different, more useful story shows up.
The Condition Nobody Expected
When the Borough Council signed off on Locale's groundbreaking, they didn't just approve a restaurant. Mayor Robert Neff described the trade directly to the Two River Times:
"In fact, this bar restaurant application, when it came up, we asked that they have a sidewalk. So, completing the sidewalk from the train station over to the Oceanport Bridge and into the old Fort Monmouth property is something we'd like to see happen."
Read that again. A restaurant license became the lever for a piece of pedestrian infrastructure that has nothing to do with pasta or wine and everything to do with a much bigger project unfolding one town over.
What's Actually at the Other End of That Sidewalk
The old Fort Monmouth Army base, which closed in 2011 and sat mostly dormant for a decade, is now home to Netflix Studios Fort Monmouth. The deal closed on 292-plus acres in December 2025, and by May 2026 walls for the first soundstages were already going up. Kara Kopach, executive director of the Fort Monmouth Economic Revitalization Authority, told NJBIZ the initial phase is on track to be operational by the middle to third quarter of 2027, with filming to follow within the year. The full build calls for 12 soundstages split across Oceanport and Eatontown, with the first four opening in Oceanport in 2027 and the remaining eight in Eatontown by the end of 2028.
The dollar figures have grown with the project. Netflix's original 2022 announcement put the capital commitment at $848 million. By 2025, coverage described the investment as closer to $900 million. By early 2026, as Netflix posted its first two studio leadership roles, the company's own language pointed to nearly $1 billion. Whatever the final number lands on, the direction has been the same at every checkpoint: up.
Here's the part that connects directly back to Little Silver. The 80-acre parcel FMERA calls the "400 Area," bordered by the NJ Transit railroad tracks, Oceanport Avenue, and Parkers Creek, sits close enough to the Little Silver train station that it was originally slated for its own transit-oriented development of 230 residences before Netflix entered the picture. Kopach told NJBIZ that FMERA is now actively exploring how to extend mass transit connections to the area, and she named the Little Silver station specifically as one of the points the authority wants to work into that plan.
So when the council asked Locale's builders for a sidewalk running toward the Oceanport Bridge and into the fort property, they weren't asking for a nicety. They were laying pavement toward a piece of land that state officials are actively trying to connect to the region's rail network. Almost 90 percent of the old 1,126-acre fort is now developed, under contract, or spoken for. Little Silver doesn't control any of that acreage. What it can control is whether its own downtown has a walkable, useful connection to it when the jobs and the visitors start showing up.
What You Can Already Walk to From the Platform
None of this required Little Silver to change its character to get ready. The blocks around the train station were already doing most of the work. Step off a North Jersey Coast Line train today and within a few minutes' walk you'll pass:
- Locale, the new bar and Italian kitchen at 51 Oceanport Ave, with a menu that runs from wood-fired pizza to full multicourse dinners
- Little Silver Bottle Shop at 497 Prospect Ave, which still holds the borough's only package goods license
- Little Silver Fish Company and Felicia's Kitchen, both tucked into the Markham Place strip that's served the town's everyday food needs for years
- Little Buca and Little Szechuan, rounding out a downtown that somehow supports three different Italian kitchens within a few blocks of each other
- Turning Point of Little Silver, the breakfast spot that's been a weekend fixture long before anyone in Trenton was talking about soundstages
The train station itself is worth a second look, too. It was designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, one of the most influential American architects of the 19th century, and opened in 1890 after the original station was replaced. The depot went quiet for years before reopening after renovation in 2003. That's the building FMERA now wants folded into a bigger transit conversation tied to a billion-dollar production studio next door. A 136-year-old depot, designed by a name architecture students still study, may end up as one of the connective threads between an old Army base and a new one of Hollywood's biggest builds on the East Coast.
The Takeaway for Anyone Who Lives Here
Little Silver didn't wake up one day and decide it wanted nightlife. It waited until a specific project gave the council leverage to ask for something the town actually needed: a sidewalk pointed at a piece of land the state has already decided is going to matter. Neff put it plainly when he told the Two River Times the borough is "constantly looking for ways to accommodate" the growth headed its way from Fort Monmouth, adding, "we'll be prepared as we can be."
That's a small, unglamorous kind of preparation. No ribbon cuttings, no press conferences. Just a strip of concrete tied to a zoning approval, built because a mayor and a council saw an opening and used it. The next time you walk from the platform to dinner at Locale, you're walking on a decision that had almost nothing to do with the restaurant and everything to do with what's coming from the other direction.
If you're curious about how any of this is showing up in what homes near downtown are actually worth, or you just want to talk through what a decade of dormant zoning decisions can mean for a block you already live on, the The Katz Team knows this stretch of Monmouth County block by block. Schedule a call whenever you're ready to talk it through.
