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The basics:

• Steady Hand Café will open its first brick-and-mortar location in Bradley Beach
• Known for whimsical, handcrafted drinks
• Founder Ashley Burk blends creativity, culinary flair and community focus in the café’s mission

Updated at 3:21 p.m. EST May 19, 2025: Steady Hand Café plans to unveil its 710 Main St. outpost at 7 a.m. May 24. The shop will be open Thursday to Monday, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. On May 23, its poolside café returns to the St. Laurent Hotel in Asbury Park, where it will be open 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Thursday through Monday. According to Steady Hand, both locations will be open seven days a week by early summer.

The original story, below, was published May 5, 2025.

A mobile café known for its playful coffee creations and culinary-inspired drinks has found a permanent home on the Jersey Shore. After starting out as a pop-up concept at Cats Luck in Neptune City and then expanding to temporary spots at other area businesses, Ashley Burk will open her first brick-and-mortar shop later this spring in Bradley Beach.

Located at 710 Main St., Steady Hand Café will give customers a dedicated place to find the brand’s signature, made-to-order offerings, like its Cereal Milk and Blue Jasmine Tea lattes. The 450-square-foot shop will also serve as a hub for workshops, as well as events that uplift and support local creatives.

For Burk, the upcoming store is a moment five years in the making and will be a “home base” for the brand’s loyal following across the region.

“People have been experiencing Steady Hand in many different ways in other spaces and now this is an opportunity to bring all of that together and have them be able to step into the full experience and have every aspect of the other ways that they’ve interacted with the brand fully come together,” she told NJBIZ.

When Burk started the business in 2020, she sought to combine her creative, culinary and coffee backgrounds to reimagine the café experience.

“All of our drinks are made with our own handcrafted syrups that are very much inspired by fun culinary adventures or cocktails that I’ve had,” she said. “I like to be playful with color and I like to be playful with flavors, so a lot of our drinks are colorful and we’re using natural ingredients to sort of give it those pops of color.”

“My brain is a Rolodex of flavor profiles and I can get really weird with some of our drinks,” she said. “And I’ve built up a level of trust with our customers that when they see something a little bit unknown to them, they are more apt to want to try it because I’ve been throwing them hit after hit of just really fun, delicious, playful, wacky and wild drinks.”

Though its menu changes seasonally, Steady Hand always seeks to give customers a whimsical, light-hearted experience. Some of the top sellers include Hot Honey Tomato Espresso Tonic, Burnt Orange Espresso Tonic, Tahini Orange, Spiced Fig Latte and Cardamom Rose Latte.

Burk said, “We’re adults now and the reality of being an adult is that things aren’t as fun. Things aren’t really made for us to have fun. Things are made for quick enjoyment or luxury. And I don’t love that. There’s an element of play that’s missing in life and I don’t want that to be the case. So, I want playfulness, I want fun, light and easy. I want nostalgia because people come alive, their inner child comes alive when they see something that they haven’t seen since they were a kid. And I think that that’s the best version of people.”

The new shop will also sell bottled lattes and its line of bottled syrups that allow customers to recreate some of their favorite drinks at home. It will also have some grab-and-go food items, she said.

“I don’t want to get too crazy with food. We are in a lovely position on our block where we have Bamboo Leaf That Eatery, which is a really popular Thai food place … and The Buttered Biscuit, which has been around for years and is a very busy brunch place. So, I in no way want to compete. I also just don’t want to. I left the food world on purpose. I don’t want to get back into it,” Burk said.

“But I think there can be a great crossover between our drinks and some of our food items. Plus, we’re also four blocks from the beach, so there’s going to be a big push for grab-and-go rather than stay-and-eat,” she continued. “We’re very playful and fun, so I kind of want to do a riff on Lunchables from our childhood and see if I can put together a cute, little snack board that’s like an adult Lunchables.”

Taking a pulse

In Bradley Beach, Burk is taking over space previously occupied by The Toast Post at Paired, a coffee and toast shop.

“The Toast Post’s owner, Chelsey Ziolkowski, is also part-owner of the Bradley Brew Project. She and her husband own the brewery two doors down. And then they opened another brewery in Farmingdale. They also have three kids. And they opened this coffee shop. So, it got to be the point where they were like, ‘OK, we need to let something go.’ And this was kind of the outlier for them,” Burk said.

Burk went on to say how lucky she feels to have secured the location, saying, “It is incredibly difficult to find ideal vacant spaces for this type of business in a beach town.”

As Burk searched for a permanent base over the last few years, she continued growing her mobile business and used it as a way to “scope out different areas” to see if it could be a good home for Steady Hand.

I want nostalgia because people come alive, their inner child comes alive when they see something that they haven’t seen since they were a kid. And I think that that’s the best version of people.
– Ashley Burk, Steady Hand Café

“I’d set up a pop-up or residency in different areas of different towns that I had a feeling might be a good audience for our brand, for our business. And then I’d sort of test the market,” she said.

“I’d see what the general age range is ideal, maximum spend, where are people usually getting their coffee, what types of places are they going to? Where do they shop, what do they do? I was kicking the tires on my ideal target market for four or five years while also continuously scouring the internet and reaching out to realtors for locations,” she explained. “And I think that that worked to my benefit.”

“I was really, really narrowing down within Monmouth County where specifically I wanted to be and what downtowns, especially by the beach, are active even in the wintertime because that’s very important to a coffee shop,” Burk said.

“Our margins are not very high, so we need to make sure that we have continuous flow of customers so that definitely narrowed down which towns would work best for us. And then while doing the popups, I paid attention to where people were coming from and how far they were willing to travel,” she said.

A passionate pursuit

A Hackettstown native, Burk said, “I have a very strange background that sort of culminated in this business.”

After earning an associate’s degree in baking & pastry arts and a bachelor’s degree in hospitality from the Culinary Institute of America, Burk said, “I decided I did not want to be a baker, but I did want to someday work in the hospitality industry in some way.”

She moved to Asbury Park in 2013 and spent about three years working in the local coffee industry before shifting gears to found her own fiber art and hand-painted sign business, Steady Hand Creative.

The change stemmed from an opportunity to do some hand painted signage for Madison Marquette, the Washington, D.C.-based company overseeing the redevelopment of Asbury Park’s boardwalk.

“They hired me to repaint a lot of the historic signs inside of the Convention Hall. That opportunity was too great to turn down. So, I left my job in coffee and … just dove into being a sign painter for three years. And that was really incredible. And I got to see the inside of a lot of places inside of Asbury Park, and I got to live that artist’s life for a few years, but I also lived that artist’s struggle during those years. And I quickly realized there’s got to be another way to do this,” she said.

Burk briefly relocated to Philadelphia, where she spent two years as an operations manager for local coffee shop chain Rival Brothers Coffee.

“I loved my job and had a lot of responsibility, but felt very good about what I was doing and started getting the inkling that I could do this and that I could do it in my own way and fold in my creative experiences and my creative nature into what I’m trying to build,” she said.

Soon after the onset of the pandemic in 2020, Burk left the city to return to a less crowded place – Monmouth County.

“COVID was kind of the catalyst for Steady Hand getting started. I saw a lot of coffee shops not opening. I saw people being scared to go out,” she said. “I thought, if this is how this is going to be right now, then I might as well take this opportunity to let this be a launchpad instead of a deterrent.”

“I bought an espresso machine with the money from the stimulus checks and started making bottled lattes at a commissary kitchen in Spring Lake, selling them online and then delivering to people’s houses during quarantine. I was tapping into my culinary background and making really fun, creative, unique flavors.”

Burk recalled delivering her bottled iced lattes across the state, from Cape May to northwest New Jersey, saying, “I was just willing to get the name out there and do this as far and as wide for as long as I could. Then, when things started opening up a little bit, businesses started reaching out to me to see if I wanted to do pop-ups in their spaces.”

Besides being a fusion of her two passions – “coffee and playful creative exploration” – Burk said the business has been a way to combine her love of service, community-oriented spirit and “desire to provide a warm/welcoming environment for people.” For instance, all of Steady Hand’s coffee is sourced from women-owned farms that support fairness and sustainability.

Measured approach

As Steady Hand did more pop-ups, special events, weddings, festivals and seasonal residences inside other businesses, such as The St. Laurent Social Club, R Bar, Talula’s and Vine Garden & Gift, Burk said the brand “built up a huge following.”

“Because I did not have a brick and mortar, I had to be really strategic about how to keep the brand activated even in the down season when there were less people in the area,” she said.

Just a few of those efforts have included being named as the exclusive coffee provider for VIP guests at the Sea.Hear.Now Festival last fall in Asbury Park, scaling production of bottled lattes-to-go and bottled syrups, and hosting workshops like “Brew Like a Barista.”

In addition to opening in Bradley Beach, Burk is bringing back Steady Hand’s poolside café at the St. Laurent Social Club in Asbury Park for a third-consecutive summer.

She also expects to begin wholesaling products, continue collaborating with other cafés and bars on custom flavors, host more programs and return to high profile events, like Sea.Hear.Now. Upgrades are also planned for Steady Hand’s mobile café experience and website.

“Everything’s sort of culminating all at the same time. We have been really amping up our bottled lattes and bottled syrups line doing more wholesale and brand partnerships with other local businesses and bars. Now, we’re working on getting that available for wholesale and partnering with local restaurants and bars so that those can be used in cocktails and dessert menus. Or so retailers can purchase them and sell on their own,” she said.

While “keeping all of these things activated at the same time” may be challenging, Burk is convinced each piece “works well with each other in a really balanced and seasonal way.”

“When we’re really, really busy, it’s not going to be as busy on the wholesale side. But in the wintertime, when it’s a little slower for us in the café, it is a busier time of year for retail. So, we’re able to scale up our syrups, bottled lattes and wholesaling,” she explained. “We can also use the space for special events, workshops and community opportunities. We have a really lovely backyard that we redid, so we’re hoping to be able to rent it out as an alternative opportunity for some extra income.”

“It’s always a juggling act for every single person who enters into the retail world, but we’ve been doing it all this time, so it doesn’t feel as chaotic. And it’s sort of like what our customers are expecting of us at this point,” she said.

“In the beginning, I was willing to go anywhere and do anything, and I was happy to show up, and I was, wherever it was, I was down … .And I found that we were starting to be tapped for popups by shops who were maybe not seeing as much foot traffic and were maybe looking for something to bring them a boost in sales. And while that’s very flattering and really incredible, it kind of put a lot of pressure on me to carry the volume of people who would show up to these popups,” she said.

“And then a lot of the marketing efforts would then be put on me. It started to feel a bit like I was doing a lot, and then the popups weren’t really generating enough traffic to warrant the amount of labor that it took to just produce this popup,” she explained.

“I had to learn my own boundaries around what was best for the business and what wasn’t best for the business and learn to say no. But it also made the things that I say yes to all the better,” Burk said. “Opening a brick-and-mortar was the No. 1 goal – I knew that’s where everything would sort of come together in the best way to fit the needs of the brand and our customer base. But being specific about what popups I said ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to gave us a little bit more exclusivity.”

Despite the current economic challenges, Burk feels confident she’s set her venture up for long-term success.

“I have had to be creative about the business from the jump because I didn’t have four walls. I didn’t have a space for people to come to. I have a lot of friends who have opened brick and mortars, and I’ve also seen them close those brick and mortars. And I’m within a community of people who open shops, there is this subscription to the idea that build it and they will come,” she said.

“And while that’s so earnest and lovely … the reality is we live in a seasonal area and it’s only gotten more seasonal in the last five years. So, I can’t subscribe to that,” she said. “With what I have been building, I feel like I did it backwards.”

“Usually, people open a shop and then they’re like, ‘OK, cool, we’re open now. What else can we do?’ And I have been thinking of ‘what else can I do until a find my shop?’ Burk said. “There’s a lot of aspects of the business that would normally have been something that people would’ve gotten around to later on that I have been tackling from the start.”

As Burk prepares for Steady Hand’s next chapter, she admitted to feeling “a little nervous.”

“I have been the face of Steady Hand and I’m happy to continue to be, but there is a reality that I am about to open my doors and customers are going to interact with my business and my brand without me being the face. I will have staff and I’ll have other people who will be kicking the tires, so to speak, on the brand … I am putting something that I’ve built and that people have a very specific expectation of in the hands of others, which I think is really just a testament to needing to really focus on training – teaching staff about the brand, how we approach customers and how we approach problem solving,” she explained.

“I worked in the coffee world for over a decade. And that whole ‘bummed out barista that couldn’t care less that you’re here’ is not a thing here. That’s just absolutely not part of our ethos,” she said. “So, I really need to make sure that when I’m handing this off to other people, that it continues to walk and talk in the same way as that I’ve established from the jump.”