Sea To Hole In The Wall: Waretown Sub Shop Makes Waves

WARETOWN, NJ — It all started with some tough days out on the boat. Harold McMaster and Michael Battista were blue fishermen on the Miss Belmar Princess.

One day the blue fishing wasn't as good as they hoped. So McMasters started making cheeses teaks. People loved them. But it was hard to get one, unless you were one of 100 on the boat off shore.

"Me and Harold used to sit on the boat 16 miles out and talk about how blue fishing’s starting to suck," Battista told Patch. "He said that he was going to start a deli for his family. He told me that in 30 days, he was going to start a deli."

That set in motion the creation of Lunch Box on 9. The hole-in-the-wall sandwich shop is difficult to notice from the outside. As drivers pass Breakers Kitchen And Tap, directly across the street is a modest brick building with a few businesses with similar-looking white signs.

The Lunch Box sits at 542 Route 9. Some call it a hole in the wall, a diamond in the rough or a "treasure chest," Battista said. Once customers first walk inside, they see there's more than meets the eye — a high-quality selection of hot and cold sandwiches, burgers and hot dogs, desserts and more.

McMaster was a fisherman for about 25 years. Battista fished too, but he also had about 20 years of restaurant-industry experience. He's a certified French pastry chef and holds several marketing and management degrees.

Lunch Box will celebrate its two-year anniversary March 24. Popular items include the cheese steak, the Italian sandwich and the Italian hot dog.

The restaurant doesn't advertise. Lunch Box relies on word of mouth, and they like it that way for now.

"I don’t really want people to know about us as much because we’re slowly growing," Battista said. "If I was to open up and be like, boom, then we may not be able to gradually increase the business at a rate that we can handle."

McMaster and Battista looked back once on their opening-day menu from 2018. They served 20 items at the time. Now they're up to 27 lunch and dinner sandwiches and six or seven more for breakfast.

The restaurant also gets several regular customers who make up their own orders. Lunch Box remains hard to notice from the exterior. Most might not think to find it in a place like Waretown. But the word is spreading, and more and more locals are rooting for them, Battista said.

"Waretown’s a town nobody even knows about," he said. "Now there’s something different that people recognize, and it’s kind of like Waretown’s little gem."

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