The Red Bank Sub Shop and House of Fades barbershop are setting up side-by-side at 8 Monmouth Street. (Click to enlarge)

By JOHN T. WARD

Time for a couple of Retail Churn updates from Monmouth Street in Red Bank.

Sandwich man Canio Paradiso is sprucing up at his soon-to open sub shop, the one with what has to be the borough’s oddest patio…

And a spacious new nail salon has opened its door, bring its owner full circle.

Innovative Nails opened on Tuesday at 73 Monmouth. (Click to enlarge)

As reported in an earlier Retail Churn, the storefront at 8A Monmouth turns out to have had a hidden patio roughly in the configuration of an airshaft in a back corner. It’s four brick walls open to the sky four stories above the floor.

Paradiso, of Middletown, tells us that when he first saw the space as a prospective tenant, even the landlord didn’t know it was there. It had been sealed off behind a staircase by a door that didn’t open, he said. He got permission to break through, and discovered “kind of a cool space,” he says.

The patio, he hopes will become a quiet place where customer “can get a breath of fresh air” in nice weather while enjoying their lunches at his shop, to be called Red Bank Sub Shop.

The shop is taking one half of a space last occupied by by Exotic Birds of Red Bank. The other half, at 8B, is being built out as the Red Bank House of Fades, a barbershop owned by friends of his, Robinson Hernandes and Juan Morales. The barbershop is expected to open next month, and the sub shop will follow by early March, he said.

Farther west on Monmouth, in the shop that formerly housed Miss Sherri’s Honey Child Music, Josephine More has soft-opened Innovative Nails. She’s doing limited business this week, and expects to be fully staffed beginning next week, she tells Churn.

We wrote about More’s association with the address – she worked in the same storefront as a manicurist 16 years ago –  in this November article.