Cape May is a stew of ocean breezes, Norman Rockwell nostalgia and Victorian architecture, on the Garden State’s southernmost spur just a ferry ride from Delaware.
In recent years, the oldest seaside resort town in America has also been home to one of the most dynamic food and drink scenes on the Jersey Shore.
Over the past few years, the island has seen a buzzy nouveau-steakhouse, Primal; house-extruded pastas with local crab at Grana BYOB; Instagram-ready mahi mahi tacos out of a pink shack called Block Party; and a big new Shore dining and drinking complex from transatlantic entrepreneurs Exit Zero.
More:Exit 0 makes headway at Cape May – Lewes Ferry Terminal with new restaurants
This season, there’s a whole new crop. This includes Taiwanese pork belly buns, a cask-beer bar from a four-generation Cape May food family, and French bistro fare from one of the most accomplished Gallic-trained chefs in the country. There are also some updates to familiar places, and yet another spot to eat brunch.
Here are the new restaurants to try in Cape May for 2023.
Vietnamese po’boys and some of Jersey’s best beer at The Cricket Club
106 Decatur St., Cape May, 609-888-6095, capemaycricketclub.com. Open 4 p.m-9 p.m. daily.
When the Merion Inn announced it would close, the news traveled first as rumor, then a source of grief: The restaurant had been open in its old Victorian building for well over a century.
But as it turned out, the new owners would be yet another decades-old restaurant: Merion’s neighbors at The Mad Batter are themselves a more than 40-year-old dining and drinking institution in Cape May.
“We always said (the Merion Inn) was the only property we would ever buy,” said Batter co-owner Pam Huber.
And so the Merion became the Cricket Club. And somehow the marriage of two institutions has made for the most adventurous new bar menu on the Cape.
The wine list sports far-flung wines that include gluggy California skin-contact pinks and Chardonnay from French natural-wine mavericks. The cocktails span ancho-chili margaritas and concoctions of cantaloupe, mint and cucumber.
And the beer menu is a novel experiment, engineered alongside acclaimed brewery The Seed in Atlantic City: food-friendly milds and bitters and pales served out of low-carbonation casks the same way they did it in Olde England.
“It’s something I’ve wanted to try forever,” said Huber’s son, Kyle Kulkowitz.
The Cricket Club will keep the Merion’s long tradition of live music, and chef Jon Davies will serve as a bridge between two restaurants: He’d cooked at both the Merion and the Mad Batter. The menu’s loaded potato muffins and are an homage to the Merion’s beloved potato cup.
But Davies’ food menu likewise offers more adventurous fare, including Thai-influenced coconut-milk mussels, Portuguese peri peri chicken and “poor mi” sandwiches that mash up Vietnamese banh mis with Cajun po’boys.
To understand the restaurant’s cocktail of old and new, look to its name. Pennsylvania’s Merion Cricket Club, with historic ties to the old Inn, is a wickety institution with all-white dress codes and an allergy to cell phones.
But the new Cricket Club isn’t named for that club, nor the sport.
“We’re named after the insect,” Kulkowitz said, while his mother just couldn’t stop laughing.
Steak frites and duck a l’orange from famed chef Michael Schultz at Maison Bleue Bistro
311 Mansion St., Cape May, 609-435-5554, maisonbleuebistro.com. Dinner Wednesday-Monday.
Chef Michael Schultz has cooked at some of the most acclaimed and rarefied French kitchens in America, whether a long tenure at the Le Bec-Fin in Philly or a brief tour at Daniel in New York.
But at Maison Bleue Bistro in his hometown of Cape May, one of the first things Schultz knew they needed was a perfect french fry.
The fries at Maison Bleue Bistro are hand-cut each day, soaked for hours each morning and blanched. The kitchen, under executive chef Anthony Depasquale, experimented again and again to find the perfect frying temperature, the perfect timing.
Until, voila! A sauce-proof fry. Crisp outside, tender within.
“We put them on a plate with steak and butter, or in the mussels with sauce, and they don’t get soggy. People are really just going crazy over them,” Schultz said.
At Le Jardin at the Hugh, under the same owners, Schultz offers a tasting menu of small and costly delights — foie gras with architecture, or rose-dusted cocoa. Maison Bleue aims to apply the same rigor to approachable bistro fare, whether duck a l’orange or straightforward steak frites.
Alongside steak tartare and burger a l’Americain, the bistro offers plant-based versions of French classics, including a heart of palm galette and a walnut-lentil-cognac pate that mirrors chicken liver. Sourcing is painstakingly local, whether foraged mushrooms, diver scallops, or free-range eggs with yolks so yellow it looks like the sun rose twice.
If you come only once, come Thursday. That’s when the restaurant serves the dish Schultz says might be their best: a laborious, old-school seafood bouillabaisse, reduced again and again over many hours and laden with fresh-caught fish and shells.
Pancake taco brunch, and steak dinner, at Brine BYOB
1231 NJ-109, Cape May,609-884-0833, kararestaurantgroup.com/brine. Brunch and dinner daily.
Starting with classic brunch spot George’s Place, brothers Yianni and Peter Karapanagiotis seemingly own all notions of brunch in Cape May and the County.
Their Kara Restaurant Group has opened at least eight brunch spots within a seven-mile drive of the Cape May beachfront. If there’s a ricotta pancake, egg Bene or gravied biscuit being served somewhere on the island, there’s a good chance they’re the ones serving it.
Brine BYOB is the newest entrant, having opened in May with a wake-up menu of crab cake sliders, ganache-drizzled French toast, and something called pancake tacos. Apparently this involves a pancake “shell” stuffed with fried chicken. Dinner, including crab cakes and multiple steaks, is also served nightly.
Big changes afoot at Exit Zero’s The Lookout and Filling Station
The Lookout, 1200 Lincoln Blvd., North Cape May, 609-551-4209. The Filling Station, 110 Sunset Blvd., Cape May, 609-770-8479. exitzero.com.Big changes keep coming to the many restaurants at the Cape May-Lewes ferry terminal owned by hospitality company Exit Zero. After opening last year, second-floor restaurant The Lookout is already getting a full makeover with a new chef, menu and decor.
Last year, said owner Jack Wright, they had to open the place at full sprint — in a building that had never been a restaurant.
This year they’ve remodeled with a brick fireplace, fishing-net decorations, a greenhouse’s worth of plants and lounge chairs for the people who’d like to stare out at the Delaware Bay with a drink in hand.
“Really, we’re going more for ‘sexy oyster bar,’” Wright said.
There’s also a new, more seafood-focused menu coming in July, courtesy of new chef Dana Erskine — a veteran of multiple high-end spots in the area.
Among other fish-forward options, Erskine’s upcoming menu will include a miso-glazed tilefish, Parmesan-crusted barramundi, and tuna poke to join the already-expansive raw bar. The Lookout also plans a literal catch of the day, cooking up whatever came in off the boats that morning.
Across town, said Wright, his Filling Station restaurant, in a former gas station, has also undergone a renovation into a kind of post-atomic bachelor pad. They’ve installed fake-grass floors, a blue-tile fireplace, mid-century chairs and Sherwin-Williams paint swatches from the 1960s.
“We have orange stools and we have these Austin Powers orange rotating chairs, which are fun to look at and really comfortable as well,” said Wright. “And we definitely have some flamingos hanging about… obviously not real ones.”
No-filler crab cakes and fresh lobster rolls at Dockside Dave’s Seafood Market
458 W Perry St., Cape May, 609-770-8923, docksidedavesnj.com. Market open Thursday to Sunday, starting June 15. Expanded hours and prepared food will arrive later this summer.
Dockside Dave’s opened on Father’s Day, and it’s not an accident:
The Dave in question is co-owner Kyle Mattera’s late father, a hard-working lover of the sea who could always be found fishing if he wasn’t out hunting.
Mattera opened his namesake Dockside Dave’s food truck on Father’s Day last year in his honor. Among other things, the truck serves buttery lobster rolls and no-filler Eastern Shore-style lump crabcakes — no Baltimore-style breader, thanks.
As of this Father’s Day weekend, Dockside Dave’s will also have a seafood market in Cape May selling fresh produce and the riches of the sea: clams, shrimp, scallops, local flounder, live lobsters, all sorts of crab, and salmon both wild and tame.
Ready-to eat crab cakes and lobster rolls likely won’t arrive at the Cape May market till at least July, after the market gets its legs under it. In the meantime, the truck can be found most weekends in North Wildwood, at the Lazy Bass Bayside Bar & Grill.
But soon enough, fresh from a seafood market that sells live crustaceans, you can get a heavy-laden lobster roll. Crab cakes made from nothing but lump and seasoning. Produce from New Jersey. Bottled hot sauce from the Shore. Seafood that might still swim.
Opening any day now: Taiwanese pork belly buns at Foo Bao
722 Beach Ave. Unit 3, Cape May. No website or phone. Softly open Wednesday to Monday, as of June 14.
The gua bao is Taiwan’s answer to the taco or the gyro: a quick street sandwich for people on the go.
The classic ingredients are simple: five-spiced pork belly wrapped up with vegetables into a doughy and springy bun called a bao. Nestled somewhere between taco and sandwich, the gua bao almost singlehandedly proves that a taco is a sandwich.
Taiwanese-heritage Amy Kao, alongside husband and chef Lulzim Rexhepi, figured it’d the perfect beach food for an area that’s often lacked for Asian flavors.
And so at 772 Beach Ave, Foo Bao will bring bao filled with pork belly, shortrib, or umami-laden fermented bean, not to mention shrimp or lobster options that wed Taiwanese flavors to the bounty of the Shore.
Each is laden with daikon, carrot, crispy garlic and shallot, cilantro and green onion. If you’d rather get your short rib or lobster in hearty rice bowl form, with an option on poached eggs, that’s also yours to have. So are desserts, including a doughnut made with Chinese five-spice.
Coming this month: Farm-to-table from their own farm at the Cold Spring Grange Restaurant
735 Seashore Road, Cape May, 609-884-0114,http://hcsv.org/cold-spring-grange
For years, the Historic Cold Spring Village, devoted to the old ways of doing things, has farmed its own produce. And it has brewed its own beer, the state’s first nonprofit brewery.
But until this year the village rented out its historic Grange to outside restaurants, which offered what longtime village employee Sherry Sheldon likes to call “Cape May food at Cape May prices.”
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.
But as the village restaurant’s new chef, Sheldon plans to serve Cold Spring Village food, at Cold Spring Village prices. Humble food. Hearty food.
Food like shepherd’s pie. And pot pie. And meatloaf. Maybe also some mac and cheese, a dish lodged in the arteries of America since pioneering chef James Hemings went to France.
She’s already serving a limited takeout menu. But as the Historic Village’s season kicks off in earnest this month, Sheldon plans a menu with two entrees a day, a starch, and some vegetables.
Especially, she looks forward to using produce grown on the village’s farm for homestyle comfort plates.
“I have my own raised garden plot,” Sheldon said. “But in the farm part of the village they’ll be planting all kinds of great things for me: lettuce, onions, carrots, green beans, maybe potatoes. Oh, I’m hoping for potatoes!”
Matthew Korfhage is a Philadelphia-based reporter for USA Today Network.
