Cape May’s Greatest Tables
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The Top 5 Cape May Restaurants
The Ebbitt Room
The Ebbitt Room occupies the dining room of The Virginia Hotel at 25 Jackson Street, a fully restored 1879 Italianate building that sits half a block from the Washington Street Mall and three blocks from the beach in central Cape May's National Historic Landmark district. The room itself is small and serious — forty-eight covers across a deep front room with a working fireplace, a lighter rear room with banquette seating, and a marble-topped bar that serves a steady programme of pre-dinner cocktails. The original hardwood floors, the Victorian millwork, and the pressed-tin ceiling have been kept; the lighting has been thoroughly modernised; and the service moves at the unhurried tempo of a hotel dining room that has been doing this for forty years.
Washington Inn & Wine Bar
The Washington Inn occupies a fully restored 1840 Greek Revival plantation house at 801 Washington Street, six blocks north of the beach at the head of Cape May's National Historic Landmark district. The Craig family bought the building in 1978 and have operated it as a restaurant continuously ever since — Arthur Craig acquired the liquor licence in 1981, the wine programme has been built across forty years under three generations of family leadership, and the inn is now operated by Michael Craig, the eldest son of the founding generation. The building itself has six distinct dining areas — a summer patio under climbing roses, a fireside main dining room, a smaller library room that seats twenty for private dinners, a glassed-in solarium, the wine-bar room with its own à la carte menu, and a courtyard for warm-weather aperitifs — and the inn handles the routing between these rooms with a hospitality that is, by Cape May standards, almost legendary.
Peter Shields Inn
Peter Shields Inn occupies a fully restored 1907 Colonial Revival mansion at 1301 Beach Avenue, on the East End of Cape May directly opposite the Atlantic Ocean and a half-mile from the Washington Street Mall. The building was constructed by Peter Shields, the wealthy steel-industry executive who is credited with planning the East Cape May beach district itself, and the architecture — three-storey gabled front, wraparound veranda, leaded windows facing the sea — has been preserved through successive ownerships since the property was converted into an inn in 1986. The dining room seats sixty-eight across a glassed-in front parlour, a more intimate centre room with a working fireplace, and the wraparound porch which seats sixteen in season. Every front-facing seat looks directly out at the Atlantic.
410 Bank Street
410 Bank Street occupies an 1840 carriage house at 410 Bank Street in the historic district of West Cape May, tucked behind a deep canopy of trees, climbing wisteria, and tropical foliage that the New York Times once described as making the entrance feel more like a Caribbean garden than a Jersey shore street. The dining room — fifty-six covers across the carriage-house interior, a wraparound screened porch with overhead fans, and a string-lit back patio — has been the consistent winner of New Jersey Monthly's Best Restaurant award for more than two decades and was named by Zagat among the top one-hundred restaurants in the United States across the early 2000s. The New York Times has reviewed the room repeatedly over the years and called it, in a memorable line, 'the reason many come to Cape May.' The restaurant is seasonal, open from mid-May through mid-October, and BYO — Cape May permits restaurants without liquor licences to operate this way, and a $8 corkage on guests' own wines has been a 410 Bank Street tradition since opening.
Tisha's Fine Dining
Tisha's Fine Dining occupies a storefront on the Washington Street Mall at 322 Washington Street, the pedestrianised retail spine of Cape May's National Historic Landmark district, three blocks from the beach and a block from the Virginia Hotel. The restaurant was founded by Letitia 'Tisha' Negro in 1988 in Wildwood, moved to Cape May in 1995, and is now operated by Tisha's son Paul Negro and his wife Jennifer — a family operation in genuine continuous tenure for more than three decades. The dining room is intimate, around forty-eight covers across a main room with white tablecloths and a smaller side room used for small private parties; the cooking philosophy is the deliberate counterpoint to Cape May's more architectural fine-dining rooms: confident, generous, polished cooking in a setting that does not perform.