410 Bank Street

The Restaurant

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.

Chef Henry Sing Cheng, the kitchen's founding chef and one of the original investors in the project, cooks an unusually disciplined New Orleans / Caribbean wood-grilling programme using mesquite from Texas and a battery of in-house spice rubs and sauces that the kitchen develops in small batches every week. Signature dishes, most of which have been on the menu in some form for two decades, include a Mesquite-Grilled Voodoo Shrimp finished tableside in a Cajun spice butter, a Soft-Shell Crab preparation with a remoulade that the restaurant guards closely, a Caribbean Chicken with a habanero-mango glaze, a Wood-Grilled Beef Tenderloin in a brandy peppercorn reduction, and a House-Made Banana Spring Rolls with rum-caramel that has become the restaurant's defining dessert. The kitchen also runs an excellent vegetarian programme, black-bean cakes, a portobello preparation with chipotle aioli, that quietly draws non-meat-eating regulars throughout the season.

The BYO format is part of the restaurant's particular character. Guests bring their own wine, and 410 Bank Street is one of the few BYO restaurants in the country that draws a regular crowd of serious wine buyers down from Philadelphia and New York specifically to drink older bottles in this carriage-house setting. The service is experienced enough to handle complex bottle programmes (proper decanting, temperature management, appropriate stemware for the room's older Burgundies and Bordeaux), and the kitchen's cooking, heavily spiced, generously sauced, confidently smoke-touched, is unusually well-paired with bigger Rhônes, Tempranillos, and California Cabernets that guests routinely bring. The wisteria-covered patio at dusk, with a candle and a 2010 Châteauneuf-du-Pape that someone has driven down from a Philadelphia cellar, has become one of the small great American dinners. Reservations open six weeks before the season begins and the most-requested Friday and Saturday tables are gone within hours.