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.