The Restaurant
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 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.
Chef Jason Lott, named 2025 Chef of the Year by the New Jersey Restaurant and Hospitality Association, runs the kitchen on an exceptionally tight farm-to-table programme: the great majority of every plate is sourced from Beach Plum Farm, a sixty-acre working farm in West Cape May owned by the same Cape Resorts group and located less than two miles from the dining room. The menu rotates with what the farm is producing — heirloom tomato preparations and corn courses in midsummer, root-vegetable and squash menus in October, lamb and duck programmes through the autumn — and a typical evening offers a six-course tasting at $110 alongside a tight à la carte selection of around eight savoury and four dessert options. Signature compositions across recent menus have included a Beach Plum Farm beet salad with whipped goat's-cheese and pistachio, a hand-rolled pasta with morels and Beach Plum Farm ramps, a duck breast preparation with fermented summer fruit, a halibut with caper-and-lemon brown butter, and a brown-butter cake with seasonal Beach Plum fruit that has been on the menu in some form since the restaurant opened.
The wine list runs to approximately two hundred and forty references with confident depth in Burgundy, Loire whites, California Pinot Noir, and an unusually serious New Jersey wine selection — Cape Resorts is committed to Atlantic-coast viticulture and the Ebbitt's by-the-glass programme is one of the few places in the country to taste a careful flight of Beneduce, William Heritage, and Unionville wines alongside the Burgundian benchmarks. The bar programme has earned its own following: an early-evening cocktail in the Ebbitt's marble bar, the room half-lit and a piano playing in the corner, has become one of the small ceremonies of a Cape May weekend. For the dinner that defines a Cape May visit, this is the address.
Why This Is Cape May’s Impress Clients Pick
For impressing a client visiting the New Jersey shore — and the steady flow of Philadelphia and New York business travellers who come down for board meetings, philanthropic retreats, and the Cape May summer-circuit fundraisers generates a regular fine-dining brief — The Ebbitt Room is the only Cape May answer that does not require an explanation. The NJRHA Chef-of-the-Year credential handles the credentialing question on its own. The Beach Plum Farm sourcing gives the host a coherent dinner narrative that goes well beyond a standard hotel kitchen. The two-hundred-and-forty-reference wine programme allows real authority across a long evening without resorting to the trophy bottles. And the Virginia Hotel address keeps the evening walkable to a hotel room or the beach afterwards — the kind of compactness that distinguishes a Cape May client visit from any equivalent Mid-Atlantic dinner.
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