Washington Inn & Wine Bar

The Restaurant

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.

Chef Mimi Wood, who joined the kitchen as executive chef in 1996 and has been in continuous tenure for nearly three decades, cooks French-influenced New American in a register that has held its standard while the rest of the Cape May scene has been rebuilt around it. The menu runs as a serious à la carte programme through the season — a Caesar salad with anchovy butter, a foie-gras-and-duck-confit terrine, a sea bass with brown-butter capers, a dry-aged ribeye in a Madeira reduction, a chocolate marquise with espresso anglaise that has been on the menu in some form since the early 1990s — and a separate, more relaxed wine-bar menu that opens at 5pm with cheeses, charcuterie, and lighter savoury plates. The kitchen's discipline is in the consistency: the regulars who have been coming to the Washington Inn for forty years return because the cooking has not drifted.

The wine list is the inn's defining asset and arguably the most serious in southern New Jersey — approximately seven hundred and fifty references at last count, with extraordinary depth in Burgundy (Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Leflaive, Rousseau verticals), Bordeaux back to the 1970s, an unusually serious Napa and Sonoma Cabernet section that goes back to the founding 1980s of Stag's Leap and Caymus, a careful German Riesling and Austrian Grüner programme, and a Champagne grower-producer selection that runs to forty bottles. The Washington Inn has held the Wine Spectator 'Best of Award of Excellence' continuously for more than two decades. The by-the-glass programme — fifty pours nightly — is itself a kind of wine education. For a Cape May business dinner where the bottle list matters, this is the only address.