Philly chefs make waves down the Shore

The Saturday night line at the Lobster House, a 550-seat Cape May dining institution, starts early and gets long. Rain or shine, year after year, families wait to soak in the nostalgia of the century-old Jersey Shore mainstay.

That’s how it is down the Shore. Long-running restaurants serve beachy classics, like stuffed flounder and fried scallops, with mid-century flair (two sides and an iceberg salad with each entree, of course).

These days though, the tides are turning.

When summer hits, our city’s chefs long for the seashore. Lately, when they cross the bridge, they’re bringing with them not only their kids and beach chairs, but their talent — to a job, a summer pop-up, or even a permanent relocation.

Yvonne Yuen, a food lover who moved from Toronto to Cape May County six years ago, says that the pandemic sparked a rapid change — for the better — in the local restaurant scene. Ashley Hayden, who worked down the Shore in her youth and is now general manager of the celebrated BYOB Hearthside in Collingswood, has noticed it too. “Small independent restaurants are hitting it out of the park and showing that dining at the Shore is more than a broiled crustacean,” she says.

James Beard Award-winning Philadelphia chef and restaurateur Greg Vernick loves Margate, where he worked his first job, cooking at Lucy the Elephant’s beach grill. He’s upgraded since then. Last summer, Vernick brought his elegant Four Seasons restaurant, Vernick Fish, to Margate for a week-long pop-up at local favorite Steve & Cookie’s. Inspired by Jersey Shore memories, his team served casual dishes like seafood salad and fruit hand pies at picnic tables. He’ll do it again this August.

Vanessa Wong, owner of Fishtown Social, credits remote work and the Shore’s relative affordability — at least until recently — with the renewed interest among people from Philly, New York, and even Los Angeles. She sees Ventnor as similar to underserved Fishtown in 2007, when she opened her wine shop and bar there.

That’s why she opened Wahine Wine Company and Fish & Whistle Market in Ventnor last summer. The shops sell local cheeses, charcuterie boards, natural wine, spirits, and beer. “It’s happy hour, all available on one corner,” she says. They’ve been well-received, Wong says, with customers of all ages and lifestyles frequently returning for carefully-sourced, reasonably-priced bottles. This year, she’s running a monthly market series in Ventnor that features Philly brands Fishtown Seafood, Salt & Vinegar, Midnight Pasta, and Beehive Bake Shop.

Some hospitality pros have traded Philly entirely for the beach. Ed Hackett worked in Philly restaurants for two decades before moving down the Shore with his family two years ago. “I was burned out from the grind of COVID,” says the former managing partner of Rittenhouse’s Pub & Kitchen. Now as general manager of Cape May’s 62-acre Beach Plum Farm, Hackett oversees popular Thursday to Sunday farm dinners, featuring fresh-picked produce and farm-raised pork and chicken.

The job at Beach Plum gave him balance and work he’s proud of, without having to put in 90 hours a week. He’s noticed an increase in people from Philly and even New York City applying for jobs at Beach Plum’s parent company, Cape Resorts, which also runs Cape May’s Virginia Hotel and Congress Hall, among others. “It’s families looking to get out of the city, [people who] want to have a yard and take walks and get some fresh air.”

Chef Melissa McGrath, a fellow Pub & Kitchen alum, has also found a way out of the “crazy grind” of a full-service restaurant with her Sweet Amalia Market & Kitchen in between the city and the Shore, now in its third summer. Though she’s still a fan of classic Shore spots like Smitty’s Clam Bar in Somers Point, McGrath set out to create a “Philly-style restaurant” to serve Sweet Amalia’s sought-after oysters, alongside upscale seasonal specials, like crab chowder topped with a fried soft-shell crab.

Chef Anthony Depasquale of Maison Bleue, a new French bistro in Cape May that’s open year-round, is currently commuting from Huntingdon Valley, outside of Philadelphia. He says that he prefers cooking for Shore-goers because everyone is nicer on vacation. Maison Bleue and its sister restaurant, Jardin at the Hugh, both made Inquirer critic Craig LaBan’s Shore dining guide this year.

At Jardin, Michael Schultz draws on his experience cooking at fine restaurants in Philadelphia and elsewhere to create “cutting-edge cuisine” and “city-style dining.” He serves a 15-course plant-forward tasting menu — featuring dishes like a plant-based foie gras with housemade kombucha syrup — to 18-20 diners a night. “Jersey is known as the Garden State for a reason,” he says. “It’s so much fun going and picking up the produce [at local farms], like zucchini or ground cherries. It’s not sitting in a warehouse or traveling a long distance.”

Sixty miles is the magic number for Heather Gleason. That’s the distance between her two Good Dog Bars, one in Philly and the new one in Atlantic City, which just opened in the Chelsea neighborhood. She says that the often-troubled gambling town needs more high-quality Good Dog-style bars and restaurants, where you don’t “have to pay $20 to park and traipse two miles through a casino to have dinner.”

Gleason, husband Dave Garry, and their two dogs moved to Atlantic City in 2021. They can still quickly get to Philly, but with a yard and daily beach visits, pups Greta and Tito are “living their best lives,” Gleason says.

For the Ebbitt Room in Cape May’s turn-of-the-century Virginia Hotel, Jason Hanin blends Philly-style fine dining with California’s light, bright cuisine. The chef, who has roots down the Shore, cooked his way through Philly from the Striped Bass to Rittenhouse’s swanky steakhouse Barclay Prime, where he was executive chef. After Hurricane Sandy, Hanin headed west to cook in L.A. Six years ago, Cape Resorts recruited him home to Jersey.

Now, he lives across the street from the ocean, gets to surf often, and sees his parents a lot. He’s cooking farm-to-table dishes, like a standout plate of perfectly seared Cape May scallops with French green beans, chanterelle mushrooms, red grapes, almonds, and pomegranate.

Hanin’s wish for the Jersey Shore: To develop a “true seafood identity,” like how Rhode Island is known for brothy chowder and Maine for lobster. “When you have Cape May, a gargantuan fishing port and dock area, why did a lot of restaurants [in the past] just serve fried flounder, broiled scallops, and frozen calamari?” he asks.

Despite the recent improvements, Philly expats down the Shore do miss some things. Ed Hackett reminisces about the Vietnamese food he’d get twice a week on Washington Avenue. Heather Gleason longs for a proper French restaurant in Atlantic County. As food lover Yuen puts it: “In Toronto, I would have Chinese for breakfast, French for lunch, Indian for dinner. That’s just not possible here.”

Yuen is excited about Wildwood Crest’s specialty coffee shop, Turtle Gut, which has been recruiting chef-friends from Philly for pop-up dinners. Owners Joseph Pettinelli and Eva Basilio Garcia recently hosted Baby’s, a forthcoming Filipino café in Brewerytown and Viraj Thomas of the traveling pizza operation Char Pizza. Having relocated from Philly, the couple sells some of their hometown favorites: Fishtown Pickles, sourdough from both Eeva and Mighty Bread, and 1-900-Ice-Cream’s soft serve.

Pettinelli recognizes that “change can be a little scary” for nostalgic Shore-goers and residents, but like the work-play balance that Philly chefs and restaurateurs are seeking down the Shore, there’s room for old and new.

The Shore “has this old school, boardwalk carnival charm,” says Vernick, the chef who’s been going to Margate for 35 years. “That still flows through all of the newness that’s happening down there. I hope they never let go of the charm that is the Jersey Shore.”