Seaside Eats

Cape May. For me, the summer is not complete without a trip to this seaside town. Clustered amongst the Victorian houses and locally owned businesses are, conveniently, some of the best restaurants I have ever visited. There's a huge variety of cuisines available. In fact, there are so many different places that after 13 years I still have not eaten in all of them. (Granted, there are some restaurants we visit every time out of sheer craving and necessity, but still....) It's my favorite beach, by far. But, as I'm sure you've realized, it's currently December. So why does any of this matter? Well, because Cape May is open in the winter as well. Brilliant, I know. And, with the Candlelight tours of the old houses beginning this weekend, my family and I decided it was time to pay good ol' Cape May a visit. It was a lovely trip. The weather was beautiful and I couldn't have asked for a better way to ring in the Christmas Season (which, for me, begins in December...as it should). But the real star of the trip was our dinner at the Merion Inn.

Located just a few steps from the Washington Square Mall (the shopping district of Cape May), is the Merion Inn, which is not actually an inn anymore. The Merion Inn has been a restaurant for about 100 years, and it has really great character. The cozy dining rooms were all dressed up for the occasion, and the Christmas songs wafting from the piano would have been enough to put any Scrooge in the Christmas Spirit. It's a lovely place, and we consistently have delicious food there. This visit was no different.
I ordered one of their specials, Pan-Seared Scallops with Garlic Potatoes and a Beet-Horseradish sauce. There's something about being by the sea that always makes me crave seafood, so I gave into that craving this weekend.
While we waited on our food, we indulged in the mini muffins that our waitress brought to the table. My favorite was the corn muffin that I slathered with a healthy serving of apple butter. Yum. I don't normally eat apple butter, but this stuff is delicious. All three of us loved the muffins. We hadn't eaten since breakfast. It was 3 o'clock. We asked for more. More muffins were brought. The process of devouring them was repeated.
And then came the main course.While I was at first a little weary of the horseradish part of the dish, it really wasn't anything to worry about. Everything was perfect. The scallops, the little fingerling potatoes, the lumps of crabmeat that I somehow neglected to see in the initial description of the dish (they turned out to be my favorite part!), it was all... *sigh*...so good.

And just when I thought that life couldn't get better and that I had reached the peak of my dining experience, the dessert menu arrived. Ah, dessert, how I love you. I am drooling now just thinking about it. (not really, but you get the idea.) The three of us decided to split the Apple-Cinnamon Bread Pudding with Some-Kind-of-Orange-and-Cinnamon-Ice-Cream-With-a-Delicious-Description-That-I-Can't-Seem-To-Remember. Regardless of what it was actually called (I do know that it was made by a local place, maybe.....Bliss? Yes. That was it.) it was darn good. The icecream was the perfect flavor and temperature to balance the warm sweetness of the bread pudding. It was divine. As I sat there stuffing myself, I was reminded of a Fred Astaire song that goes something like, "Heaven, I'm in Heaven, and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak....." Sound familiar? It was that good. And it was gone much too quickly.

At that point, I was content. We could have gone home and skipped the tours all together and I probably would have considered the day a success. But we did stay (thankfully) and saw some very beautiful homes and had a great time. But that dinner, well, we're still talking about it.