Step Inside Only NJ Hotel Restaurant on America’s Top 100 List

A new list of America's top 100 hotel restaurants includes only one hotel restaurant from New Jersey.

Cape May's Ebbitt Room in the Virginia Hotel.

The top 100 list was created using data from a survey of over 1,500 American consumers who have dined at a hotel restaurant within the last five years, as well as flight and hotel searches on the search engine Kayak and restaurant data from the online restaurant reservation service, OpenTable.

A Little History on the Virginia Hotel

Originally known as the Ebbitt House, the Virginia Hotel was one of the first hotels to be rebuilt on Jackson Street after the Great Fire of 1878 destroyed 35 acres of Cape May.

A 2017 article in Boxer Brand recalls the transformation of the Virginia Hotel in the 1980s.

“Before its owner, Curtis Bashaw and his family, bought it in 1986, the property had been through a lot,” says Patrick DeLaney, restaurant manager of the Ebbitt Room Restaurant in the hotel. “It was a rooming house at one point, and a school dormitory at another, before it was actually condemned in the 1980s.”

"Bashaw was rejected six times for a bank loan, and the cost of restoring the property was staggering. For example, the property has original stained-glass windows dating back to 1879. Rather than replace them, they were fully restored. Those windows have become a centerpiece in the hotel."

“That was my first property, so it was a real learning experience,”  Bashaw told South Jersey Magazine in 2012.

The hotel led to the creation of Cape Resorts, with properties including Congress Hall, Sandpiper Beach Club, Star Inn, Beach Shack, and a 62-acre farm in West Cape May called Beach Plum Farm.

The Ebbitt Room

Known for its innovative cuisine, attentive service, and stylish, casual ambiance, the Ebbitt Room follows a farm-to-table, farm-to-glass dining philosophy.

Here's how The Ebbitt Room is described on OpenTable.

The Ebbitt Room serves inventive contemporary American cuisine with a focus on farm-to-table dining, with ingredients grown from our very own Beach Plum Farm.

In addition to its regular a la carte menu, The Ebbitt Room offers nightly prix fixe menus showcasing the best of what each season has to offer. The bar serves small plates nightly. The wine list, the recipient of numerous Wine Spectator awards, features selections from all the major wine regions of the world.

Enjoy a cocktail on the wraparound porch or in the lounge, with live piano music on weekend evenings. Then get ready for a delicious dinner at a candlelit table in the dining room or out in the garden..

The Ebbitt Room's wonderful deviled eggs or the tomato & burrata salad are tasty ways to start your meal.

Main course favorites include trout, rack of lamb, scallops, New York Strip, and roasted chicken.  And, don't miss the Mexican street corn.

Yummy desserts include sorbets, doughnuts and tortes

The service is top notch -- friendly, knowledgeable, and attentive.

All of which helped make the Ebbitt Room in the Virginia Hotel, New Jersey's only inclusion on the nation's top 100 hotel restaurants, according to OpenTable and Kayak.