1 of 500: Scenes from a Unique Surf & Turf
By Rob Ascough, Treasurer
“This is one of the 500 best restaurants in the county,” my father would boast every time we pulled into the parking lot. I think the idea of one of our annual traditions in our favorite vacation spot filled him with an immense sense of pride, as if it validated the Wildwoods or announced to the world it belonged on the main stage. I’ve never been able to uncover proof of the claim being true, and definitely never identified who might have made it, but also never had reason for doubt – if my father knew, there was no reason for questioning. Besides, we always had fantastic meals there, and the hour-long waits for a table suggested everyone knew what my father knew: Dinner at Urie’s was an event.
Years ago, I remember Wildwood also being home to Urie’s Surf & Turf, although you’ll have to excuse me if the actual name of the place escapes my fading memory. We never went there, likely because the “real” Urie’s restaurant (as we called it; the one that still stands to this day at the foot of the George Redding Bridge) always offered food in both the surf and turf varieties, meaning everyone in the family could get whatever it was they desired. It was the flounder that swam in the dreams of me and my father, possibly leaving behind an actual trail of breadcrumbs – it never tasted as good as it did while on summer vacation, and never as good as it tasted at Urie’s.
Because Urie’s has been an enormous place since before I can remember, it was often a challenge finding a place to park. My father would let my mother out at the front door so she could put our name on the waiting list while he drove up and down the rows of parked cars, the sound of crushed seashells crunching beneath the yacht-sized family station wagon’s tires forever etched into my brain like zeros and ones onto a compact disc (remember those?). We might as well have moored the Ascough vessel somewhere on the perimeter of Grassy Sound by the time we found something.
Today, the space to the left of the main entrance to the building is a small arcade; years ago it was a gift shop, and before that the gift shop was a trailer-like structure in the middle of the parking lot (I can’t recall what the more-recent gift shop was before it was a gift shop.) We’d find my mother there after having given the hostess our information, and it seemed she didn’t leave until she examined every single sea-worthy item for sale. After a few minutes, me and my brother would get bored and walk along the water between Urie’s and the (then) newly-constructed Boathouse Restaurant with my father close behind, reminding us not to venture onto the dock and board anything. It was difficult to resist – boats were always sitting there unattended with nothing to prevent curious children from satisfying their newly-discovered maritime tendencies. That, and we were getting impatient. The long wait for a table at Urie’s meant a night on the boardwalk wasn’t on the horizon.
“Relax, it’s one of the 500 best restaurants in the country,” my father reminded.
Eventually our name would be called and we’d get seated, always in the back dining room at a table adjacent to the floor-to-ceiling netting with carved wooden seagulls attached to it. It was comfortable, like a second home, although we wondered why we were never seated elsewhere inside the gigantic catacomb-like structure. My father has always suspected restaurants set aside sections for families so the ones with unruly kids didn’t disturb other guests without kids. Looking back, I wonder if the back room in Urie’s was a non-smoking section. Hard to believe but when I was a kid (not too, too long ago) restaurants had smoking and non-smoking sections, and despite my mother being a smoker she never lit up a cigarette at the dinner table and hated when others did.
A meal at Urie’s today feels much like the ones we used to enjoy despite the wooden seagulls having flown off, perhaps in search of the gift shop that’s no longer filled to the brim with seashore-themed tchotchke. The salad comes in bowls for the entire table, the butter for the bread remains perfect little individually-wrapped rectangles, and golden brown mozzarella sticks and fried flounder can all be enjoyed against a backdrop of boat traffic on the waterway in the near distance while a band performs on the tropical-themed outdoor patio. Urie’s, like most things in the Wildwoods, has changed throughout the years (not always for the better, but this isn’t the proper venue for that kind of conversation.) Still, when it comes to memories, it’s a delightful beast – a 500-pound beast, in fact.
“It used to be one of the 500 best restaurants in the country,” my father will recite to this day.
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