Year-round restaurants fill Ocean City's plate

Brian and Lisa Bolter, restaurateurs from Annapolis, plan to open a wine bar and a restaurant at 48th Street and Coastal Highway in Ocean City — and keep them open for 12 months a year.

“We have seen, like others have, the continued growing demand for both elevated dining and drinking experiences and year-round destinations," Brian Bolter said.

There was a time when that idea — year-round dining service — would have been revolutionary in this resort community. Now, so many restaurants keep their kitchens humming that some owners have begun to wonder whether the market is sated, even as offseason demand continues to grow.

Monday was Labor Day, the closing ceremony to Ocean City's tourism season. Now is the winter of restaurant owners' discontent. Or the fall.

One of the deans of the resort's restaurant scene, the Bonfire Restaurant, open since 1973, has found itself staying closed for longer stretches in recent years during the dregs of December and January.

General Manager Rick Weber describes the seafood buffet-centered establishment as an "aircraft carrier," which requires extensive logistics and cost to operate even during the best of times.

“It just became too much. It’s just that there’s nobody here," said Weber, adding that the influx of dining choices in West Ocean City and Ocean Pines has only pinched Bonfire's bottom line further.

In an interview on the Thursday before Labor Day, Madlyn "Maddy" Carder, co-owner of BJ's on the Water, said she was dreading the change in seasons.

More:Fresh off the boat: Where to get local seafood on Delmarva

“We need the summer as long as we have it. We like extending our summer for as long as we can," Carder said.

As it approaches its 40th anniversary, the 75th Street restaurant remains open all year, save for Christmas Eve and Christmas. When it opened, there were maybe six or seven other restaurants for locals and offseason visitors to patronize, she recalled.

Of the 107 places to eat listed on the Ocean City Hotel-Motel-Restaurant Association's website, 59 are currently designated as being open year-round. (That figure likely includes many places that close for periods, perhaps as much as a month, during the offseason, the association says.)

“I feel the pie gets sliced up a little smaller every time another place opens," Carder said.

In the summer, BJ's might serve as many as 700 meals on a given evening. In the winter, that number drops to as few as 50, she said.

“We gut it out because we want to keep our employees employed," she said.

George Ojie-Ahamiojie teaches courses in managing hotels and restaurants at Wor-Wic Community College. He is a former guest service manager at Walt Disney World Resort and hospitality instructor at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts' campus in Orlando, Florida.

To survive the cold, lean times, he recommends that restaurants turn up the heat on their marketing efforts and target convention traffic and events such as the Winterfest of Lights.

“Other than that, they pretty much have the locals," he said, and that market is “already saturated with different types of restaurants. In my opinion, the market might be very hard to break through.” 

Carder said she tries to entice repeat business among locals during the offseason with half-price specials starting in October. She also makes sure that a live band greets her guests at least four days a week, despite the expense.

MORE:Ocean City businesses optimistic for Labor Day — if the weather holds

Many restaurants brave the long financial winter by reducing their days of operation to just a handful per week, usually to Thursday-Sunday. 

At Longboard Cafe on 67th Street, however, owner Rick Vach is betting on longer hours for success.

When the restaurant opened in June 2013, it shut its doors for three months during the offseason. Then, Vach started experimenting. The following winter, he closed two months. Then three weeks.

This offseason will be his first welcoming diners year-round. 

“It was sort of victory by attrition because there are not so many places to go to in the wintertime because they’re closed," Vach said. 

Unlike in the past, Longboard will be open on Mondays as well. Vach said he figures there's interest because he used to find up to a dozen messages on his answering machine on Tuesday mornings from people inquiring whether he was open the previous day.

Still, he added: “I don’t know if there’s anybody who doesn’t lose money over the winter months.” 

Like Bonfire, he hopes that the steadier flow of paychecks encourages staff members to stay onboard.

Brian Bolter is betting on finding a niche in the market to entice patrons throughout the year. He is pitching Red Red Wine Bar and Dry 85 in the middle ground between Ocean City's pub grub-infused sports bars and its white table cloth-draped upscale restaurants.

A former TV news anchor in Washington D.C., he made a mid-career swerve into the hospitality business a few years ago. 

“As you’ve seen, the internet has wreaked havoc on both newspaper and television news. There are only four jobs in any town I’d be qualified to do. If things didn’t work out, I’d end up moving to Seattle," he said.

And he had no interest in uprooting his family anytime soon. So, he opened the first Red Red Wine Bar on Annapolis' Main Street in July 2011. Buoyed by its success, he launched the restaurant Dry 85 a few doors down three years later.

He and Lisa became familiar with the Ocean City market because they owned a second home in Bishopville. They bought a concrete pad in front of the Gateway Grand condominium and began construction on the 4,600 square-foot building in July.

Dry 85 will occupy a slight majority of the space, but both will share the same back of the house facilities, he said. 

Why open in November? It could actually be to both restaurants' advantage come next summer, Bolter said. 

“We want to make sure we’re hitting on all cylinders when the season comes along," he said.

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