This summer, however, I also found myself drawn back to one of the Shore's oldest, most unfashionable institutions - venerable Busch's in Sea Isle City, founded in 1882 - for the purpose of a farewell meal. After five generations in the same family, Busch's 128th season will be the final call for this giant fish house. And while the famously decadent she-crab soup was as good as ever - luxuriously creamy and jeweled with crab - it was also laced with bittersweet.
It's like a bad Jersey Shore remix of the Joni Mitchell song where, instead of paving paradise to put up a parking lot, the old seafood palace is getting mowed down for condos and mixed-use retail. Owner Al Schettig, who's finally pulling the plug, says it was no longer feasible to maintain the aging, block-long behemoth on a few months of seasonal business. He has promised a new chapter for Busch's, with plans for a take-out market across the street.
But as the ebullient Schettig recently worked a packed dining room of silver-haired regulars in his chef whites, pumping hands and trading stories, one could feel a sense of melancholy growing as a century-and-a-quarter's worth of history closes in.
"I feel the ghosts move me when I walk around - I feel it in my stomach," concedes Schettig. "I tell [the guests] thank you, then have to walk away before I start to cry."
