A story of perseverance at McGlade’s Backstreet Café
When Theresa Ann McGlade was 9 years old, her father, Peter, died. Theresa was the youngest of 10 children growing up in the Camden County city of Gloucester.
“He was a postmaster, and when he died, my mom kind of got everyone together and said nothing was going to change in our lives except the fact that my father wouldn’t be there anymore,” Theresa said. “My mom was hardly a stay-at-home mom, but here we were, the oldest child had just graduated college, I am in fourth grade, and our father’s gone. It wasn’t going to be easy.”
How her mother worked and raised the family, yet still managed to have home-cooked sit-down meals for her children is something that is ingrained in Theresa.
“She was in real estate, and got her own brokerage, and she really turned it on. She cooked every night like every other mother. She loved to cook,” she said.
As the family grew and the older children married and began raising their own children, the time together began to wane. That didn’t stop the McGlade matriarch.
She started the Mansion House in Gloucester City back when there used to be a racetrack there, and then she bought real estate at the shore so the family could reunite during the summer.
“When I was in high school,” Theresa said, “we bought a house where Mangia Mangia is now, and it was our summer house. We ran McGlade’s Mansion House, and we lived upstairs. We first had a place in Ocean City, a little clam bar, called Holy Mackerel 2. That’s where the idea started to have a place at the shore so she could see her kids and her grandkids.”
Theresa admired her mom’s work ethic, and adopted it. She graduated from Gloucester Catholic High School, where she became a 1,000-point scorer for the storied program there. She was also inducted into the South Jersey Hall of Fame for her career, which included a full athletic scholarship to San Diego State University.
She graduated college in 1984 and that’s when mother McGlade, Theresa Marie, opened McGlade’s on the Pier in Cape May, and talked another of her children, Mickey, a former high school and college basketball coach, to manage it.
“It was just a little seasonal place we rented behind Morrow’s Nut House,” Theresa said.
For years Theresa heard her mom tell her she was a born cook and should go to school to learn more about the culinary arts.
“But I was a basketball player, and was about to become a coach,” she said.
She was working at a French restaurant in Atlantic City when the chef/owner also told her she was a natural, and that she should attended the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), in Hyde Park, N.Y.
“I had just graduated college where I went for free, and now I was supposed to go to college all over again and go into debt to do it? No way,” she said.
“He said, ‘You have to. You’re a natural.’ ”
So she went through the application process, which CIA graduates will tell you, is not a simple one.
“It was harder than some final exams I had taken,” Theresa said.
And then her mom died.
“You have to understand, my mother was really the key person in this family, the driving force,” she said.
The day after her mom passed away, someone from CIA called to tell her she had been accepted.
“I thought it was an omen. I just had to go,” she said, and so she did. She attended classes Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. until 2 p.m., and worked Wednesday to Sunday cooking from 3 to 11 p.m. for $6 an hour.
She graduated CIA in 1988, but her brother sold the McGlade Mansion House a few months earlier. So she approached Mickey about doing a dinner shift at McGlade’s on the Pier.
“That’s how dinners got started there,” she said.
She looked into buying her own place, but banks told her she needed a decade of experience in the corporate world before they would lend her a quarter-million dollars.
“So I took a job with Stouffers and moved to Atlanta in 1998, and then moved to Ruby Tuesdays after two or three years with Stouffers. In 1997, my husband (Tony Lombardi) and I were tired of the rat race in Atlanta. All the money we were making went to the car payments, the mortgage, so we decided to live a simpler life. We made a plan to move back to Cape May,” she said.
When they arrived back on the Cape, Theresa called Mickey to tell her they were back.
“Great,” Mickey said, “you’re now the night chef.”
In 1999, she and Tony bought the former Taste Buds Café and went into business for themselves.
“There was no cool, little, casual place for a couple to go out and eat for 40 bucks. Everywhere you went you’d drop 100 dollars and not ever order a bottle of wine,” she said. “What Cape May needed was an affordable little place to go for good food. That’s how we wound up here.”
“Here” is McGlade’s Backstreet Café, an “inconveniently located” cool little bistro on Park Boulevard between West Perry and Elmira, north of the CVS.
“Inconveniently located and conveniently priced” reads the Backstreet Café menu, taking a good-natured poke at their unusual spot in an antiquated strip mall. But once inside the disappointing exterior, the dining room is pop-culture cool, with different colored tablecloths and plates on every table. Tony’s celebrity caricatures adorn two of the walls (they used to fill the restaurant, but customers began buying them up), and on this evening, he’s in charge of lighting the tea lights on another wall.
“We added the candles this year, and they’ve added to the room. My husband painted like 30 caricatures of celebrities two years ago. We had David Letterman, Rod Stewart, David Bowie…we decided to put them up on the walls and, lo and behold, we wound up selling most of them,” Theresa said.
As the room has evolved, so has the menu.
“We definitely kicked it up a notch this year. The first year we only had one appetizer, two salads and six entrées, and the same was true for the lunch menu,” she said.
Now there are three appetizers, two soups, three salads and nine entrées on the menu. Off the menu are nightly specials that include five appetizers and five entrées. People have noticed.
“From what everyone is saying about this being a down summer and the weather being off, this is by far our best year, and with that in mind we’re well on our way to having something here,” Theresa said, smiling at the achievement.
“The first couple of years we lived off our regulars. Now, my husband, who makes sure everything is perfect in the front of the house, said he’s seeing new faces all the time. Last night, we did 45 dinners and he said he only recognized three tables. For us, that’s a real big step. Mom must be proud.”
Rob Seitzinger can
be e-mailed at
seitz@catamaranmedia.com
or you can comment on this story by calling 624-8900, ext. 250.
McGlade’s Backstreet Café
600 Park Blvd.
West Cape May
884-7660
ON THE MENU
Hours: Lunch daily
(closed Tuesday) from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.; dinner daily (closed Tuesday)
from 5 p.m. Breakfast is served Saturday and Sunday only beginning at 9
a.m.
Chef’s Favorites:
Lunch—Spinach and Artichoke Dip (with fried pita chips, $5.95); Chicken
Quesadilla ($6.95); Warm Goat Cheese Salad ($7); Wraps (chicken salad,
buffalo chicken and crunchy fish, $6.50 to $6.95); Baskets (crab cake,
chicken finger, fish, $6.95 to $8.50)
Dinner--Rack of Lamb
(topped with a Dijon mustard sauce and seasoned bread crumbs with mashed
potatoes, $16.95); Pan-Fried Crab Cakes (served with seafood sauce with
mashed potatoes, $17.95); Grilled Salmon (served with honey maple glaze
and rice, $15.95); Pan-Fried Fish (over mashed potatoes in a lemon caper
sauce); Pasta Carbonara (pasta with egg, bacon, parsley, white wine and
parmesan, $11.95, add chicken $3, add shrimp $6).
Desserts—Key Lime
Pie; Crunchy Peanut Butter Pie; Bananas Foster (sautéed in butter, brown
sugar, cinnamon and rum over vanilla ice cream topped with whipped
cream); Chocolate Bread Pudding (topped with cinnamon, whipped cream,
caramel and fudge sauce); Old Fashioned Bourbon Raisin Bread Pudding
(topped with bourbon sauce and whipped cream).
BYOB
Capacity: 40
Plenty of free
parking
Reservations accepted
for parties of six or more.
Major credit cards
accepted.
Rob Seitzinger can be e-mailed
at seitz[at]catamaranmedia.com or you can comment on this story by
calling 624-8900, ext. 250.
Check out his Cape Cuisine food blog