Still cooking

When Brent Poffenberger and his three partners established their first Cottage Café restaurant in Ocean City, Md., in 1993, the focus behind the business was a simple philosophy Poffenberger calls “the Cottage promise.” That promise focuses on superior customer service, high-quality food and affordable prices.
Coastal Point • M. PATRICIA TITUS:
Brent Poffenberger is ready to greet guests at the Coattage Café.
More than 10 years later, the Cottage Café in Bethany Beach continues to flourish as one of the area’s most popular casual-dining establishments. The menu features a selection of what Poffenberger terms “comfort food,” based on home cooking and updated in the hands of Cordon Bleu-trained chef George “Geo” Johnson.

While the Cottage’s award-winning crabcakes are always a favorite on the menu, Poffenberger said the year-round top-seller is the restaurant’s pot roast — an old-fashioned classic, slow-cooked overnight in special ovens that make use of low, moist heat.

“When people haven’t tried it before, they say, ‘I can’t believe I’ve been missing this for so long,’” Poffenberger said of the pot roast.

Seafood is always popular at the restaurant, he added, since it’s the signature food of the shore — and doubly so during the summertime. But the Cottage Café takes that one step further under Johnson, winning a national award from Old Bay Spices for his crab-a-bella: a portabella mushroom, broiled and stuffed with spinach and crab, topped with creamy imperial sauce. Poffenberger said the dish has proven very popular.

The restaurant’s crab soup is also a contest winner, as is Johnson’s chili — a three-time top contender in the area’s annual chili cook-off. And those famous crabcakes are labeled “the best” by the Cottage staff, simply because they were voted the best in competition during the 2001 Delaware Coast Day festival in Lewes.

Beyond the stars of the menu, Poffenberger noted that his goal is to make as much of the restaurant’s offerings from scratch as possible. “Very little is out of the box here,” he said.

The dedication to quality, home-cooking-style food was a choice Poffenberger made at the start. “It was clear that there were a lot of retirees moving to the area. If we were going to stay open year-round, we knew we had to appeal to seniors,” he said.

They appreciate the food style, its quality and the restaurant’s service, he noted. Most of the restaurants open when the Cottage Café was first started, Poffenberger added, were focused on a “seasonal mentality,” trying to get diners in and out quickly without a high priority on training, service or food quality.

In contrast, the signature Cottage Café service involves a six-hour training session for every employee at the restaurant, and Poffenberger trains them all personally. He spends three hours of that training just on the “Cottage promise.”

The promise itself centers on how to treat people — particularly the customers — as well as on a philosophy of real teamwork.

The goal for a Cottage employee, he said, is to be a friendly, efficient server with more than enough knowledge of the restaurant’s menu to answer questions and make recommendations to the customer.

Poffenberger said he also focuses on training his managers — “team leaders” — in how to interview prospective employees, so as to best identify those who genuinely like people, have a positive outlook and want to function as part of the Cottage team.

While the occasional hire still doesn’t work out, Poffenberger said, the core group of people who operate the restaurant continues to draw those who make a contribution to the team.

Poffenberger’s business philosophy wasn’t born from simple entrepreneurship. He and partner Tom Neville were students in hotel, motel and restaurant management at Shepherd College in Shepherdstown, W. Va.

The two were also members of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity, where they met Geoff Clopton, who also became one of the original four partners. Closing out the group was Poffenberger’s friend from a previous restaurant job, Howard Hopkins.

The decision to go into restaurant management was an easy one for Poffenberger. He had an uncle in the restaurant business in Atlanta. “He was a fun-loving guy, and I knew I wanted to enter that business,” he recalled.

While Neville finished his formal education, Poffenberger pursued real-world restaurant experience. “You can’t just open a restaurant right out of college,” he said. And when the time came for the group to open their own venture, Poffenberger knew exactly where he wanted to head.

“I always wanted to live at the beach. I surf. I love the ocean. I don’t like to wear shoes,” he explained with a laugh.

The partners identified a niche they believed needed to be filled on the Maryland shore — one for a quality, casual restaurant open year-round. And with financing from Poffenberger’s parents, they opened the Ocean City location.

That first restaurant was such a success in its first year that they expanded with a second location — in the space once occupied by the Pepper Mill in Bethany Beach. Then it was on to Salisbury, with a third location — but one Poffenberger said “never really did that well,” with a low payoff for the extra work and travel involved for the partners. That location was soon closed.

Eventually, two partners shifted into other locations and endeavors, leaving Neville and Poffenberger as the sole owners of the business. (Hopkins is currently starting his own restaurant in Williamsburg, Va., and Neville and Poffenberger are working to support him in that endeavor.)

Unfortunately, in March of 2003, the lease on the original Ocean City location expired. The Cottage Café group simply couldn’t afford to keep renting the location and, unable to find an alterative spot in downtown Ocean City, they decided to shift down to a single location — the one in Bethany Beach.

To this day, customers still ask Poffenberger why they had to close the Ocean City location, wondering whether it wasn’t doing well financially or various and sundry other reasons it might have closed. They also ask if a new Ocean City location is in the cards. Poffenberger said it’s not — at least for the meantime.

“If the right opportunity came up, we would expand. But we’re not actively doing anything right now. This restaurant keeps us busy enough,” he said.

They are indeed busy at the Cottage Café, even during the winter. They cater to that original goal-audience of retirees, as well as the growing year-round population of workers.

Poffenberger said a large degree of the restaurant’s success is due to another element of his philosophy: consistency. Beyond a menu that is built on time-tested favorites with the occasional new offering, the restaurant’s hours also don’t change significantly from season to season, nor from day to day.

The Cottage Café is open seven days a week, serving lunch and dinner. They open every day at 11 a.m. for lunch, shifting to dinner at 4 p.m. Dinner service continues until 9 p.m. on weekdays, until 10 p.m. on weekends. And “light fare,” including sandwiches and salads is served every night until 1 a.m.

Happy-hour runs until 6 p.m. in the bar each night, with reduced drink prices, $3.99 hamburgers, reduced-price appetizers and a $3.99 special. The one concession to changeable hours is for breakfast: brunch is served at 10 a.m. on weekends, while a breakfast buffet rolls out just for the summer.

Poffenberger said the restaurant’s consistent scheduling has meant people return regularly. “Sometimes people simply won’t go eat somewhere if they’re not sure it’s open,” he said.

They’ve been coming in droves to the Bethany Beach location for more than a decade now, often filling the parking lot to capacity and bringing a spill-over crowd onto the outside deck.

But once inside, patrons are treated to a feast for the eyes, as well as their appetites. While Poffenberger’s father continues to help with maintenance and financial issues, his mother is the motivating force behind the decorating.

The restaurant’s major remodeling project was completed in 2000, with the knowledge that the “writing was on the wall” for the closure of the Ocean City location, Poffenberger said. “We basically built a whole new restaurant,” he added.

From there, his mother took over with the decorating, selecting paint colors, accessories and artwork. She continues to select the decorative elements for the restaurant, helping them keep updated with remodeling projects every two to three years. (This year, it will be new carpet and paint.)

Further, Poffenberger’s mother has helped bring in the distinctive artwork displayed on the walls. There, too, is a Poffenberger connection, for his parents began giving their son artwork by Gaithersburg, Md., artist Joseph Craig English when he was still a teenager.

In fact, English was Poffenberger’s Sunday-school teacher as a child. The future restaurateur would receive depictions of his favorite locations from his childhood in Potomac, Md., for birthdays and other special occasions.

When the group first opened the Ocean City restaurant, Poffenberger said, “We were on a shoestring budget.” He brought in some of his personaly collection to fill up the empty space on the walls, and their popularity soon led to an agreement between the Cottage Café and English in which the artwork was given for free display and the restaurant sold the works to interested diners.

Today, that tradition continues, with depictions of the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. area arrayed throughout the restaurant, to the delight of diners and art aficionados, many of whom originate in that area.

(Poffenberger has had to hide his personal favorite artwork, though. English’s depiction of Baltimore Oriole’s Cal Ripken at the plate — baseball, not dining — is just too tempting an acquisition for him to let it out of his sight.)

Another Cottage tradition is in the “table tents,” those little display stands that describe dessert and drink options at many restaurants. But again Poffenberger has made the standard his own.

When the partners first discovered a book titled, “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” they asked (and were granted) permission from the publishers to include some of the included stories in their table tents.

The goal was to give the customers something to read while they waited — if briefly — for their food. Beyond that, the aim was for something to cheer them up, make them smile or at least to give them a sense that their own lives were something to be cherished for their own fortune, Poffenberger said.

That was well before the book became a best-seller and a ubiquitous franchise of titles in the same vein. And when the Cottage Café kept getting requests for copies of the stories in their table tents, they started offering copies of the book for sale as well. At one point, Pofferberger said, the restaurant was the largest independent seller in the United States of that particular title.

Those days are long gone, but the signature table tents remain, personally tended to by Poffenberger. He said he likes to change them gradually, rather than making wholesale changes to the entire repertoire of stories.

That, he said, means diners can sit at a different table on a subsequent visit and have a different selection of stories to read.

In fact, adding new stories is even less work for Poffenberger than it might otherwise be, simply due to the table tents’ popularity. Customers send him new stories all the time, he said, and he keeps a file of them ready for their continued dining entertainment.

It’s one of the small touches that the restaurant’s regulars have come to expect and enjoy, along with those regular hours, homestyle foods and Cottage-promise service. It all keeps them coming back — and in the case of that oft-missed Ocean City location, asking for more.

Poffenberger jokingly said his ability to retain his valued group of employees is from “pure brainwashing,” but the equal luck he has in retaining customers — and building the Cottage Café’s customer base — suggest that there might be something of real value in that “Cottage promise” of his.

Otherwise, it might simply be chalked up to appreciation for a good pot roast and a certain way with crab.