Riding the Wave
Riding the Wave
Written by Kristen Hampshire | Photography by Pamela Aquilani
Come as you are. Shorts and flip-flops are just fine. Grab a burger and a margarita. Order tacos after a day on the beach. Bring the kids. If the dog is along, there’s a spot on the outdoor patio—and, with permission, even a slice of bacon waiting.
Longboard Café owner Rick Vach wouldn’t have it any other way.
“We’ve got a beach crowd, and this is a beach place,” he says.
But casual doesn’t mean ordinary.
Behind Longboard Café’s easygoing surf-inspired atmosphere is a kitchen serving homemade sauces and dressings, fresh seafood, premium burgers, entrée-sized salads and a dinner menu that stretches from Wagyu steak to crispy duck, seafood pasta and a changing fresh catch.
Rick has a phrase for the balance: “Casual dining, refined.”
It wasn’t necessarily the restaurant he expected to create when Longboard opened at 67th Street in Ocean City in 2013.
“It was originally going to be a surfer-rat place—burgers, tacos, margaritas,” Rick says.
Then he saw the finished space.
The buildout was more polished than he had envisioned. So Rick began thinking bigger about the food, adding salads and eventually dinner entrées. Longboard has continued evolving ever since, including an expansion into the neighboring storefront three years ago and an upgraded enclosure that allows its outdoor dining area to be used year-round.
The restaurant now seats about 175, but its original personality remains intact.
“We’re not doing foie gras and caviar,” Rick says. “We’re doing good American food with a Mexican hint to it.”
Full-On Flavor
Rick spent years living in San Diego, and that Baja influence naturally works its way through Longboard’s menu. The restaurant’s range is part of its appeal. “You’ve got to play to your crowd,” he says.
At Longboard, that means offering plenty of reasons to return.
There are eight burgers, including the signature Longboard burger layered with spicy-sweet bacon, provolone, horseradish crema, red onion and a fried egg. The crabby patty burger is topped with lump crabmeat and crab imperial sauce.
Baja fish tacos remain a top seller, while the new smash burger taco—Longboard’s taco take on a classic fast-food burger—has quickly climbed the ranks.
Then there are the dishes that have developed followings of their own.
Longboard’s wings have won every wing competition the restaurant has entered, Rick says. The signature version starts with large chicken wings that are fried and tossed in a soy-based house sauce made from roughly 15 ingredients, then finished with bacon dust and crumbled blue cheese.
The famous wrinkled green beans date back to Rick’s Island Time Café days. Deep-fried and tossed in a thick, flavorful house sauce, they have become another Longboard staple.
“Mothers love us because their kids are eating green beans,” Rick jokes. “We sell these by the truckload.”
The sauces behind both dishes have become popular enough to bottle and sell in Longboard’s market, located just off the bar alongside other house-made sauces and dressings, apparel and restaurant merchandise.
Freshness, Rick says, is nonnegotiable.
“I can’t tell you how many food deliveries we get a week,” he says. “All the recipes are house recipes.”
Casual, Elevated, Evolving
Longboard changes its menu twice a year, but Rick has learned to choose carefully.
“We only change five or six things,” he says. “When we take stuff off, people say, ‘Don’t take that off.’ We introduce very few menu items that don’t do well.”
Rather than reinventing Longboard, the team tweaks it.
This approach is reflected in the restaurant itself. Over more than a decade, Longboard has expanded physically, developed a more elevated dinner program and become increasingly reservation-driven—even outside of the summer season.
Meanwhile, what remains the same are the rituals that Longboard regulars love.
Daily happy hour runs from 5 to 6 p.m., with two-for-one cocktails throughout the restaurant rather than only at the bar. Off-season specials give locals another reason to return.
Families are part of the mix, too, thanks to a kids’ menu and playful bibs that read, “Burp’s Up.” And for the dogs, there are “Got Bacon?” bandanas.
At the heart of it all, Rick says, is a staff he considers central to Longboard’s success.
“We have an excellent staff,” he says. “A lot of people have been working with us for many years. We have people who have been with us since the day we opened in 2013.”
The post Riding the Wave first appeared on Coastal Style Magazine.
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