Sea Isle City's Center of Summer Has Quietly Moved Sixteen Blocks North
August 27, 2026
August 27, 2026
For more than two decades, if you wanted to know where Sea Isle City's summer actually lived, you walked to 59th Street and Pleasure Avenue and looked for the line. That's where Tim McNamara has run Bubba Dogs since 2004, the cart that's fed generations of beachgoers coming off the sand, and where a Navy veteran turned high school teacher built something closer to a shore institution than a hot dog stand.
This summer, for the first time in a quarter century, that isn't the only address that matters. Walk sixteen blocks north to the Promenade near 42nd and 43rd, and you'll find a new Bubba Dogs storefront doing brisk business next to a sandwich shop that didn't exist a year ago and already has an Eagles legend's photo taped up near the register. The two biggest food stories in Sea Isle City this season didn't happen at opposite ends of the island. They happened within a few blocks of each other, on the same stretch that also happens to host the town's busiest weekly calendar. That's not a coincidence worth skimming past. It's a shift in where the island actually gathers.
Steve's Grilled Cheese held down 27 JFK Boulevard for more than a decade, long enough to become the kind of address regulars gave directions by. For the 2026 season, that spot belongs to Johnny Cutlets, a sandwich shop built around stuffing steak, roast pork, meatballs, and breaded chicken cutlets into long, chewy rolls. The Philadelphia Inquirer sent a photographer down in June to shoot the shop's namesake sandwich, a chicken cutlet layered with provolone, broccoli rabe, and long hot peppers, and gave the new spot a real review rather than a passing mention.
The grand opening over Memorial Day Weekend got an assist nobody could have planned for. Jason Kelce stopped by, posed for a photo with the owner, and turned a new sandwich counter into a topic of conversation up and down the shore before most visitors had even unpacked their beach chairs for the season. Whatever you think about celebrity visits as a measure of anything, the practical effect was real: a brand-new business on a block that had just lost a decade-old tenant got instant, island-wide attention.
Bubba Dogs' story is longer and more personal. Tim McNamara opened the original cart on 66th Street on Memorial Day Weekend in 2002, moved it to 59th Street two years later, and has run it there every summer since, weather permitting, through Labor Day. McNamara spent twenty years as a Navy lieutenant commander before starting the business, and he still teaches personal finance at La Salle College High School the rest of the year, a detail he apparently works into his own lesson plans. All three of his children have worked the cart at one point or another. Jason Kelce has a hot dog named after him on the menu and has stopped by more than once, which tells you something about how long this particular shore relationship has been building, separate from anything happening at Johnny Cutlets.
For 2026, McNamara took the step he says he'd wanted to take for years: a permanent storefront on the Promenade, at 11 43rd Street, right between 42nd and 43rd, next door to Boardwalk Casino Arcade and Zio Niccolo Pizza. He's calling it Bubba Dogs Snack Shack, and he's kept the 59th Street cart running alongside it rather than replacing it. In his own words, explaining the decision:
"The decision to open our own storefront on the Promenade really came from a combination of opportunity and the desire to grow the Bubba Dogs concept. For many years, we operated at 59th Street and built a great following there, but we always believed there was potential to expand what we offer and create a more permanent space for the business."
The name change matters more than it might seem. A cart called Bubba Dogs sells hot dogs. A Snack Shack sells hot dogs plus whatever else fits a boardwalk-style menu, which is McNamara's explicit plan: keep the classic dog, add more quick bites and drinks suited to a beach day or an evening walk through town. That's a business built for foot traffic, not just beach traffic, and foot traffic is exactly what the Promenade near Excursion Park generates every night of the week.
Most of Sea Isle City's Jason Kelce connections have nothing to do with this particular stretch of the island. He's had a hot dog named after him at the original Bubba Dogs cart on 59th Street for years, and he's become an investor in Hank Sauce, a restaurant between 86th and 87th streets, both addresses well outside the corridor this piece is tracking. Which makes it more notable, not less, that the single Kelce appearance everyone in South Jersey actually talked about this season happened at Johnny Cutlets on JFK Boulevard, a short walk from Excursion Park. Kelce's footprint in this town has always run the length of the island. This year, the moment that traveled furthest happened in the same handful of blocks as everything else in this story.
Excursion Park, at JFK Boulevard and Pleasure Avenue, sits right in the middle of everything this piece has been tracking, and it runs a heavier weekly schedule than almost anywhere else in town. The 2026 season includes:
Layer the Beach Bards poetry and prose series on top of that, a reading night sponsored by the Cape May County Library system and coordinated by local poet Antoinette L. Braca, and you have a park that's doing something almost every night of the week without any of it feeling like an event you have to plan a trip around. Add the Chamber of Commerce's Restaurant Weekend, which drew 26 participating restaurants for exclusive specials the first weekend of June this year, and you can see the pattern: the organizations shaping Sea Isle City's public calendar keep pointing toward the same handful of blocks.
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only track one story at a time. Fifty-ninth Street, home to the original Bubba Dogs cart, sits south of Excursion Park, close to the beach entrance it's served for two decades. Forty-third Street, home to the new Snack Shack and Johnny Cutlets, and a short walk from Excursion Park, sits sixteen blocks north. That's not a small distance on an island where most errands happen on foot or by bike. For years, the safe assumption about Sea Isle City's rhythm was that the 59th Street beach crowd stayed close to 59th Street, and the Promenade handled everyone else. This summer, the two biggest food expansions on the island both bet on the Promenade end, and both bets are already paying off in foot traffic and local buzz.
None of this means 59th Street is fading. McNamara didn't close the original cart. He added to it. But when a twenty-five-year business decides its next chapter belongs sixteen blocks away, and a Philadelphia food writer drives down to review a sandwich shop that opened four months earlier, it's worth noticing where the island's energy is actually pointing this year, not where it's always pointed by habit.
If you're spending your evenings walking that stretch between Excursion Park and the Promenade this month, you're not imagining that it feels busier than it used to. It is.
Whether you're a longtime Sea Isle City family thinking about what's next for your own place on the island, or you're simply the kind of person who wants a local's read on how a shore town actually changes year to year, that's the sort of detail worth having someone in your corner who tracks. If a valuation, a market question, or a conversation about your own Jersey Cape property ever crosses your mind, Teresa Campama is glad to talk it through, no obligation attached.
Stay up to date on the latest real estate trends.
Get assistance in determining current property value, crafting a competitive offer, writing and negotiating a contract, and much more. Contact me today.