For years, a Margate summer evening had a default setting: walk Ventnor Avenue, grab something to eat, watch the boardwalk crowd thin out as the sun drops. This August, that default has shifted two blocks west. The restaurant that took five years to finish, the coffee shop that just opened its second location, and the town's signature August event have all landed on the same short stretch of Amherst Avenue, along the back bay. If you've been going about your usual routine, you may not have clocked how much of what's new in Margate this season is happening somewhere you don't usually look.
That's not a marketing observation. It's a pattern you can trace address by address.
Two Blocks Of Amherst Avenue, Two Big Reopenings
The anchor is Lamberti's Restaurant & Sunset Marina at 9707 Amherst Avenue, which finally reopened this year after a construction saga that started back in 2019. The rebuild doubled the footprint of the original restaurant into a two-story structure with a 30-seat bar, an open kitchen, and an outdoor deck facing the water, according to reporting from Downbeach.com. The marina side didn't shrink to make room for the dining room. Lamberti's now operates 100 boat slips plus another 100 jet ski slips, and the restaurant is open year-round for the first time. A local plumbing contractor who worked the job put it plainly:
"It's not like the average place you can find at the shore."
That's not a small claim for a town with no shortage of shore restaurants. What makes it worth noting for a resident, rather than a tourist, is what showed up around it.
A few blocks up the same street, BayBuzz opened a coffee shop at 9511 Amherst Avenue this year, with a sister location on Dorset Avenue in Ventnor. That's the kind of small, unglamorous opening that rarely makes news on its own. But paired with Lamberti's, it means the bay side of town now has both an all-day coffee stop and a destination restaurant within a couple of blocks of each other, something that section of Amherst Avenue hasn't had in the same combination before.
The Rest Of The Season's New Names
Lamberti's and BayBuzz aren't the only additions. This summer's roundup from Downbeach Buzz also flags a handful of other names worth knowing if you haven't been paying close attention to what's turned over:
- Fish House Margate, a locally owned seafood spot serving fresh catches and the kind of casual, family-friendly menu that fills the gap between a sit-down dinner and a boardwalk snack.
- Juniors Doughnuts and Dogs, which is technically a return rather than a debut. The original owners ran a bayside doughnut shop from 2002 until they sold it in 2015. After a decade away, they found a new spot this past February, a former residence they've converted, and brought the shop back.
- BayBuzz, already mentioned above, now running two locations across the Margate-Ventnor line.
None of these are headline-grabbing openings on their own. Together, they describe a season where more of what's new in town is food and coffee rather than retail, and more of it sits closer to the bay than the ocean.
The Duck Derby Settled In At Scott's Dock
The clearest sign that the bay side has become the town's social center this year is the Margate Duck Derby, which the Margate Business Association is hosting on Sunday, August 23, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Activities start at the top of the hour with the derby itself running around 11:30, staged at Amherst Avenue and the bay at Washington Avenue, right in the same stretch as Lamberti's and BayBuzz. The event is sponsored by Margate Gardens Wine & Spirits and run in partnership with Scott's Dock, according to Shore Local's coverage published earlier this month.
If you want in, tickets are five dollars each and sold at a specific, short list of places, all clustered around the bay corridor:
- Margate Gardens Wine & Spirits
- The Other Lucy Beach Grille
- Scott's Dock
- Thrilling Thursdays (see below)
- The Margate Community Farmers Market
Ticket sales close on Thursday, August 20, three days before race day, and they are not sold at the event itself. As Shore Local put it, this one's built for spectators as much as competitors:
"Come for your ducks, stay for the fun."
Top finishers win Visa gift cards, with the top prize at $1,000, but the actual draw for most residents is the same as it's always been: an excuse to stand on the Washington Avenue pier on a Sunday morning and watch a few hundred rubber ducks get herded toward a finish line by kayakers.
Thrilling Thursdays Still Belongs To The Ocean Side
None of this means the ocean side of town has gone quiet. The Margate Business Association's Thrilling Thursdays series, which pairs the Steve & Cookie's Farmers Market from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m. with a free movie on the beach behind the Bloom Pavilion between Granville and Huntington Avenues, runs through August 27 this year with no scheduled rain dates. That gives you three Thursdays left: August 13, August 20, and the closing night on August 27. Pre-movie activities start at 6:30 p.m., with the film itself around 7.
That split is the useful part. Margate's daytime and early-evening family programming, the farmers market and the beach movies, still runs on the ocean side of town, the way it always has. What's changed is where the newer, later, adult-oriented energy has landed. If your August habits have you defaulting to Ventnor Avenue or the boardwalk after dinner, you're missing the stretch of Amherst Avenue where most of this year's actual investment showed up.
Planning The Rest Of Your August
With three Thursdays and one Sunday left on the calendar, the sequence for the rest of the month is straightforward:
- August 13 and 20 — Farmers market at Steve & Cookie's in the morning, free movie behind the Bloom Pavilion in the evening. August 20 is also your last day to buy Duck Derby tickets.
- August 23 — Duck Derby at Amherst and Washington, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., presented by the Margate Business Association and sponsored by Margate Gardens Wine & Spirits.
- August 27 — The final Thrilling Thursdays of the season.
Whether or not you make it to the derby, it's worth a slow walk down Amherst Avenue sometime this month, past Lamberti's rebuilt deck, past the new BayBuzz counter, down toward Scott's Dock. A year ago, that stretch was mostly a place to park a boat. This August, it's where a meaningful share of Margate's new energy actually lives.
If watching Margate's bay side fill in this year has you thinking differently about your own property here, whether that's what it might be worth now or what it could support as a rental, Eric Millstein Properties has spent three generations tracking exactly this kind of shift on Absecon Island. Let's Connect — Get Your Home Valuation.
