Walk past Cousin's Restaurant & Catering on Asbury Avenue on the wrong Friday night and you might assume it's closed for a private party. The lights are on, the dining room is full, and the door is locked to anyone who isn't on a list. It isn't a party. It's Friday night at Cousin's Dinner Club, and if you've lived in Ocean City long enough, you already know the shorthand: this is one of the few places on the island where the person at the next table might be drinking a glass of cabernet with their veal.
Everyone who lives here knows Ocean City doesn't sell alcohol. What fewer people can explain is why a bottle of wine still shows up on some tables anyway, and how that's been true, on and off, for years, without the town ever reversing its dry-town laws.
A law that's older than the boardwalk's current shape
Ocean City's alcohol ban isn't a modern ordinance dressed up as tradition. Four Methodist ministers, Ezra Lake, James Lake, S. Wesley Lake and William Burrell, founded the Ocean City Association in 1879 with sober living as a founding principle. The city didn't formalize that into law right away. It took until 1909 for Ocean City to pass an ordinance prohibiting the sale and manufacture of alcohol within city limits, and the town has never issued a retail liquor license since.
Here's the detail most visitor guides skip: Ocean City actually allowed BYOB restaurants for a stretch before banning the practice outright in 1984. So the current situation isn't the original rule holding steady. It's a rule that was loosened, then tightened again, then tested by referendum in 2012, when residents were asked whether to bring BYOB back. They said no by a wide margin, 3,132 votes to 1,425, close to 69 percent against.
That should have settled it. It didn't, because the vote banned BYOB. It didn't ban private clubs.
The distinction that keeps a handful of restaurants pouring wine
New Jersey's Alcoholic Beverage Control code allows for a category of private club that can permit alcohol among its own members, as long as the club is organized for pleasure or recreation, doesn't let a private individual profit from its earnings, and doesn't hand out same-night memberships at the door. That's a narrow, specific legal lane, and it's exactly the lane several Ocean City restaurants have built dinner clubs inside.
The restaurant owner's version of the pitch: it's their building, their private event, and their guests choosing to bring their own bottle to what amounts to a members-only dinner. Bill McGinnity, who owns Cousin's and started its dinner club in October 2018, made that case directly to the point where the analogy became his defense at a city council meeting: it's no different than hiring a caterer for a private meal in your own home, just happening inside a restaurant he owns.
The opposing view, from residents like Susan Cracovaner and David Hayes, is that the clubs function as BYOB in every way that matters and that allowing them to multiply quietly undoes what voters decided in 2012. Cracovaner's argument to council leaned on the same code the restaurants cite, pointing out that membership isn't supposed to be sold at the door for a single night, which she argued was happening in practice even if not on paper.
Mayor Jay Gillian's position has stayed consistent: there's been no change to the ordinances banning alcohol sale and consumption in public places, and because the clubs operate inside privately owned buildings, the city has limited ability to intervene even when it disagrees with what's happening. Police have issued summonses to clubs they believed crossed the line, but no citywide crackdown followed.
Where the clubs actually are
If you've wondered whether this is a rumor or a real, joinable thing, it's real, and it's been operating in more or less the same form for years. Here's what currently exists, as of 2026:
| Club | Restaurant | Cost | How it works |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cousin's Dinner Club | Cousin's Restaurant & Catering, 104 Asbury Ave | $65 per year, covers the whole household | Roughly 200 members as of a 2020 count; private club nights on weekends |
| Sunset Dinner Club | Dockside Kitchen, 228 Bay Ave | Issued per party, per year | Membership renews every November 25; reservations run 1.5-hour seatings on the bay |
| Supper Club 1923 | Flanders Hotel's Emily's Ocean Room, 11th Street and the Boardwalk | $100, lifetime family membership | Open Fridays and Saturdays year-round; members can bring up to eight guests per visit |
| Foodie's Dinner Club | Captain Bob's, south end of Ocean City | $10 per year | Running for more than a decade, hosted without a standalone physical location |
The Flanders club is worth a second look because its name carries more history than any other club on this list. It opened inside the hotel in September 2019, borrowing its name from the hotel's own 1923 opening, and grew out of a banquet operation that had already been hosting weddings and events for 15 years. What started as a $75 annual fee with a $25 renewal has since settled into a flat $100 lifetime family membership, a detail confirmed on the club's current membership page. That's a one-time cost, not an annual one, which makes it the cheapest long-run option on this list if you plan to use it more than a couple of times.
Why this still matters if you already live here
None of this is a workaround for tourists passing through for a weekend. It's mostly a resident's tool. The friction dinner clubs solve isn't "how do I get a drink," it's "how do I get a drink without leaving the island every time I want wine with a nice dinner." Somers Point sits just over the 9th Street bridge and has the bars and package stores Ocean City doesn't, but that's a drive, not a walk, and it means someone in the group has to stay sober enough to make the trip back.
A $65 or $100 fee that covers an entire household for a year, or in the Flanders' case, for good, is a small price against the alternative of driving off-island every time you want a glass of wine with your seafood. That's the actual math locals are doing when they join, not the math of getting around the law for sport, but the math of convenience weighed against a short list of very specific costs.
The debate over whether that convenience undermines the town's identity as America's Greatest Family Resort hasn't gone away. Residents pushed for a new referendum as recently as 2020 that would have required roughly 612 signatures, 15 percent of the votes cast in the last Assembly election, to force the question back onto a ballot and close the loophole for good. It didn't happen. The clubs are still open, their websites are current, and their fees are published in plain view in 2026, which tells you which side of that argument has held ground so far.
The takeaway if you've never joined one
If you've lived in Ocean City for a while and never bothered to look into this, the surprise isn't that private dinner clubs exist. It's how ordinary the membership process actually is. There's no vetting committee, no waiting list, no need to know somebody. You fill out a form, pay a modest fee, and you're in a system that's been quietly operating since before most current residents moved in.
Ocean City's dry-town identity isn't changing anytime soon, and the fight over whether these clubs stretch that identity too far isn't over either. But if you've been driving to Somers Point every time you want a glass of wine with dinner, there's a shorter list of options than you probably realized, and most of them cost less than a dinner out somewhere with a full bar.
Whether you're weighing a move to the island or you've called it home for twenty years, understanding the small print of how this town actually works, from its dry-town history to the workarounds that have grown up around it, is part of understanding the place itself. If you ever want to talk through what life on this stretch of the shore actually looks like, day to day, The Anchor Group knows Ocean City block by block, and we're always happy to talk shop about the island, real estate or otherwise.
