The Knife and Fork Inn

At the corner of Atlantic and Albany avenues, where the Boardwalk district meets the older residential city, there is a building that has been feeding people since nineteen twelve. The Knife and Fork Inn opened that year not as a restaurant open to the public but as a private men's club, founded by a circle of Atlantic City's political figures. Membership was exclusive, the dining rooms curtained for privacy.

Women were not permitted at the bar. They waited in a separate lounge until summoned. The second floor had private dining alcoves.

The third and fourth floors held rooms used for gambling and, according to the accounts that have survived, other activities. During Prohibition, the club kept serving liquor openly, without apparent concern about federal law. The most plausible explanation is that Enoch Johnson was a regular, a man for whom the liquor laws were, in Atlantic City, largely advisory.

By nineteen twenty-seven the building was converted into a restaurant proper, and it has operated as one ever since. The building itself is worth looking at: brick and terracotta, with a corner tower that gives it the profile of a small Flemish civic building transported to the Jersey Shore. Inside, the original woodwork and the pressed tin ceilings have largely been preserved.

It is the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Atlantic City. It has outlasted the clubs, the grand hotels, the political machines, and several cycles of boom and bust. The kitchen is still open.