Summer House
One of Rehoboth Beach’s longest running restaurants, Summer House is a traditional American restaurant featuring steaks, seafood, pastas, burgers, soups, salads, and sandwiches. Recently renovated and under new management, Summer House still specializes in custom burgers, but chops, seafood, and sandwiches round-out a high-end Irish pub-inspired menu. Avoid the chicken pot pie, as it is soupy and under-cooked, and the steaks, while decent for a pub, are not steakhouse quality. Summer House presents a long winding bar in the main restaurant, a place where local adult nightlife, to the extent it exists in Rehoboth Beach, often gathers, and the music and mingling can be fun, enough to take your attention away from the middling service and often bland entrees. Indeed, to the extent The Real Housewives of Rehoboth gather, they coagulate at Summer House after the dinner service closes and the bar gets active with a live D.J. who apparently never heard of that 80’s music that defined the lives of most of the bar’s patrons.
Owned by the ubiquitous Big Fish Restaurant Group, Summer House could use a menu makeover, leaving the middling but popular burger bar the way it is, but importing new recipes, replacing tired entrees that have adorned the menu for decades, and paying more attention to the love of cooking. Mondays during the off-season is ‘locals night,’ and new patio dining in the adjacent empty lot has expanded the kitchen’s reach, which unfortunately exceeds its culinary grasp. Despite and, perhaps, because, of its longevity and local institutional status, Summer House needs a food makeover, and as prices keep rising and the competition increases, the owners no doubt will be persuaded to change Summer House to an all-season eatery that matches the cool vibe of its excellent Libation Room.