Cape Charles’ charms led couple to leave California, buy café

by Robert Burke
Virginia Business
June 2005

It started on a whim. Marshall and Roberta Romeo were visiting family in Virginia Beach in May last year when, out of curiosity, they decided to drive the 23-mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel to Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
Once across, they kept exploring. “We saw the sign that
said, ‘Historic Cape Charles,’” Marshall Romeo says. “We drove into town, and just driving the main drive you could feel something happening.”

What they felt was the hum of a town in the midst of an overhaul, driven largely by the development of the new Bay Creek resort that surrounds tiny Cape Charles, an old railroad and ferry port town. The couple had never heard of Bay Creek, but at lunch their waitress told them about the new marina, golf courses and upscale houses.

So they looked around — and bought a house in Bay Creek the same day. At the time they lived in Sonoma, Calif., outside San Francisco, where he worked in securities for Lehman Bros. and she was a mortgage broker. “We’re just used to making quick decisions,” he says.

The Bay Creek house was going to be their vacation getaway, but a few months later they made another big decision — to quit their jobs, buy a Cape Charles business and move there for good. Today the Romeos own and operate Cape Charles Coffee, a trendy little café that opened last year in a renovated storefront on Mason Avenue, the town’s main commercial row. The original owner who did the renovation sold the building and business to the Romeos, who quit their jobs and moved here in February.

The speed of the couple’s cross-country move and investments in Cape Charles mirror how quickly the town and this end of the Eastern Shore is changing, and attracting people with money and an eye for investments. “People come here, they don’t just buy one thing,” Marshall Romeo says. “They buy a house, they’ll buy a fixer-upper and a piece of property, or all three.”

The coffee shop is drawing its customers from longtime residents as well as the growing number of tourists from nearby bed-and-breakfasts. The day starts with fresh-baked scones and light breakfast pastries. The lunch menu is deli-style sandwiches, such as roast pork with apple and pesto or walnut cranberry chicken salad.

Marshall Romeo arrives early to help the café’s four employees open up and greet the early customers. Sometimes he sits out front under the canopy and talks to passers-by. “It’s a nice life, very social,” he says.
Elsewhere on the street there are renovations going on: Two doors down a hotel is being renovated, and down the street a couple is keeping just the front of an old building and building new space behind it. “The whole town has changed dramatically,” Romeo says. “It’s a town that would have eventually come back. But this Bay Creek deal just pushed it much faster.”

It’s too early to say how profitable the café will be but the Romeos aren’t worried. They’re halfway into their own retirement, and have a daughter and future son-in-law eager to come to Cape Charles and help run the business. “We’re happy here,” Romeo says. “I’m not so young that I have to worry about building and expanding and paying for college. We make enough to live and enjoy these years.