Smokey's Survival: In the Aftermath of Restaurant Fire, A Happy Ending for a Stray

The fire that tore through Sweet Jenny’s Restaurant in December destroyed many things: booths and tables, kitchen equipment, owner Marty Sprinzen’s priceless collection of antiques, which decorated the walls — and the building itself.

But a stray kitten trapped below the building made it through, and restaurant staff and their friends came together to give the animal a second chance at life.

Sweet Jenny’s manager Joe Dringus said he and others had seen the little cat hanging around behind the restaurant in the weeks before the fire. It was a shy little thing, gray, with a white bib and four white socks.

“We didn’t know where it lived,” he said. “We’d see it outside, out in the woods.”

After the Dec. 27 fire that left the beloved log cabin restaurant a charred shell, Dringus wasn’t thinking about much besides sifting through the ashes of building where he’d spent most of his waking hours for the last decade.

He was there with his son Brandon and his good friend Ed Moritz the day after the fire when they heard a cat meowing, he said. The sound was coming from below the blackened, debris-strewn floor. 

Moritz said when Dringus pried off the restaurant’s crawlspace door, they found that familiar little cat, stuck and scared in a corner. They could only surmise she’d been there through the fire.

“She was trapped underneath the building,” Moritz said. “You could see her running around in there.” Somehow she’d survived both the blaze and the flood from the firefighters’ hoses, which had poured into the basement space.

“They put a lot of water on her,” Moritz said. “Poor thing.”

While Dringus and Sprinzen dealt with the aftermath of the fire and kept serving loyal customers at their Ship Bottom location, Moritz helped keep an eye on the ruins of the restaurant. He got into a pattern of taking care of the little stray cat that kept him company. 

When snow and ice fell, he dug out the entrance to the crawlspace where she was still sheltering. He laid out water and cans of food, noting with satisfaction that in the morning, nothing but paw prints remained.

“I’d sit out there and read the paper,” he said, “follow her pattern while she was out running around. She had her own little playground in the debris from the building. You’d see her chasing branches around.” 

Soon she had a name: Smokey, for her color and her survival story. Moritz said the kitten was pretty much feral. “You could tell it’s been on its own all the time,” he said.

Still, she warmed to Moritz a bit, cautiously approaching him from time to time. “She started getting used to hearing the cans pop,” he said.

But the winter was cold, and the burned-out restaurant was no place for her. Moritz wanted to find her a home. He and Dringus figured if they couldn’t find a place for her among their friends, they’d ask the Associated Humane Societies’ Popcorn Park Zoo to join in the campaign to save the kitten.

“We knew we’d have to trap her to get her out of there,” he said. So he and Joe borrowed a humane trap from a friend and set it up in the entrance of her crawlspace hideout.

 She was clever, he said, managing to get in, gobble the food and slip out without hitting the trigger on the trap’s door. 

Finally, one evening he got a call from a friend: They had the cat. Moritz called Joe, whose longtime friend Cristi Elliot had just offered to take Smokey in.

Moritz dropped what he was doing and drove over to the restaurant to meet Elliot, who came with family in tow. “We were just so happy,” he said. “They looked very excited.” 

Elliott took Smokey, trap and all, to her home in Forked River, where she said the cat is now part of the family menagerie: two dogs, two cats and a hamster.

“And two kids,” Elliot added, laughing.

She puts Smokey’s age at about 8 to 10 months, she said, though she’s still very small. “My cat Sneakers looks like a monster next to her,” she said.

And she’s still adjusting to life in her new home, Elliot said. Mostly she hides under beds, said Elliot; she's too shy even to come out to be photographed. But Elliot’s daughter is gaining the cat's trust. “She starting to venture out through the house,” she said.

For Dringus, Moritz and others still dealing with the heartbreak of losing Sweet Jenny’s, Smokey’s success story is an uplifting detail an otherwise difficult few months. 

They’re planning for their future — keeping the Ship Bottom restaurant open and preparing to rebuild in Barnegat — and they’re glad they could ensure her future, too.

“How could you not take care of the cat after it lived through something like that?” Dringus said.