I had one of the strangest dining experiences of my life at the Inn at Ship Bay on Orcas Island in Washington’s San Juan Islands this past week.  The food was good, maybe even great, but the combination of guests and viewpoints made it extremely uncomfortable at times.

The Inn at Ship Bay is a unique restaurant concept. The restaurant is part of a larger complex that includes an inn and a working farm.  The restaurant gets much of the produce it uses for its meals from its own farm.  It also houses a number of animals, including pigs, from which it gets many of its meat products. The restaurant makes its own sausages and prepared meat products, as well. To top it off, the restaurant gets its seafood from divers who mine the local waters for oysters, sea urchins and King Salmon. The restaurant also uses the local farm services from local San Juan farmers for the majority of its dishes. Depending on what kind of produce, meat and seafood offered the restaurant’s chef, Geddes Martin, creates a menu that rotates often and seasonally.

That said, the food is amazing.  We started off with a platter of duck pate and cured meats that the kitchen staff had prepared themselves. The poached quail egg was one of the best egg products I have ever tasted--it was so rich and jellied that it almost reminded me of the pate that accompanied it.  I ordered a beef rib steak served with fingerling potatoes and leeks and served with a bacon and wine sauce. The dessert was a delicious panna cotta served over a chocolate cookie and topped with caramel brickel. The meal was paired with a delicious Riesling from Washington state. 

One of the best parts of the meal was the service.  Our server was knowledgeable and very friendly. If we didn’t understand some type of preparation or how something could really be a sauce, she would explain it in a non-condescending way. The restaurant, too, was in a beautiful location.  The dining room looked like an old living room. There was a small fireplace in one side of the room and bay windows on the other. The walls were painted a pale blue and were hung with non-threatening pictures of fruit and the sea.  The closed-in patio provided a view both into this dining room and onto the bay. 

The strange part of the night came from the kind of scene you usually see at this type of restaurant--an older, stately couple dining out for her birthday--and the kind of scene you only see at a bar--a young man turning 21 who gets drunk and rowdy with his parents and a group of people dressed as pirates. The older couple was suited to the restaurant’s class (and price) and obviously were regulars who knew the wait staff.  The pirates must have thought the Inn was a pub and the boy’s parents got rowdier than he did.  The result was an altercation, a ruined birthday party for the older couple and the older man probably beginning to hate an entire generation of twenty-somethings.

It seems like a restaurant of this caliber should have some procedure for turning away people dressed like pirates, but truly, do you think they’ve encountered it before?