Visiting chefs turn Coupeville dinner into four-hour Whidbey feast

A four-hour dinner at Captain Whidbey Inn in Coupeville turned a weekend meal into a social event built around Whidbey ingredients, shared plates and a room where most diners began as strangers. Visiting chefs Kelly Mariani and Joshua McFadden used the long format to slow the pace, stretch the conversation and make the island itself the center of the evening.

Mariani, the Culinary Director at Scribe Winery in Sonoma, works the California winery with her brothers Andrew and Adam Mariani as part of the family’s fourth-generation farming operation. McFadden, based in Oregon, brought the credentials that helped define the menu’s credibility: he won a James Beard Award in 2018 for Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables, his book Grains for Every Season was nominated for a James Beard Award in 2022, and his third cookbook is slated for fall 2025. The two chefs have collaborated before, and both lean into seasonality and ingredient-driven cooking, letting the food carry the message.

That approach showed up in the dishes. One course featured leeks from Ralph’s Greenhouse with beurre blanc, roe and tarragon, paired with a 2025 Scribe Riesling. Another, billed as the PNW Relish Tray of Dreams, brought together Miyagi oysters with rhubarb mignonette, radishes on seaweed butter and crispy Dog Island mushrooms. Scribe described the weekend, held April 24-26, as a celebration of the new releases of its SVS Spring Allocation and of “the simple pleasure of eating well together.”

The setting gave the meal its own layer of meaning. Captain Whidbey, built in 1907, sits on six acres overlooking Penn Cove and offers 30 rooms and cabins. The inn also centers a 100-year-old fireplace and a restaurant that promotes locally sourced ingredients and Pacific Northwest cooking, giving the dinner a home that already feels tied to the island’s agricultural and coastal economy.

That matters for Coupeville and the rest of Island County because events like this do more than fill tables for a weekend. They test whether Whidbey can hold its own as a destination for immersive, locally rooted dining, where visiting chefs, island farmers and waterfront hospitality reinforce each other instead of competing. Megan Gellert of Slice PR & Events said the weekend was designed as a creative partnership with the inn, and Captain Whidbey has said it plans to do more special food events. For residents weighing whether the island’s food scene is becoming a draw in its own right, the answer was in the room: a long meal, a local menu and a historic lodge that made the island feel like the point.