Duck, NC Dining: Two Shopping Centers, a Handful of Duck Road Standbys, and the Sanderling's Own Table

Waterfront Shops (1240 Duck Road): The Blue Point and Duck’s Cottage Have Real, Documented Histories

The Blue Point Bar and Grill is the anchor tenant, and it has a real 30-plus-year story most visitors never hear. It opened in 1989, founded by John Power and Sam McGann -- two Norfolk natives who bet Duck could support a wine-and-food-forward restaurant well before that was a common Outer Banks proposition. The kitchen added a screened porch not long after opening, then a major building expansion in 2006, and in 2016 built an outdoor annex behind the main dining room. That annex is what shows up on Waterfront Shops' own tenant directory as "The Blue Point Back Bar" -- it is not a separate restaurant, it's the Blue Point's own outdoor bar space, run under the same phone number, website, and ownership as the main building. (This is a genuine correction to this site's own earlier research: an older tenant list on Duck's hub page named "Back Bar" as if it were a fourth, independent business; it's the Blue Point's yard, not a fourth restaurant.) In 2021, longtime local restaurant operators Ryan, Jamie, and Leigh Raskin -- siblings operating as Sibling Revelry LLC -- bought the Blue Point from Power and McGann; Ryan had already worked eight years in the kitchen before the sale. The restaurant has also had unusually long-tenured staff for a seasonal beach town: server Elaine Piddington and chef de cuisine Dave McClary were both there on opening day in 1989, and reservationist Nancy Stanford held that role for 16 years, per a 2019 trade-press retrospective on the restaurant's 30th year.

Duck's Cottage Coffee & Books, the other Waterfront Shops anchor, sits in a building with its own separate, checkable history -- and, in an odd small-town coincidence, its founding connects back to the Blue Point. The structure was built in 1921 as a hunting cottage for a group of New York investors, originally known as the Powder Ridge Gun Club and locally managed by a resident named Lewis Scarborough (the same Scarborough surname attached to Scarborough Lane Shoppes elsewhere in town, though this research did not confirm a family link between the two). The club fell into private hands in the 1940s and stayed a private residence for decades; its last private residents were a couple named Duck and Betty Braithwaite. John Power -- the same John Power who co-founded the Blue Point in 1989 -- opened the building as Duck's Cottage Coffee & Books on July 22, 2002, together with childhood friend Allen LeHew, with Jamie Anderson managing the bookstore side from early on. LeHew retired in 2023 after nearly twenty years, selling the business to Anderson (now Jamie Hope Anderson-Silver), who still owns it. The shop has drawn outside press coverage, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Our State magazine, and functions as something close to a community living room for the town.

The center's third dining tenant, Coastal Cantina, bills itself as waterfront Tex-Mex on the Currituck Sound and operates seasonally, April through October. This research could not confirm its founding date or ownership -- a real gap, not an oversight, and one worth checking directly with the business or Waterfront Shops before relying on it.

Scarborough Lane Shoppes (1171 Duck Road): A Second, Separate Center With Its Own Raw Bar

Scarborough Lane Shoppes is a distinct shopping center from the Waterfront Shops -- a different address, a different owner, and a different tenant roster -- and it's easy for a casual visitor to conflate the two since both are soundside and both mix retail with dining. Its confirmed food-and-beverage tenants, per the center's own store directory, are Fishbones Raw Bar, Duck Pizza Company, Island Smoothie Cafe, and Swells'a Brewing Duck Dive Bar, alongside several specialty-snack tenants (a popcorn shop, a fudge shop, and a couple of confectionery-style storefronts) that round out the food mix without being sit-down restaurants.

One open question worth disclosing rather than glossing over: Fishbones Raw Bar shares a website domain (fishbonessunsetgrille.com) with Sunset Grille & Raw Bar, a separate, long-running waterfront restaurant at 1264 Duck Road that says it's marked 25 years in business and has won a Travel Channel "Best Waterfront Atmosphere" nod. That shared domain strongly suggests common ownership between Fishbones and Sunset Grille, but this research could not confirm the exact corporate relationship -- whether they're one company running two locations, a shared brand under different operators, or something else. Treat that connection as likely, not confirmed.

Freestanding Duck Road Restaurants: A 1987 BBQ Institution and a Chef-Owned Grill

Duck Deli, at 1223 Duck Road, is the closest thing this research found to a genuine long-running local institution outside the two shopping centers: a family-run restaurant established in 1987, serving Carolina barbecue and homestyle comfort food, with indoor dining, an outdoor picnic garden, seasonal live music, and catering that includes a "Beach House BBQ Feast" package. The business describes itself as family-run but does not name current owners publicly on its own site, so this research can confirm the restaurant's age and format but not a specific proprietor's name.

NC Coast Grill & Bar, at 1184 Duck Road, is chef-owned by Wes Stepp, who the restaurant's own site describes as having more than 25 years cooking on the Carolina coast; a LinkedIn profile independently corroborates him as chef/owner of the business. It's a separate, independently owned restaurant -- not part of the Sanderling Resort, despite a superficial resemblance in coastal-cuisine framing to some of Sanderling's own dining venues covered below. It runs first-come, first-served with no reservations, open daily 11:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. at the time of this research.

The Village Table & Tavern opened in August 2018 inside the former Nor'Banks Sailing and Watersports Center building, an adaptive reuse rather than new construction -- property owner Jon Britt had long wanted a restaurant paired with the water-sports operation and approached the team behind Trio Wine, Beer & Cheese in Kitty Hawk (Jennifer and John Minnich, and Kenny and Melissa Hyman) in February 2018 to build it out. The restaurant serves casual, seasonally driven comfort food with a built-out cocktail, wine, and craft-beer program.

The Sanderling Resort’s Other Restaurants, Beyond the Building Already Covered

Duck's hub page already tells the Sanderling Inn Restaurant's building history in detail, so it isn't repeated here -- but that's only one part of what the resort now runs. Its own site currently brands the restaurant inside that historic building as "Lifesaving Station," a three-meal Southern-coastal restaurant open to both resort guests and outside visitors; if that's a recent rebrand from the "Sanderling Inn Restaurant" name used elsewhere, this research could not pin down exactly when the change happened, and that's worth flagging rather than guessing at.

Beyond that building, the Sanderling runs several additional venues this site hadn't previously covered: Theodosia, a more formal dining room built around Eastern North Carolina cooking and coastal ingredients, fronted by chef Vivian Howard -- a chef with real outside name recognition from her PBS series "A Chef's Life" and subsequent restaurant work in Kinston, NC; Sandbar, a seasonal beachside spot for light bites and drinks; Beach House Bar, a flexible daytime-to-evening stop for coffee or cocktails; and a rotating set of seasonal programming -- a Thursday-evening seafood boil (May through September), Wednesday-evening "Sanderling Socials" (April through September), and a beachside seaside-picnic offering. All of that programming is seasonal by design and should be confirmed directly with the resort before planning a trip around a specific night or date.