The Tomales Bay Resort has been home to many restaurants since the first one opened in 1947 on the waterfront site just west of Inverness. The latest incarnation, the Bayside Bar and Lounge, debuted last week, and eager locals flocked to the refreshed space to enjoy cocktails at the bar and pub-style fare in the dining room.
The Bayside offers a casual seafood-forward menu with everything from smoked ribs to a vegan banh mi. The catch of the day and the oysters are both locally supplied, and there will be pizza pies for both dine-in and takeout.
“I’d like to make it a fun place where everybody feels welcome,” said owner Jeff Harriman, who bought the resort in 2005 and previously had tenants lease the restaurant. “We want to serve both our guests at Tomales Bay Resort and the local community. The idea is to make it a casual place with some games and good food, mainly using local ingredients. My hope is to make it a real community center.”
The new establishment borrows in part from the formula that has kept Mr. Harriman’s downtown Petaluma restaurant, McNear’s Saloon and Dining House, operating for 39 years.
It serves familiar dishes like fish and chips, but Bayside has a special sauce that McNear’s can’t offer: a spectacular view of Tomales Bay and the rolling pastures on the eastern shore. It also boasts a roof deck looking out over the same windswept landscape.
Bayside is the latest eatery to join what may prove to be a restaurant renaissance in West Marin. On the outskirts of Point Reyes Station, Marina Bernal and her nephew Ruben Santana are reviving the former Point Reyes Roadhouse at their new Mi Casita, which opened in April.
In June, Bar Auklet, the latest venture from Shannon Gregory, who owns the Marshall Store and the Route One Bakery and Kitchen in Tomales, will open in the former Station House space in Point Reyes Station.
By early July, the First Valley Bistro will begin serving customers in the space previously occupied by Saltwater Oyster Depot. The bistro will be operated by Roseanne Lavoy, Enrique Hernandez and Patrick Sullivan, the same team that runs the Coast Café in Bolinas.
As Mr. Harriman describes it, Bayside will have something of a “Cheers” vibe, with a West Marin twist. A lounge next to the dining room features the pool table, a foosball table and dart boards from the Barnaby’s days, along with a supply of board games and puzzles. There will be live music, and Mr. Harriman envisions hosting trivia nights, guest speakers and seasonal celebrations.
To manage the place, he has hired a father-daughter team, James and Sophia Tolbert. All three grew up in the San Geronimo Valley, and all three still call the valley home.
Sophia’s parents met when her dad was working as a bartender at the Old Western Saloon and her mom was a baker at the Bovine Bakery. They crossed paths when he was walking home from work and she was heading in to knead dough.
“They met because they passed each other in the wee hours of the morning,” said Sophia, who spent her first few years living with her parents at the former Olema schoolhouse.
Her boyfriend, Danny Speirn, is a Bolinas angler who fishes out of Bodega Bay and will supply Bayside with his daily catch.
“I want to feed local people, and I want to hire local people,” said Sophia, who teaches yoga in West Marin and managed a yoga studio in Mill Valley for several years.
She’s glad to have a new adventure. “I needed to have a little breakup with the southern Marin yoga world,” she said.
With no more than a couple of social media posts announcing its soft opening, the restaurant drew a large turnout of locals last week. They were eager to dine on the west side of Tomales Bay, which has wanted for restaurant options since the closure of Saltwater last summer and, before that, the shuttering of Vladimir’s, which was a fixture for half a century.
Last Thursday evening, one local after another streamed in the door. “Welcome. Nice to see you again,” James greeted them while mixing up margaritas and gimlets.
Among the happy customers at the bar was Rick Michetti, a woodworker who was nursing a vodka and tonic. “I’ve been coming here since it was Barnaby’s, way back in 1999,” he said. “It’ll be nice to have a place to come and hang out after work.”
Given its location on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, the restaurant will also cater to tourists and hotel guests. Sophia envisions selling picnic boxes and soft serve to people visiting Chicken Ranch Beach, just a short walk along the shore from the resort, tide permitting.
So far, James and Sophia have hired eight people to work in the restaurant—four in the kitchen, four in the front of the house—and they’re looking for more.
As they ramp up staffing, they will open their doors Thursdays through Mondays from 4 to 8 p.m. The bar will open at 3:30 p.m. and close at 9 p.m. The schedule will run an hour later on Friday and Saturdays. In time, they plan to open seven days a week and serve brunch and lunch on weekends.
Before it became the Tomales Bay Resort, the hotel—known by locals as the boatel—was called the Golden Hinde Inn, after the galleon sailed by Francis Drake when he circumnavigated the globe in the 16th century. Before that, during the 1930s, the site served as the town dump.
Over the years, the resort has been home to a series of restaurants, the first opened by Dorothy Meloney, an army nurse who spent childhood summers in Inverness and used a G.I. loan to buy a stove and grill in 1947. They called the place Tombahia. A soda fountain and ice cream parlor, it served burgers, clam chowder, chicken and oysters until it closed in 1953.
After that came Barnaby’s, the spot’s longest-standing tenant, operating from 1985 until 2008, the last three years under Mr. Harriman’s ownership. Next came Thepmonggan Thai, which enjoyed an eight-year run until Fog’s Kitchen took over from 2016 to 2019.
In 2021, Mr. Harriman brought in a management team that intended to open a spot called Andy’s by the Bay, but their plans stalled. The spot has sat vacant since the pandemic, but Mr. Harriman believes Bayside has much better odds of success than some of its predecessors. Previous restaurateurs were out-of-towners and leased the restaurant space, whereas Mr. Harriman owns Bayside, allowing for better integration with the resort.
“We have a really good local staff now,” he said. “Having a local staff and having the restaurant work in harmony with the hotel will be the ticket to keep it working.”