Osprey Coastal Dining

There are restaurants you book three weeks in advance and spend the whole drive up hoping they deserve it. Osprey deserves it. It more than deserves it. It is the kind of meal that makes you reconsider every other meal you have had in the last five years.

The Sunshine Coast is not short of good food. Smitty's in Gibsons does things with an oyster that would make a Parisian weep. The Lagoon at Painted Boat has a French chef who knows what he is doing with a scallop. But Osprey, perched on the rocks above John Henry's Marina in Garden Bay, is operating at a different altitude entirely. This is a summer pop-up in the technical sense — open Thursday to Sunday, May through September, closed for the winter — but the cooking is as serious as anything you will find in a Vancouver tasting room at twice the price.¹

Chef Heidi Murphy is the force behind it. She comes from the Tribe Called Zest hospitality group — the team responsible for el Segundo, The Shameful Tiki Room, and The Shed in Vancouver — and she has brought that urban precision to a waterfront building that looks, from the water, like a blue-and-white Tudor boathouse that someone has inexplicably decided to turn into the best restaurant on the coast.^3,4

John Henry's Marina has been here for decades. It is a working marina — fuel dock, general store, waterfront cottages, the kind of place where you tie up your boat and stretch your legs and feel like you have arrived somewhere that has not changed much since 1975.⁵ Osprey sits above all of that, on a deck with porthole windows and a view of the harbour that, at dusk, is one of the most beautiful things you can see from a restaurant table in this province.

The Meal

We started with what I can only describe as a mussel in a black shell that was not a shell. A pastry casing, coloured with charcoal, holding a single plump mussel with herbs. It was gone in one bite. I spent the next ten minutes trying to work out how she had made it and whether I could ask for three more without embarrassing myself. I could not, and I did not, but the impulse was strong.²

What followed was a sequence of courses that I will not describe in full — partly because the menu changes with the season and what I had in July 2025 will not be what you have in July 2026, and partly because the surprise is the point. What I will say is that there was a summer squash dish — baked firm, not mushy, stuffed with a savoury herbed cheese filling, topped with fried onions — that I have thought about on at least four separate occasions since. It is the kind of dish that recalibrates what you think vegetables can do.

The wine list is short and well-chosen. The cocktails are creative and include genuinely impressive non-alcoholic options — not the usual sad glass of sparkling water with a sprig of mint, but actual drinks that have been thought about. The service is warm and unhurried. On the night I was there, Chef Murphy came to the table herself. She is not performing. She is just interested in whether you are enjoying it.

Getting There

Garden Bay is about ninety minutes north of Gibsons by car — which means a BC Ferries crossing from Horseshoe Bay to Langdale, then north on Highway 101 through Sechelt and Halfmoon Bay and into the Pender Harbour basin. The drive up the coast is part of the experience. The road narrows. The trees close in. The inlets appear and disappear. By the time you reach Garden Bay you are already somewhere else.⁶

If you are arriving by boat — and you should, if you can — moorage is available at John Henry's. The marina sits on shíshálh Nation traditional territory, and the harbour itself is one of the most sheltered anchorages on the coast. Sixty kilometres of shoreline, multiple inlets, and a general store that has been selling provisions to boaters since before most of us were born.⁵

Osprey is open Thursday through Sunday, from 5pm. Reservations are highly recommended — and when you book, you will be asked whether you want the "Trust the Chef" tasting menu or à la carte. If you are going for the first time, choose the tasting menu. There is no other correct answer.

I have been coming to the Sunshine Coast for years. I know the ferry crossing, the way the light changes as you round Gower Point, the particular quality of the silence when you get far enough north that the cell signal drops and the trees take over. I have eaten well up here. I have eaten very well.

But Osprey is something else. It is what happens when a chef who has spent years working at the highest level of the Vancouver restaurant scene decides to take that skill somewhere that deserves it — somewhere with a harbour view and a working marina and sixty kilometres of coastline and the kind of quiet that you cannot manufacture in a city. The food is extraordinary. The setting is extraordinary. The combination of the two is one of the best meals I have had in British Columbia.

Go in the summer. Book the tasting menu. Arrive by boat if you can. Stay for the sunset. Order the cocktails. Trust the chef.

Best Day Ever. Without question.