Virginia Beach’s Pink Dinghy has evolved into a casual powerhouse of wine and panoramic flavor

The feeling first took hold at breakfast.

At the Pink Dinghy, a blush-colored ViBe district restaurant the approximate size and shape of a shoebox, it came halfway through one of the most singular egg sandwiches in Hampton Roads.

The Dinghy’s rendition is a parade of surprising Middle Eastern spice and ferment — including a spicy cilantro-coriander sauce from Yemen called zhoug — and of gently contrasting textures. The sandwich mixes crisply fresh shards of lettuce, butter-toasted bread with an edge of caramelization and airy chew within, and especially a lava flow of cheesy scrambled eggs with delicate softness you’d be more likely to find in France than Virginia Beach. By American standards, the eggs were a mere medium-rare.

Even without springing for an option on thick-cut bacon or pickled jalapenos, the sandwich was a casual luxury that neatly hopped multiple culinary traditions — on a table that also included the satisfying chew of Caribbean-influenced yucca tots, corn-masa pancakes and a glass of amber-hued wine from the slopes of Sicily’s Mount Etna, full-bodied and earthy in its pleasures.

The sensation that morning was a familiar one, though it feels new each time it happens: It was the light thrill of encountering a restaurant that has fully come into itself.

Without sacrificing the casual feeling that first made it popular when it opened a year ago, the Dinghy has evolved into a morning-to-night powerhouse of refined wines, creative cocktails and far-flung foods — binding disparate flavors from South America and the Middle East into a singular culinary identity.

Mornings and lunches especially have remained loose, beginning on the weekends with long lines for a painfully limited supply of creative-flavored doughnuts — a cult item from owner Stephanie Dietz’s former business, Doughminion Donuts. But lately, the doughnuts are joined by a host of other baked delights, including a vegan strawberry-almond-butter cookie that’ll have dairy farms checking their business model.

Under sommelier Colin Breland, the wine list has leveled up like a Scott Pilgrim character. Without being overly expensive it’s now one of the most adventurous in the region, ranging from zippy natural wines to structured reds and bottle-conditioned sparklers.

On the new dinner menu, inaugurated in January, well-considered veggie small plates of charred Brussels sprouts and golden raisins might share time with fish roasted in corn husks, and a hulking slow-braised lamb shank that might read like a Middle Eastern love poem dedicated to osso buco.

It is a hard-won transformation for a restaurant whose history has been defined for too long by misfortune and tragedy.

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The story is well known locally by now: Before founders Stephanie Dietz and Chase Pittman even had the chance to open the Dinghy last spring, the restaurant was hit by a car. And then it was hit by a pandemic. And this all followed more than a year’s worth of construction delays. When the Dinghy finally opened in May, the tiny spot did so without inside seating, or much of the ambitious and world-hopping menu its owners had envisioned.

They improvised, pulling together an impromptu picnic-table patio scene often soundtracked by dancehall reggae — a home to quaffable wines and low-cost painkiller cocktails in plastic cups. The opening menu of casual Latin-Caribbean eats ranged from chorizo torta sandwiches to pernil pork. Though Dietz swore she never wanted a sandwich spot, sandwiches were mostly what they served.

“I had to design everything to be eaten out of a box, maybe after long distances,” she said.

In the fall, when they felt like they finally had their footing, Dietz and Pittman started working to bring their original vision for the restaurant to life. And then tragedy struck again, from nowhere. Pittman, a surfer and well-loved local personality long before he and Dietz opened the restaurant, was felled at the age of 35 by a previously undetected heart defect — a death so unexpected its cause wasn’t immediately known.

The community pulled together in grief, and at one point Dietz’s therapist asked her whether she thought it was even wise to go on with the restaurant.

“She said, ‘Have you ever considered selling?’” Dietz said. “And I said, ‘What are you talking about? No!’”

After a couple short closures, Dietz and the Dinghy have persisted. Slowly, she’s expanded the restaurant’s repertoire, and its staff, growing from a kitchen crew of four to eight — bringing in a menu of flavors and recipes she’d designed years ago for the restaurant but couldn’t implement until now.

During the patio days of last summer, the restaurant’s menus and execution could sometimes be uneven — a little too improvised, perhaps. But these days the Dinghy has handily battened down its hatches. While also adding a refined dinner menu, the restaurant has trimmed and refined its coterie of lunchtime sandwiches and breakfast items. And especially, Dietz has expanded the restaurant’s range of flavors into a dizzying cosmopolitanism.

This is exemplified best, perhaps, by the Dinghy’s take on the banh mi. The sandwich, served on a Mexican torta made by Italian bakers, does indeed contain the cilantro and brightly pickled daikon and carrot inspired by the colonial Vietnamese sandwich. But its meat is Latin-American chorizo, sweetened with a Caribbean touch of orange juice. Meanwhile, the spice comes from a Thai hot sauce.

The sandwich, served morning to night, is a food historian’s worst nightmare. Meanwhile, a gently charred broccolini small plate at dinner, familiar from Italian restaurants everywhere, might arrive on a bed of jalapeno-spiked tahini. And yet the flavors at the Dinghy blend into a neatly harmonious whole, without often seeming like self-conscious fusion.

In part, it seems, Dietz has bonded these disparate cuisines by creating a house flavor, a deeply personal set of predilections that thread through the menu. This involves a marriage of earthy flavors, orange-juice sweetness and bright acidity — plus a blend of cilantro, tart Middle Eastern sumac and fiery Aleppo pepper. The depth of Caribbean sofrito is another common element.

These flavors wind through much of the restaurant’s food, including that rotating lamb entree, which might arrive atop some Southern-style grits that have been creamed into fermented labne yogurt. A fried cauliflower dish plays with a similar profile, augmented with Peruvian peppers and that same cilantro-garlic-coriander Yemeni zhoug sauce that graces the breakfast sandwich.

The cocktails and wine at the Dinghy come in glassware these days, not plastic cups — and the husband-and-wife team of sommelier Breland and general manager Madeline Ott are both broadly knowledgeable in recommending pairings from a far-ranging wine list that might otherwise be unfamiliar to most diners. On a recent visit, they neatly married the spice and deep savor of the lamb to a buoyant, berry-acidic old-vine gamay from Beaujolais natural winemaker Kevin Descombes, son of the renowned Georges.

Among cocktails, a gin-based Dinghy Revival was a well-balanced play on the old-fashioned Corpse Reviver #2, while a novelty Beet It Up leaned perhaps a little too hard on its namesake ingredient. You will love it or you won’t, and it will all depend on how you feel about drinking alcoholic beet juice.

The restaurant, Dietz says, will keep changing. The covered tent out back will eventually become an expansion of the restaurant space. The patio tables will soon be ensconced amid a jungle of planters. Spring produce will mean a wholesale swap of the vegetable plates. More seafood will arrive, to augment the mussels and fish already aboard.

But already the Dinghy has dropped anchor in fertile seas. After a year that’s been tragic for far too many, including the Dinghy, the restaurant’s evolution been one of the year’s most welcome success stories.

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If you go

The spot: The Pink Dinghy, 609 19th St., Virginia Beach

The vibe: Tiny, cozy, mostly casual pink-toned restaurant and market, with casual vibes at lunch, refined meals at dinner, great wine and cocktails, and a large picnic-tabled patio for the summer.

Order this: At dinner, get multiple veggie small plates and split a lamb or fish entree, and take your server’s advice on wine. At breakfast, yucca tots and egg sandwiches. At lunch, the Banh Dinghy or anything involving the excellent pernil pork or chorizo.

Hours: 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5 to 9 p.m., Wednesday through Friday; 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5 to 9 p.m. Saturday; 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday.

COVID protocols: Masks, spaced tables, patio seating, takeout.

Food prices: Lunch and brunch entrees, $10 to $15; generous-sized dinner small plates, $10 to $13; dinner entrees, $24 to $29. (Sandwiches also available at dinner, at lunch prices.)

Drinks: Cocktails, $9 to $12. Extensive wine glass menu, mostly $9 to $13; craft beer.

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Kid-friendly? There are always sandwiches for the kids.

Vegan/veg/gluten: Lots of options, clearly marked on the menu, for most dining restrictions. Vegetarians and vegans will be best served at dinner, from the large assortment of veggie small plates.

Disabled-access? Yes

Reservations? Recommended, on opentable.com. (And stay tuned for a national ad campaign from OpenTable featuring the Dinghy.)

Parking: Lot

Contact: 757-937-1010, thepinkdinghy.square.site

Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com.