The Shipwright’s Cafe in Margate, Prince Edward Island, is a culinary voice in the wilderness. 

That statement can be taken quite literally, since the restaurant, on the outskirts of the town of Kensington, is almost lost amidst the potato fields and red dirt roads of rural PEI.

But on a different level, the Shipwright’s Cafe is also a solitary voice because it is one of the relatively rare places in PEI’s rural areas offering fine (or at least finer) dining.

The Cafe operates out of a farmhouse originally built in the 1880s, and fits right in with the scenery. You could easily assume it was somebody’s old residence. A vegetable garden next to the house further reinforces the impression of something homy and old.

Inside, the wooden interiors and traditional furnishings lead you to expect that this is a place where you can get a no-nonsense meal of steak and potatoes.

You would be partially right. You can indeed get a good steak, as we learned when we dined at the Cafe recently with friends who are PEI residents. But that steak (the $32 “Shipwright’s Tournedos of Beef”) was, if you’ll pardon the pun, a cut above the usual pub or family restaurant fare because of the excellent red wine sauce and the perfectly roasted potatoes and the not-overdone vegetables.

But I am getting a little bit ahead of myself. Meals properly start with an appetizer, and one of the specials of the day — a large portobello mushroom stuffed with lobster, shrimp, vegetables, and a mysteriously delicious sauce — turned out to be the most spectacular part of the meal. Sadly, this succulent appetizer does not appear to be part of the regular menu, but if it were, the mushroom alone would be worth revisiting the Cafe.

The giant mushroom cast a huge shadow over my main course — a $32 lamb special (again not part of the regular menu) that turned out to be not so special because the slices were rubbery. Also, while the lamb portions were generous, the meal was served on a plate that seemed too small. The food was in constant danger of spilling off the plate.

Other members of our party had much better luck with their choice: a $22 roast chicken special that came with gravy and a tasty, tangy rhubarb compote. Once again, the vegetables, potatoes, and other sidings were done to perfection. 

My dinner ended with a Kahlua pudding that was good but had almost imperceptible Kahlua flavour — yet another indication that, while much is right with the Shipwright Cafe, some aspects could stand improving.

Despite the less-than-perfect ending to the meal, the Shipwright’s Cafe experience was a positive one — primarily because the restaurant clearly has flair with at least some of its dishes and because it is refreshing to have an alternative to the seafood shacks, family restaurants, diners, and pubs that are the normal fare on this island province. 

I just disposed of my old, beaten-up, huge, bright yellow suitcase – but before I did, I made one last trip with it.

The suitcase came with my family when we migrated to Canada some 15 years ago. The Lojel – for that was the brand of the suitcase as well as our affectionate name for it — was a humongous piece of luggage made in Japan. Made of a tough hard plastic material that managed to weather most of the wear and tear of our various trips, the Lojel was roomier than any suitcase I’ve ever seen – so spacious that, one time, my daughter, then perhaps 14 or 15,  was able to curl up and lie inside it). It was the executive suite of suitcases, with the carrying capacity of perhaps 1.5 times the standard piece of baggage.

But the day had come for the Lojel to go. Its locks were finally on the verge of snapping after years of valorously holding back full loads that threatened to explode out of the bag. Its tiny wheels had worn out to the point that it made more sense to carry the bag than to roll it. And as the kids grew up and we traveled less as a family, there was simply less need to have such an oversized piece taking up space in the trunks of today’s ever shrinking taxicabs.

Saying a final goodbye to this loyal friend, I noticed that there was a piece of paper taped to the inside of the top lid. It turned out to be a checklist of the items that the Lojel had held when we made the Big Move to our new country. The list was labeled “Lojel 2”, reminding me that we had once had two of these giant suitcases. The first one had finally succumbed to the gentle ministrations that baggage handlers the world over are so famous for, and had developed a crack.

The list was a snapshot of who we were, the items serving as clues to the kind of brave or foolhardy people who had opted to change countries in midstream.

“3 packs of Tintin” referred to my wife’s collection more than a dozen Hergé books, most of them in hardcover. Some of these had suffered water damage from a tropical storm, but there was no way they were going to be left back in the old country.  (Packed away in the hand-carry luggage when we moved to Canada was another Hergé work: a letter that the famous cartoonist had written to my wife when she was a young girl, a letter accompanied by a personalized drawing of Tintin and Snowy.)

The “Father Brown Omnibus” (by G.K. Chesterton), a collection of superb mystery stories with a spiritual and philosophical bent, was another book from the old library, an elegant Penguin Books edition that we refused to leave behind — even if we could no doubt obtain another copy in the bigger bookshops of our brave new world.

And “Goedel, Escher, and Bach” (by Douglas Hofstadter) referred to perhaps the most obtusely brilliant book I have ever owned.  Owned, not read.  I bought the book, which discusses beauty and form in math, art, and music, in the early 1980’s, while on a trip to the US. I read it with gusto for perhaps the first 100 pages before it overwhelmed me with its complexity. Not to be defeated, I packed the book into the Lojel, determined to finish it in the new country.

The “Uncanny X-Men” item referred to a small portion of my comic collection. Comics were more expensive and harder to come by in the old country – and perhaps because of this, these particular copies were valuable enough to me to bring along, even if I could get comics cheaper and more easily in Canada.

That was us: we loved our books, and were willing to lug them with us when we started a new life. Most of the books on the Lojel 2 list are still with us today, occupying places of honour in our floor-to-ceiling bookcase in the living room (another story for another time).

You can’t live on books alone, of course. You have to eat. We recognized this, apparently, since the Lojel 2 list included “eight plates”, “chopsticks”, “4 knives”, and a “cork fruit bowl”. To the best of my recollection, the plates survived the long trip, and may very well still be in use today. The “cork fruit bowl” made it intact, too, and, remarkably, holds North American fruit just as well as Asian fruit.

The grey undershirt and various socks on the list were nostalgic reminders that our children were just eight and three years old when we migrated. The “winter jacket” was a particularly poignant memory: coming from a tropical country, how prepared could we possibly have been for a wintry country? We did our best, but I’m sure that our initial “winter jacket” was soon replaced by something that offered more protection from the Canadian winter.

After I had gone through all the items on the Lojel 2 list, I had the distinct sense of having traveled again. The Lojel was ready to join the big baggage bin in the sky, but as it turned out, my big yellow suitcase had had one last trip left in it, after all: a trip back to those callow days when one family’s new life was just beginning. Thanks, big yellow buddy.