‘Everybody Must Get Sconed’

A singular sense of hospitality at Mendocino’s historic Westport Hotel

By Cheryl Angelina Koehler  |  Photos by Scott Peterson

 

 

Like many young San Franciscans in 1974, Lee Tepper and Dorine Real were looking to get “back to the land.” Wandering north along the Mendocino Coast, they came to the formerly bustling logging community of Westport on a sleepy stretch of Highway 1 about 15 miles from Fort Bragg, where they settled for a ramshackle schoolhouse that could be renovated into a comfy home for themselves and their however many cats.

At the time, the tiny borough still boasted around 100 year-round residents, and local kids numbered enough to warrant a small independent school. There was a closet-sized post office, a few modest lodging options for wayfarers, and an old store with two working gas pumps out front. Population has since dwindled, the gas pumps are now relics, and the post office was recently decommissioned, but the deli inside the Westport Community Store currently boasts a strong reputation for generous made-to-order sandwiches.

Not too long after their arrival, Tepper and Real sensed that the town would soon be under threat from developers looking to create yet another seaside condo resort, so as they renovated their home, they also bought up quite a few undeveloped acres and some dilapidated houses. Tepper took a seat on the local water board, and the couple helped launch the town’s first rubber ducky race on Wages Creek, which became a beloved annual tradition, succumbing (like so much else) to Covid. Real took up duties with the local League of Women Voters, which she continues to this day.

Around 2007, the town’s long-empty hotel building went up for sale.

 

 

“People have roles in the community, like blacksmith and innkeeper, that can continue for generations,” says Real. Could someone in town play innkeeper? A pair of locals soon hatched a plan.

“The male counterpart of the couple had a bartender fetish,” Real says. “His dad had been a bartender, and he wanted to be a bartender, and they were going to redo the whole hotel.” But the project stalled out.

Rather than let the building drift back into decay, Tepper and Real bought the hotel as a work in progress, and they didn’t search long for a name: Westport Hotel seemed perfect. For the barroom, they channeled words from an early 20^th-century work song that writer George Sterling composed to help Carmel dock workers pound tough abalone meat into palatable steaks. To decorate their Old Abalone Pub, Tepper and Real gathered abalone shells from around Westport, setting a vibe that is more rococo than old salt.

While the hotel dates to 1890, Real wanted no truck with dusky Victorian parlors and instead envisioned a sleek, bright aesthetic. Tepper drove around finding tasteful antiques, and they prioritized light through large windows. Copious views of the luminous sea encourage some to climb down the steep stairway from the headlands to the dramatically rocky beach below.

 

 

“We opened on Halloween 2008, and it’s pretty much worked ever since,” Tepper says, referring to the ongoing challenge of meeting their self-imposed mandate to staff the six-room hotel and weekend eatery entirely with Westport locals. They manage to stay open 10 months of the year and even tailor a few part-time roles to local teens, who seem to relish being part of the main action in town.

Real describes the style of the hotel as a “one-off,” and guests who were checked in on the evening of June 14, 2025, seemed to appreciate the friendly welcome and casual elegance. One solo traveler, a Midwesterner who had left Michigan on his fully loaded bicycle in early May, was happy for a soft bed, warm shower, and folks eager to chat. Another, a retired commercial airline pilot adrift in his Porsche, was found wandering the common areas at around 8pm saying, “this place is great!” Many of the folks dining at the pub that night were locals who had come to enjoy Chef Odile Perkins’s reliably delicious comfort food.

 

 

Born in France, Perkins came to Fort Bragg with her family in 1975 and grew up in her dad’s restaurants, working front of house until she demanded a station in the kitchen. “I was 15 when I started cooking,” she says. After high school she flew the coop and got hired at the Mendocino Café, where she rose to kitchen manager. “I learned a lot from Maggie Drake, who was a great chef,” she says. Then followed stints at the brewery in Fort Bragg, the Hill House, and at Sharon’s by the Sea (now Princess Seafood). But Perkins also felt an urge to join the local fishing industry.

“I spent seven years down in the Noyo River harbor, where I learned all about unloading and processing and packing fish,” she says. At the time, the plant still provided salmon and red sea urchin to San Francisco restaurants. “We were super busy with 15-day runs and 15-hour shifts,” she adds. At Nemo’s, the harbor’s little fish market, she prepared chowder, Crab Louis, fish tacos, and fish sandwiches.

Perkins was serving hundreds of guests a day at Django’s Rough Bar Café when Covid shuttered in-person dining in March 2020. She found work at the local health food store and then moved on to a job harvesting and packing seaweed for Rising Tide Sea Vegetables. That’s when she heard that the Old Abalone Pub was looking for a chef.

“I really like the pace here,” says Perkins. “You have time to cook because you don’t have so many tickets in front of you.” Dusting off her recipes for dishes that locals told her they missed, she created a comfort food menu with a healthy bent, adding salads and yam fries to the burger options and spotlighting seafood in tacos, a spicy cioppino, a buttery steamed clam pasta, and crisp deep-fried oysters. Her crab cakes served over Asian slaw took second place at last year’s cook-off in Fort Bragg, and there’s even a plaque to prove it. “We make everything in-house as far as our dressings and bread and desserts,” Perkins says, adding that everybody really likes the chocolate pot au crème. Edible flowers, which grow abundantly in the hotel gardens, grace many of the pub’s dishes as well as hotel manager Kayla Cooper’s breakfasts and Real’s afternoon tea service (available by advance reservation).

 

 

Real, who loves to bake, felt that a caring innkeeper should bring coffee and scones directly to guests’ doors in the morning. “I don’t like the idea of having to come downstairs and socialize with other guests just to get a cup of coffee,” she says. So, staff now silently chant the proprietors’ motto as they carry up the breakfast trays:

Every-body-must-get-sconed…
Every-body-must-get-sconed…

Real’s enthusiasm for her afternoon tea service is boundless: “I love teatime. I love it when people use it as a chance to just hang out and spend time with each other. I love it when they bring children. I love it when they use it as a special party. I love it when they wear hats just because it’s teatime and they don’t get another occasion to wear their hats. I just love it.”

 

 

The tea service is five courses served on tiered trays: First is a slice of the inn’s bread with Real’s composed confetti butter made with flower petals and herbs like the candy lime mint from the hotel gardens. “I like to make everything into shapes, usually heart shapes,” she says. Next, there’s a little cup of cut fruit followed by scones: lemon poppy, candied ginger walnut, dried cranberry currant, apricot orange, and others according to the baker’s whim. The fourth course is a set of tiny open-face sandwiches. These might include a curried egg salad sprinkled with dried fruit confetti; a heart-shaped Swiss cheese sandwich with an apple slice set on one side of the heart, garnished with fresh dill and a dill flower; pumpernickel bread spread with chive cream cheese, garnished with an onion flower; or sourdough bread with cream cheese and a slice of cucumber, garnished with a borage flower and kalonji (Indian nigella) seeds.

“The fifth course is dessert,” says Real. “It might be a tiny piece of cake or a little tart, and there’s always a chocolate candy at the end.” ♦

 

Westport Hotel and Old Abalone Pub
38921 CA-1, Westport CA
707.964.3688
westporthotel.us

The hotel and pub will be on winter break from December 7, 2025 until February 5, 2026, so make reservations well ahead, and make sure to specify if you want to partake of afternoon tea.

 

 

Scott Peterson is an East Bay photographer with a passion for images, food, music, and lately…motorcycling. He is also a busy video producer looking for calm in a crazy world. Find a range of his work at scottpetersonproductions.com.

 

Westport Hotel Scones

Proprietor Dorine Real makes what are called “short scones,” which means that they have a high proportion of fat to flour. She created a master recipe that she varies with different mix-ins and glazes. “It gives me the chance to try something new or make use of what’s on hand,” she says. Here are four of her favorite variations plus her hard-won recipe for oatmeal scones.

Makes 8 scones

• 1¾ cups (half pound) all-purpose flour
• 2½ teaspoons baking powder
• ¾ teaspoon salt
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 1/3 cup cold unsalted butter
• ¾ cup rich milk (5 ounces whole milk with 1 ounce half-and-half added)

Preheat oven to 375°F.

Sift dry ingredients into a large bowl. Cut butter into small pieces, add to flour mixture, and incorporate into flour with a pastry cutter. Warm the milk and add to the flour mixture. Stir just until dry ingredients become moistened. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead just until it’s formed into a smooth ball. Divide dough into 2 pieces, pat into rounds, and then cut each round into quarters. Transfer to an ungreased sheet pan. Bake in the preheated oven for 12 to 15 minutes (or less if using a convection oven). Turn the pan once in the middle of baking if using a standard oven.

Variations

Lemon Poppy Seed: Zest and juice 1 lemon. Stir ½ of the lemon zest into the sugar before adding it to the dry ingredients in the master recipe. Add ¼ cup poppy seeds to the dry ingredients. Stir to combine. Continue with instructions above. Make a glaze with 1 tablespoon lemon juice and ½ cup powdered sugar. Pour glaze over scones or brush it on just after baking.

Apricot Orange: Roughly chop 8 dried apricot halves and add to the milk. Warm the milk to soften the apricots. Zest an orange and add ½ of the zest to dry ingredients. Make a glaze with 1 tablespoon orange juice and ½ cup powdered sugar. Pour glaze over scones or brush it on just after baking.

Cherry Almond: Roughly chop 1/3 cup dried cherries and add to the milk. Warm the milk to soften cherries. Add 1/3 cup slivered almonds to dry ingredients. Place 1 tablespoon sugar in a custard cup with 2 tablespoons water. Warm in a microwave to dissolve sugar. Brush the sugar water on the tops of the scones and sprinkle sliced almonds over tops before baking.

Butterscotch Chip: Add 3 ounces (¼ package) butterscotch chips and 1/3 cup roughly chopped pecans to dry ingredients. Make a mixture of 2 tablespoons finely chopped pecans and 2 tablespoons brown sugar. Brush tops of scones with milk and sprinkle on the pecan mixture before baking.

 

Dorine’s Oatmeal Scones

“Before we opened, I struggled to find an oatmeal scone recipe that worked for me. Nothing was working until I tried liquid fat,” says Real. For a variation, she adds a handful of chopped apple bits.

Makes 8 scones

• 1 egg
• ½ cup milk
• ½ cup melted butter
• 1 cup old-fashioned rolled oats
• ¾ cup currants
• ¾ cup all-purpose flour
• ¾ cup oat flour
• ¼ cup sugar
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• Cinnamon sugar

Preheat oven to 375°F.

Beat the egg and milk in a large mixing bowl. Stir in the melted butter along with the rolled oats and currants . Let stand for 5 minutes.

Sift all-purpose flour, oat flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder into a separate bowl. Add to milk-butter-oat mixture and stir just until it comes together as a sticky dough.

Turn dough out onto a floured surface. Flour your hands and sprinkle some flour over the dough. Knead briefly and gather the dough until it forms a smooth ball. Divide dough into 2 pieces, pat into 6-inch rounds, and then cut each round into quarters. Transfer to an ungreased sheet pan. Sprinkle with a small amount of cinnamon sugar and give a little pat to embed the sugar into the dough.

Bake in preheated oven for 12 to 15 minutes. The time will be shorter if using a convection oven. It might help to turn the pan once in the middle of baking if using a standard oven.