Roses Bakery Cafe

If you want a dinner/​lunch to treat yourself this is the place to do it. We had their pizzas, soup, desserts and some delicious beer from the Island Hoppin Brewery. Everything was fantastic. Prices are a little high, but you’re paying for quality here.

Food was good to great, limited options for vegetarians. Food was fresh and unique, but maybe a bit overpriced. We sat on the patio, which can be breezy to cool. One of us asked for wine recommendations which seemed to baffle the server.

Best lunch in town! Crab cakes are off the charts, as is the clam linguini! Came back next day had a repeat!!! Go early or you will be turned away or on a list!

Fresh local ingredients that are hard to beat. The salad with crab and marionberry crumble were the standouts.

The food here is fresh and had quality ingredients. Prices for some items seemed very steep. I had a BLAT sandwich. A Bacon Lettuce and Avocado Sandwich. It had some avocado smeared on the inside and two pieces of bacon. The sandwich came with a teaspoon of potato salad. That was $ 12.
The patio is pet friendly and the service was nice and attentive. The value was not there for the price.

I accidentally ordered the wrong thing (because the menu had very similarly named items) and the waitress was unwilling to fix the mistake or do anything to help me make the experience right, except to point out it was my fault. Her attitude was all like «too bad so sad.» Not only that but the food was terrible. Rubbery, dry eggs. And the wait for our bad food took an hour.

Yum! Great atmosphere, super friendly service, gorgeous food and an affordable bottle of champagne mean I’ll definitely be back next time I get to visit Orcas.

Absolutely loved this place! Everything we ordered was perfectly prepared, with the freshest ingredients. We will definitely be back! Friendly staff, excellent food.

Staff was awesome and the food just as awesome. Very very fresh and tasted nothing but quality! A little gem on the island for sure! Loved the salt and pepper shaker mills

This place certainly caters to an older crowd. I personally found the food on the bland and boring side. While excellent quality and well executed, nothing popped or really gave me a reason to finish my plate.

We had grav lox and croque Monsieur The salmon on the grav lox was smoked to perfection, heirloom tomatoes, and fresh baked rye bread… simply delicious! The croque Monsieur was delicious with melted cheese, ham and the added egg. Would highly recommend this place for breakfast.

Fantastic brunch here for our first time to Orcas Island! We came on the Friday morning of 4^th of July weekend around 10 am. When we first arrived the dining room was about half full but when we left it was hard to spot an empty table. All of the baked goods in the counter look great, the kitchen is open air, they have a nice patio outside but they weren’t seating anyone out there when we first arrived, and they had a limited menu but with good selections.
Three of us ordered the poached eggs on potato nest while I was the only one that ordered the crispy polenta cakes with a poached egg, greens and a spicy red sauce. Order this! I wanted to lick my plate clean and that wasn’t because I was left hungry. The eggs all around were cooked perfectly, the polenta and potato nests were actually crispy but not burnt. The greens were nicely cooked and added another element to the dish but the real winner was that super delicious spicy sauce. Oh wow!
Staff was friendly and checked in when needed but were also quite busy. The food coming out of the kitchen was a little slow and the only reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5. Café vitta coffee is another win!

Good atmosphere and serving staff. Food was good but not at the level of the décor or the price. Kitchen staff is slow moving and unfriendly. Overall an OK but not nearly as good of a place as the rest of the reviews display.

We’ve been going to Rose’s regularly for at least 15 years. It remains the best food on Orcas, but it is worth remembering that the demand for meals fluctuates wildly from month to month.
Come to Orcas in the winter and feel the care that goes into this food. Come to Orcas in the summer and you may find a frazzled staff.
Based on many visits, here’s what we know:
The staff is expert and knowledgeable. They can get stretched so ask questions but try to help them get you served.
The food is prepared from scratch from local ingredients. That costs more so prices might be higher than you’d expect. But these guys do it to produce better food and the quality is first rate.
Learn about Island Time. That can be hard with small children but slow down enough to enjoy Orcas and it’s quirks. The food and the people at Rose’s are really remarkable but you may miss both if you aren’t prepared to take your time.
You are not in the Big City when you are in Eastsound…

The best thing I have ever eaten on vacation at the San Juan Islands was at a place called Rose’s Restaurant on Orcas Island. It was burrata, olive oil over sliced heirloom tomatoes and basil with a sprinkling of crunchy salt. Everyone I was with was absolutely bowled over by this! This is a seasonal item.

How can you not love this great place, they do so many things so well. Service is wonderful, the food is frequently local and REALLY good. Breakfast rocks too, so don’t miss out on that if you haven’t tried it. I would eat here everyday if I could afford to :)

We came to Roses over a year ago and had a lovely experience, delicious food, and beyond fantastic service. This memory is what prompted us to return. However, something was distinctly different and unfortunately our good memory faded into a dream as the reality of the place in its current rendition sank in.
Atmosphere:
The ambiance is lovely and the space is well appointed. The attached delicatessen is, without a doubt, the best part of the experience; wines, bread, cheese, charcuterie, cookware and imported foods.
Service:
Incredibly aloof. From the time we were seated to our interaction with the waitstaff I was concerned by the thousand yard stare theme that seemed to be endemic with the waitstaff. Our pigtailed server seemed kind of glossed over and when we presented her with menu questions there was a definite heir of patronization from her we found incredibly insulting. My suggestion to the owner, address that situation immediately because I know first hand how that plays out. BAD! Aside from the semi-​snide service and glossy eyes food did come promptly from the kitchen.
Food:
Our pizza was the best part of the meal… However, strange that the pizza should be the entrée première in this kind of place. I must warn everyone to do yourselves a favor and don’t order the ham and gruyère sandwich unless you like butter… like a solid inch of butter. Instead that sandwich should be called the «mouth coater» because your mouth is literally schelacked in butter while you consume the thing. Seriously, it is a laughable and obscene sandwich that costs about $ 16. Yikes! So, don’t get the butter sandwich or like two of our party you will be sad while you watch your guests eat pizza. We also tried the halibut which was cooked well, was very fresh and came with not enough slaw and two daintily appointed olives. Our espressos were bitter from improper execution.
To summarize, Roses is not what we remembered it. The service has gotten, unfortunately, very lackadaisical and snotty and the cuisine that was once so well imagined and divinely ordained has become hastily slapshod as if the mission is now, hang on and just get the job done. I hope the owners dream is not dead and the great Roses we remember from yesteryear might reappear.
My advice is to go to the deli and order some well selected cheese and charcuterie… select a nice bottle and take it to go.

Delicious sandwiches! All the food here is good, but I particularly like the halibut sandwich. It’s sooooo flavorful and fresh. It’s lovely to sit outside during the summer… there can be quite a wait for one of these tables, especially when it’s warm out. The prices are a little high, but the quality of food makes up for this. They also tend to run out of certain items on the menu, so get there early!

Our recent trip to Orcas Island yielded a lot of wonderful culinary delights and experiences that I will cherish for many years. Our experience at Rose’s Bakery and Café was definitely not one of them. It was the second-​to-​last day of our vacation on Orcas Island, and I had originally committed to making dinner for everyone. Like I am sure many of you have experienced though, it was the end of my vacation and I just did not feel like cooking that night. So, we made a last minute decision to try Rose’s because of the good reviews my fellow Unilocal’ers have written.
Food: Under-​seasoned, and a complete lack of flavor are the themes for this meal. For starters, they had a mussels special that they were advertising as an appetizer, and I think I have a pretty good idea why. The mussels arrived at the table with incredible promise as it was a monstrous bowl of mussels, piled-​high and cooked in a white sauce. Gosh, they looked amazing — that was, until you ate them and realized that not only were they bland; but some of them tasted a bit older than the others. My guess? They were cycling-​out some shellfish that was rapidly approaching expiration. That may be untrue, but some of them had a distinctly ‘fishier’ flavor. You know, the flavor of seafood when it is about to expire.
Anyway, our party of 6 ate about a third of them. When the waitress came, we expressed our dislike for them, and figured they would do the right thing when the bill came (I’ll continue this later). For our lunch, one of our group members had the pizza with assorted meats, where I had the ham and cheese on a baguette with some fancy butter scraped across the top. This was, literally, the worst ham and cheese sandwich I have ever had. It, literally, tasted like nothing — zero flavor! The ham was bland, the cheese (which I believe was gruyère and should have imparted a beautiful nutty undertone) was bland, the butter was bland. I could have made a better sandwich with Oscar Mayer products and week-​old bread. If this sandwich were $ 6, I would not be as dissatisfied, but it was over double that (more to come).
Food: ²⁄₅ (one person in our party thought the food was alright)
Service: Though the service was kind, it was pompous. From asking if they had Pepsi (where the waitress snobbishly referenced us to the wall of ‘fancy’ beverages behind our table), to the haughty response to my wife asking what was in the ‘slaw’ that accompanied our sandwiches (which I believe was celery root) — all the way to our mussels not being half-​priced or at-​cost-​priced. I understand that I ordered them; but the ‘right’ thing to do is to at least identify that an entire table of people disliked your food, and should not be penalized for your inability to cook fresh food.
Service: ¹⁄₅ (ignorant, haughty service with no desire to make a situation ‘right’)
Atmosphere: This is an extremely charming, little restaurant that has a delightful little shop attached. I would frequent a place modeled like this, as I found it very cozy. However, the uptight attitude, coupled with seemingly inflated self-​importance that Rose’s boasts is a major turn-​off.
Atmosphere: ²⁄₅
Price: Possibly the worst value for food I have ever experienced in my entire life. Between the under-​seasoned and under-​flavored mussels, the bland ham and cheese, and the sub-​standard service coupled with brilliant arrogance, I would rather spend my money at McDonald’s — and I haven’t eaten there since 2007.
Price: ¹⁄₅ (a $ 14 sandwich? Really? And THAT is what I got…)
Final Thoughts: In a touristy area, there are always ‘those places’ that use the natural foot-​traffic of an area to try and serve food that doesn’t even remotely live-​up to the inflated cost of its products and services. As shocking as this may seem, given the high average-​stars Rose’s has achieved, they are definitely one of them. This was one of the worst dining experiences I have had in a very long time. This is why it gets 1-​star overall — for its uniquely awful service, and tourist-​trap prices on uninspired food.

Meh. Feh. Shrug. Whatever.
After many days of hasty breakfasts of just toast and coffee, I was craving an old-​fashioned feast of eggs, bacon, and hash browns, or a waffle with fresh berries, or some French toast. Rose’s is NOT the place to go for this.
Rose’s scant menu had little variety. Want eggs? You get your choice of poached, poached, or poached. No omelets, no scrambles, no over-​mediums. You’ll have poached eggs and like it, serf. Want cheese? Gruyère or nothin’. Want bacon? Suck it; your ration is two shavings of prosciutto, and that’s the only meat choice there is. Want potatoes? One dish on the menu comes with potatoes; the rest include only toast or a baguette. (And most of the toast-​or-​baguette dishes are strictly continental breakfasts that do not include eggs, just cheese or butter.) You can’t order a side of potatoes or bacon. You can’t make substitutions. In Rose-​ia, breakfast order YOU.
For $ 14, I got a salad plate with the closest thing on the menu that I could find to a hearty breakfast: a hash brown nest with two poached eggs, and two sheets of prosciutto, each about the size and thickness of a personal check.
Drip coffee is $ 2, and for that, you schlep your own refills from a pump carafe on the counter. No one refilled my water glass, ever. No one asked, after my meal finally arrived 20 minutes after ordering, whether I needed anything or if everything was all right.
I see a lot of apologists here claiming that smug, indifferent, high-​priced scantiness is to be expected because quality blah blah local ingredients blah blah. I call bullshit. Why? Because when I’m not on the island, I live near two of the best breakfast places in the Northwest. The Maltby Café, for example, kicks Rose’s stuck-​up little ass with their variety and generosity, and they also use local ingredients, seasonal fruits and vegetables, their own breads and pastries, and scratch-​made house recipes.
What’s the difference? The difference is that a place like Rose’s is all about Rose, or whoever the owner is. It’s about the food philosophies that Rose wants to impose on her diners. A place like the Maltby Café is about their diners, and what makes them happy. I’m a diner, not a restaurateur, so thanks, but I prefer the latter.