Kent Island Local News for August 2026: Two Island Stories

Early August on Kent Island usually means one thing to anyone driving in from off-island: boat traffic backed up toward the Bridge, tables full at the crab houses, a Tuesday that feels like a Saturday. That was true again this month. But the two stories locals were actually passing along to each other this week had nothing to do with any of that. One was about a bagel shop that closes at two in the afternoon. The other was about a crew of thirteen who spent a summer afternoon in the water, wrapping bags of oyster shells around the pilings under a restaurant's own dock.

Neither story was built for a visitor. Both were built by people who had somewhere else they could have been, and chose to put their time into the island instead. That is the thread worth pulling on, because it says something about how Kent Island actually runs underneath the summer traffic.

A Shop Built to Close by Two

DePaola's Bagel and Brunch sits in a shopping center on Shopping Center Road in Stevensville, the kind of address you'd drive past without a second look. It opened about three and a half years ago, founded by Andrew DePaola, who is also a Pro Bowl long snapper for the Minnesota Vikings. For roughly half the year, he is not behind the counter at all. His parents, who used to run a restaurant in Baltimore County, keep the shop going while he is in Minnesota.

The idea came from a specific kind of frustration. DePaola and his wife would visit her sister on the island in the off-season, go out for the evening, and wake up the next morning wanting something that did not exist yet. As he put it, he grew up loving bagels enough that he wanted to eat them "right out of the bag," and years spent in New Jersey sharpened his sense of what a good one should taste like.

The shop runs Monday through Friday from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., and weekends from 7 to 2. That schedule is not built around a dinner rush or a sunset crowd. It is built around people who need breakfast before a shift starts, which is a very different customer than the one most Kent Island restaurants are chasing in July and August. DePaola still tests recipes with teammates and coaches in Minnesota, and some of those suggestions have made it onto the Stevensville menu, which means a cream cheese spread on Kent Island may have started as a conversation in an NFL locker room a thousand miles away.

The Pilings Under Libbey's Dock

A few miles down the road, at the foot of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, a different kind of project was underway at Libbey's Coastal Kitchen and Cocktails. The day before National Oyster Day, six men in a boat and seven more in wetsuits worked together, wrapping more than thirty bags of oyster shells, held in place with concrete and fabric cuffs, around old pilings left over from a previous pier near the restaurant.

The reasoning is more specific than it sounds. Pilings made of treated wood are built to resist rot, which also makes them resistant to the marine life that would otherwise colonize them. Concrete pilings nearby, by contrast, tend to grow their own healthy oyster communities without any help. The team, led by John Consoli of Kent Island, wrapped shell-filled cuffs around six wood pilings to essentially give them a concrete-like surface, hoping oysters would take to it the way they already had next door.

Walt Petrie, one of Libbey's owners, said the project started from a practical concern about the dock itself, recalling how the wake from a passing freighter would set a tied-up boat rocking.

"We were worried when people would bring the boat here and tie up."

The install took about ninety minutes, working at low tide against water that was still seven to eight feet deep with a strong current. Consoli expects the pilings to grow a working mini reef within one to three years. That is a slow return on ninety minutes of labor, and it has nothing to do with what shows up on the menu. Libbey's does not source appetizers from the reef it is building. The point is to help clean the bay its own dock sits in.

Same Water, Same Logic

Libbey's has a history worth knowing if you are going to understand why an owner would sign off on a project like this at all. The restaurant occupies the site of the old Hemingway's, and when Petrie took it over, he named the new place after his wife Lisa and daughters Lindsay and Abbey, combining pieces of all three names into Libbey's. The signature cocktail, the Papa's Old Fashioned, still nods to the building's Hemingway roots. None of that history is something a first-time visitor needs to know to enjoy a crab cake. It matters more to the people who have been eating there since it was still Hemingway's, and to an owner who put his own family's names on the building.

That is the pattern connecting a bagel counter that closes at two and a restaurant owner rebuilding a reef under his own dock. Both are decisions made for the place itself, not for the visitor passing through it. DePaola could have opened somewhere closer to his football schedule. Instead he built a shop that runs on his parents' hours when he cannot be there, serving a crowd that needs breakfast before work rather than brunch at noon. Petrie could have left the pilings as pilings. Instead he directed labor and materials toward a project whose payoff is measured in years, not turns of a table.

What to Watch For at the Dock This Month

Libbey's still offers complimentary dockage for up to two hours at the Bay Bridge Marina, so anyone who wants to see the pilings in question can tie up and walk over. The reef work is not finished. Consoli's timeline puts real oyster growth on those six pilings somewhere in the next one to three years, which means the difference between a wood piling and its newly wrapped neighbor will be visible, gradually, to anyone who ties up there regularly enough to notice.

The same is true of the bagel shop. Its rhythm will keep shifting with the football calendar, busier at the counter when DePaola himself is behind it in the offseason, running on family hours the rest of the year. Neither story needed a ribbon cutting or a marketing push. Both surfaced because someone on this island was paying closer attention to the water and the people around it than any visitor passing through ever would.

Shawn Moore and his wife Meagan work this stretch of the Eastern Shore year-round, and stories like these are part of why they still enjoy it. If you ever want to talk through what's happening on Kent Island, on the water or off it, Shawn Moore is glad to hear from you. Let's Find Your Perfect Home Together.