Keeping Up with the Joneses
“We’re always looking ahead and exploring new restaurant ideas and locations,” Julia Jones, owner of The Point Crab House and Grill in Arnold, told Bay Weekly last August.
Now Jones and her partner-husband Bobby have found the spot.
The pair who created a million-dollar waterfront destination on Mill Creek off the Magothy River are expanding to Herring Bay.
Ketch 22 will open at Herrington Harbour South Marina Resort by summer. A complete remodel is underway.
“It’s a big project, and we’re trying to do it the best we can for the neighborhood,” Bobby Jones tells me.
The restaurant business is a labor of love for the Chesapeake Country pair, who’ve been acquainted since high school, sweethearts since college. Its pull was so strong that the University of Maryland Baltimore County graduates left careers in their fields to open The Point. In five years, they’ve made it a neighborhood gathering spot with regional appeal, noted in The Washington Post, Washingtonian Magazine and Travel and Leisure.
Their success at The Point is based on their investment in Chesapeake cuisine and culture. Food is efesh, regional and innovative. Views from The Point’s setting at Ferry Point Marina are traditional, nautical and wide open.
Herrington Harbour South offers a parallel setting and opportunity.
That’s a bonus for the ambitious pair, who hadn’t gone looking for that in particular.
“Julia and I have been in business nearly 30 years, in a lot of higher end restaurants and all different sorts of places,” Bobby Jones says. “We’d been looking at different opportunities and spots all over the place. If we’d seen an interesting opportunity, it could have been a milkshake stand.”
They chose Herrington because, says Jones, “this spot is just great, the team terrific, the property beautiful, the parking right.”
The punny Ketch 22 takes over Herrington’s marina-centered, pool-front location from Mango’s, the latest in a series of Caribbean-themed restaurants, bars and tiki bars at the popular spot.
There, as at The Point, the Joneses plan to create “a place where people feel like they’re on a little mini vacation.”