A Woman Found a Rare Pearl While Eating a Clam and Turned It Into a One-of-a-Kind Engagement Ring

Sandy Sikorsky and Ken Steinkamp regularly enjoy date night at The Bridge Restaurant and Raw Bar in Westerly, Rhode Island, and their go-to order is often the quahogs, a variety of hard clams. “They’re bigger, and they come in platters upraised…They taste delicious,” Sikorsky explains to NBC 10 WJAR. While they were dining out at the restaurant with Sikorki’s brother and wife in December 2021, the couple found something unexpected yet incredibly valuable in their favorite seafood dish: a rare pearl. 

At the restaurant, Sikorsky and Steinkamp were sharing an order of quahogs, and once they got down to the last one, Steinkamp politely offered it to Sikorsky. “I said, ‘OK Sandy, you have it. You really like this,'" Steinkamp recalls. Once Sikorski bit into the last clam, she knew something was off. “That’s when I tasted this big, round thing in my mouth, and I’m thinking, ‘What the heck is this?’” Sikorski recounts to the outlet. “So, I take it and spit it down on the table in my hand, and my sister-in-law says, ‘Is that a tooth?’”

It turns out that the hard item inside of the clam wasn’t a tooth but was instead a 9.8-millimeter pearl. “What are the odds of a pearl being inside of this shell?” Sikorski wonders. She decided to take the stone to fine jewelry store The Compass Rose in Westerly to assess its worth. “He said, ‘Wow you got a beauty there. It’s heavy,’” Sikorski recounts. After evaluating the gem, the jeweler told Sikorsky that it’s called a Mercenaria pearl, which took about 50 years to make. “He goes, ‘It’s probably one in a million, one in a million to have it perfect,’” Sikorksi continues. “Usually, there’s pieces of them missing, and it looks like a tooth or something. It is never like the whole perfect little oval. Plus, it’s big.”

Right then and there, they decided that they would use that pearl to make an engagement ring once they got engaged. Sikorski added that she wanted a gold setting to secure it. Steinkamp also took the unique discovery as a sign that they’re destined to be together. “We’re not getting any younger, and we felt in a way that this was kind of a signal or an odd bit of synchronicity, and we said, ‘This would be a great engagement ring,’ and so it is,” Steinkamp says. So, on July 8, 2023, Steinkamp proposed with the pearl ring in hand. “It’s beautiful,” Sikorsky gushes. “It has diamonds and a sparkle.”

After Steinkamp popped the question, the couple naturally celebrated at the place where it all started: The Bridge Restaurant and Raw Bar. “It was nice to see them again and hear that story,” hostess Myra Dioisio tells the outlet. “It’s a fairy tale. It’s magical. You hear about, ‘Oh, I hope to find something in there,’ but you never do. It’s always a piece of rock or sand.” After Diosio posted a picture of the ring on the the restaurant's Facebook page, one person commented that he’s never found a pearl despite frequently searching for one. “A man posted he had shucked 100,000 oyster in his day, and he never found one pearl or one of those,” Sikorksi explains. 

Sikorski says that one day, she’d like to have the pearl appraised, but for now, she’s enjoying wearing it on her left ring finger. She also tells the news outlet that she hopes to one day pass the ring down to her granddaughter, Nora, who is eight years old. When asked if they ever thought this would happen to them, Sikorski responds, “Not in a million years.” Steinkamp was similarly surprised at their luck. “The more you think about it, it does become a more charming and romantic story,” he says.