A Totally Delightful Surprise

A year or so ago our very favorite restaurant in the world closed.  Dear Husband and I ate lunch there at least two Sundays a month, and we often had dinner there as well.  Food was limited to old fashioned Florida seafood -- fried by somebody who knew their way around a stove!  Everything was take-out but they had picnic tables all around the building, which sits on a little promontory between the intracoastal waterway and a marina.  Pelicans, seagulls and every other manner of coastal bird sit on posts around the dock.  Dolphins and the occasional manatee were routine visitors. I'm not a huge fan of fried fish, but I loved the atmosphere so much, I ate it anyway.  Sitting in outside in the sunshine, with a cold beer and visiting with native Florida critters was enough for me.

Ever since the place closed, we've been checking back periodically to see if someone else might open a restaurant there.  In recent weeks, someone was remodeling the building and it appeared that a new restaurant was in the works.  Today, it was open.  The views are the same.  The beer is still cold. The counter area and kitchen had gotten kind of run down; now it's all clean and new.  They need some new picnic tables outside, but far be if from me to quibble about a little thing like that.

The best part was the food!  For one thing, they offered both grilled and blackened fish in addition to the awesome fried stuff. DH doesn' t like blackened fish, so we split a seafood platter and got the oysters and scallops fried, with grilled fish and shrimp.  It was hands-down the best grilled shrimp I've ever tasted and the fish rivaled my benchmark grilled fish from a dive on Key Largo.  (The only points off were that it was mahi mahi, not grouper.) The Cole slaw was good and so were the hush puppies. I wasn't much for the tartar sauce (it was made with miracle whip, which I think is a disgusting concoction that should not be considered actual food).  However, the fish was so good it didn't need the tartar sauce, so I didn't care.  

As if all that were not enough, the price was right.