Time for a Baycation

Pearl Hotel pays homage to the Cure family legacy

by Mimi Greenwood Knight

PEARL HOTEL photo courtesy IN CASE YOU’VE BEEN LIVING UNDER A ROCK for the past few years, let me be the one to tell you that Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, has got it going on.

Since Hurricane Katrina put a whooping on it in 2005, the once-sleepy beachside village has reinvented itself. What has emerged is a fun, funky, artsy, highly walkable town that’s hopping every night and bustling every weekend. In fact, USA Today listed it in its “10 Best Small Coastal Towns in America” in 2020. The new, improved Bay St. Louis offers cafes and boutiques, art galleries, antique shops, museums, restaurants and pubs, many of them tucked away in quaint and quirky historic buildings. The Bay’s downtown offers multi-story restaurants/bars open to Gulf breezes and the sights and sounds of the harbor. Foodies find everything here from finger fare in the bars to craft cocktails and fine dining in the restaurants with tons of fresh-offthe-boat seafood everywhere.

As New Orleans ex-pats—and others— have found their way to the Bay, many have set up idyllic, little Airbnbs within walking distance (or golf-cartriding distance) of the trendy downtown. At night, there’s live music along historic Beach Boulevard as visitors mingle with locals, all strolling with drinks in hand. Daytime finds endless shopping opportunities, with many stores featuring local artwork. There are popular festivals like Frida Fest, Cruising the Coast and Jeepin’ the Coast—plus block parties every second Saturday and Katrina-damaged trees transformed into towering angels. With all the growth and reinvention though, Bay St. Louis has held onto its small-town Southern charm and maintained the atmosphere that appealed to our parents—and their parents before them.

If the beachside community was still missing one thing, it got it last year as a local founding family opened Pearl Hotel, a 59-room boutique hotel smack in the beating heart of Olde Town. The name and the décor throughout the hotel pay homage to the life and legacy of the Cure family. We were lucky enough to speak to Sarah Cure Clark, a third-generation in the family business, who co-manages the hotel with her brother, Joseph. She offered us a first-hand look around the elegant, new digs and a look back at the family legacy it honors.

Cure is a Gulf Coast girl through and through, having grown up right down the road in Waveland, attending the same elementary school where her father met her mother. She went to high school at Our Lady Academy, a stone’s throw from the hotel, before heading off to Ole Miss and eventually joining the family business. That business began in 1959, when her grandfather, Joseph Cure, known to the family simply as “The Old Man,” obtained a single oyster boat and tried his hand in the Hancock County oyster business.

Sarah chokes up as she talks about the decades of “blood, sweat, and tears” that went into making their Bayou Caddy Fisheries a success. “People don’t realize what hard work the oyster business is,” she says. “My grandparents worked day and night to build up a business they could give to their four kids, which included my dad. Now, most of their eight grandchildren work in the family business, too.”

As the oyster business grew, family enterprises expanded to include a trucking company, a land management company, and more recently, the hotel. In an oversized oil painting in the lobby of Pearl Hotel, Gulf Coast native Billy Solitario captured the family’s first boat, The Cindy C, named for the oldest Cure sibling. That boat is still in operation today, and Cure is happy to explain e

very element of the boat’s workings and the way the family learned to farm oysters, buying back the oyster shells from their customers and creating or enhancing the oyster beds they later dredge. As they fostered longtime relationships with customers and employees, their reputation and fleet grew, adding 15 more boats, named first for the next three Cure siblings, The Joey C, The Michael C, and The Susie C, and then moving on to the names of the grandchildren and even family pets, most recently adding The Atticus C, named for a beloved dog.

Throughout Pearl Hotel (Cure is quick to point out there’s no ‘The’ in the name and no affiliation with The Pearl Hotel in Florida or New York.), artwork and photography pay homage to the Hancock County oyster business with depictions of the Cures’ boats and the faces of longtime employees. There’s oyster art and other references throughout the rooms, lobby and the onsite restaurants and bar, including a giant pair of weathered oyster tongs on the wall of the hotel’s craft cocktail bar, Hinge. Cure was adamant that artwork for Pearl Hotel be commissioned from Gulf Coast artists and employed other locals to handle their marketing and interior design. She says, “Rick Dobbs did our logo, and he worked hard to create a font based on my grandmother’s handwriting. That’s her handwriting on our logo and sign just as if she’d written it.”

The hotel was still under construction but close to completion in October 2020, when Hurricane Zeta hit Bay St. Louis. “It was terrible,” says Cure. “We had to replace all the windows, and the hardwood floors in the restaurant were ruined. It set us back. That’s the only time Joseph and I disagreed on anything. I felt like we still needed to open on December 30. We had an entire block of rooms reserved for a wedding that weekend. Canceling would have been a PR nightmare. Joseph wanted to take our time and open when we were 100 percent

ready.” The family backed Sarah, and they opened by the skin of their teeth on December 30. She says, “It was a nightmare. So much was on backorder because of COVID, and our installers had headed back to California. We worked Christmas Eve, had Christmas day with our kids, and on December 26 were back at it. The night before we opened, my husband and I and other family members were here hanging mirrors and assembling furniture. To be honest, there’s still a ton on our punch list, but people have been very complimentary. We’re getting good reviews and people are returning, so that’s a good sign, right? We came into this with no idea how to run a hotel, but it helps to think about what you’d like in a hotel yourself and then give it to your guests. When my husband, Jeremy, and I got married in 2014, there were only two small hotels in the area. It was crazy trying to find places for all our out-of-town guests to stay. We’re booking a lot of weddings now, seeing a lot of people from New Orleans and locals enjoying a staycation. We’re getting guests from other states, too, but it’s been mostly from the South.”

The four-story hotel, designed by New Orleans-based firm Trapolin-Peer, came with an $18-million price tag. It includes six suites, an event space, appropriately named The Captain’s Quarters, a courtyard and a pool with private cabanas. Just this month, they opened a poolside bar. Currently under construction and coming soon are designated guest parking and The Reef at Pearl Hotel, a retail space for guests. “It’s amazing to step back and realize it’s all come together,” says Cure. “Pearl Hotel stands as a tribute to our grandparents and every fisherman who’s been a part of our family over the years.”