13 minute read
DIVERSE DINING From
Dining Options That Please All Palates
Grand Boulevard offers an array of exceptional eateries
Grand Boulevard’s array of restaurants has you covered. Whether you’re running errands and need a quick bite, possibly a fresh salad or wrap from everkrisp; or you’re celebrating a major milestone and decide to have a special meal at Emeril’s Coastal or Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar; or you simply need an afternoon pick-me-up, so you stop into Black Bear Bread Co. or Kilwins.
No matter the occasion, from fast and casual to fine dining, you would be hardpressed not to find a dining option you adore at Grand Boulevard.
“The great thing about Grand Boulevard’s restaurant options is we’ve got the best of all worlds from locally owned to nationally known names,” said Stacey Brady, director of marketing and communications with Grand Boulevard.
With 16 dining experiences, whatever your tastebuds tingle for, Grand Boulevard likely has it.
Say you’re shopping and you want a sit-down experience with a filling meal, Grimaldi’s Coal Brick-Oven Pizza is noted as having some of the best slices in the region, with fans flocking to the meatball pizza.
The Craft Bar is a locally owned gastropub that’s a great place to gather with friends. Try out local, regional and
national craft beers paired with standout menu items like the hot chicken or an array of burger options.
Everkrisp’s tagline is “where farm meets fast food.” Diners enjoy farm-totable fresh salads, wraps and sandwiches to sit down or to-go. Everkrisp proves fast doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice quality ingredients.
Black Bear Bread Co., a locally owned company that opened its second location at Grand Boulevard, specializes in artisan, fresh-from-scratch bread and pastries. Begin the day with a pastry and coffee, and in the afternoon, transition to a glass of wine and a baguette.
A favorite for breakfast, brunch and lunch, Another Broken Egg plates comfort food from benedicts to Belgian waffles to brunch cocktails. Speaking of libations, The Wine Bar and Vin’tij Food & Wine are known for their perfect pours and pairings.
The Wine Bar may present itself as casual, but the artisan, chef-inspired menu is anything but casual. The atmosphere makes for an ideal happy hour, date night or girls’ night out.
Vin’tij is an award-winning restaurant serving fresh foods from local purveyors paired with an extensive and impressive wine list. If you enjoyed the wine you sipped with your meal, you can head over to the wine shop to purchase a takehome bottle.
If your heart flutters at the mention of chips and queso, or you never miss a Taco Tuesday, Cantina Laredo should be on your radar. The menu is flexible with casual fares like burritos and fajitas or upscale options such as fish and steak. No matter what, the tableside guacamole is a must-order.
Tommy Bahama Restaurant & Bar came to Grand Boulevard as a first-inmarket dining option. The garden room and patio overlook the park providing pleasant scenery to enjoy island-inspired seafood, steaks and signature cocktails.
To impress family, friends or coworkers, Emeril’s Coastal and Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar are prime locations. As a South Walton resident, chef personality Emeril Lagasse has a deep appreciation for the nearby coastal seafood, which is featured prominently on the menu. Diners have been known to see the chef himself in the kitchen from time to time. You won’t go wrong with an excellently cooked steak from Fleming’s delectable menu.
Nationally known chains Jimmy John’s, Starbucks, P.F. Chang’s and Kilwins promise speedy service and reliable food and beverage offerings.
“Ideally, we offer something unique to our market, something you’re not going to see elsewhere around here,” Brady said. “When dining and drinking at Grand Boulevard, you’re going to experience quality food, great customer service and a pleasant atmosphere.”
GRAND BOULEVARD
585 GRAND BOULEVARD, MIRAMAR BEACH | (850) 837-3099 | GRANDBOULEVARD.COM
PERSONALITY
ALL-AMERICAN BEACH TOWN
Panama City Beach is a reliably fun place
by STEVE BORNHOFT
For a few years now, Visit Panama City Beach, a tourism promotion organization, has maintained a three-word brand position: Real. Fun. Beach.
It’s ambiguous. Is “Real” meant to qualify “Fun” or is it meant to signify authentic or genuine?
“It works both ways,” said Dan Rowe, Visit Panama City Beach’s president and CEO. “Real fun is not necessarily the most grammatically correct, but it is true. Real stands alone, but it also amplifies fun. Those three little words are incredibly important as we look out into the world and the world looks into us.”
Rowe isn’t inclined to tinker with the VPCB motto — even if the practice of separating words in a stance line with periods so as to add emphasis to each word passes from view — but his outlook on the World’s Most Beautiful Beaches suggests that he wouldn’t object strenuously to the addition of Reliable.
“Panama City Beach for generations has been one of the truly all-American beach towns,” he said during an interview. “It goes all the way back to the 1930s. This has been a place that people have come to, year in and year out, because the quality of the experience is always so high. There are a lot of beaches in the nation that you go to for a very specific purpose, but this is a beach where you come to relax, chill out and have fun.”
↖ Visit Panama City Beach president and CEO Dan Rowe at the Panama City Beach Sports Complex. Sports tourism has become an important part of the visitation mix at the “Home of the World’s Most Beautiful Beaches.” VPCB is working on plans for an indoor sports facility that will adjoin the sports complex’s existing fields of play and host gymnastics, volleyball and other events.
Rowe holds in special regard the early developers of Panama City Beach, including Gideon “Gil” Thomas.
Thomas recalls Harvey Jackson III in his fine history, The Rise and Fall of the Redneck Riviera, “bought a little over 100 acres adjacent to J.E. Churchill’s Long Beach Resort and named it Panama City Beach. Selling the project wasn’t easy, but Thomas’ enthusiasm was contagious. He raised the money, laid out the streets and made them passable with oyster shells brought in from Apalachicola. Then he built a two-story, 12room hotel along with a few tourist cottages. Gated with an arch, the development was so brightly lit at night that it could be seen
from the downtown Dixie-Sherman Hotel, located across St. Andrew Bay.”
Said Rowe about Thomas, “When he opened the first hotel on the sand at Panama City Beach, people ridiculed him. His response was, ‘I’m not here to grow vegetables, I’m here to grow people.’ He had an insight that really helped define our destination.”
On, in, under
Rowe spoke to the natural assets that account for Panama City Beach’s enduring appeal.
“The old adage is that when you get our sand between your toes, you’ll be back,” he said. “That has to do with the quality of the beach and the sand and the whole experience of being out on the Gulf. J.E. Churchwell came up with the tagline ‘World’s Most Beautiful Beaches,’ and it stuck because it ain’t braggin’ if it’s true. Our water is spectacular. When there is no weather system in the Gulf, it is just stunning. We don’t have the big river systems flowing into our bays, so our water clarity is phenomenal.”
That clarity makes Panama City Beach a Florida diving destination second only to the Keys in popularity.
“The beach is our No. 1 attribute, and we show up on best beach lists all the time, but we encourage everyone to get on, get in and get under the water while they are here,” Rowe said.
Amid the sun, the sand, the water and the salt air is fun, and that, Rowe said, “is the glue that holds it all together.
“You come here and you have a smile on your face. The definition of fun will change at different times of the year, but fun is always the centerpiece, whether it’s a family in the summertime, a jazz aficionado during the Seabreeze Jazz Festival, winter residents coming down here to beat the bitter Midwestern cold or a country music fan. Everybody is coming here to have fun. It is really cool to be able to market that because as the world gets crazier, people need to be able to reconnect and be able to put it all aside for a while.”
In Bay County, first Hurricane Michael and then a global pandemic reminded people of the preciousness of connections with others and the importance of good times “because there are some things that are out of our control,” Rowe said. “We’ve done quite well in the aftermath of the pandemic because our fundamentals are very strong: You can come down here, go outside, hang out on the beach, be socially distanced and make sense of the world.”
Even as the Panama City Beach area has begun to become home to largescale residential developments and is seeing a proliferation of branded hotels, Rowe said, its homegrown small businesses remain foundational to the PCB experience and the renewal of traditions each year among regular visitors. Dusty’s Oyster Bar, Goofy Golf, Half Hitch Tackle, the Shell Port and countless other owner-operated businesses are permanent fixtures of the landscape.
↑ Panama City Beach, in the estimation of its promoter-in-chief Dan Rowe, has been a quintessential beach vacation destination for going on 100 years. “There are beaches in the nation that you go to for a very specific purpose,” he said, “but this is a beach where you come to relax, chill out and have fun.”
Expanding on a traditional market
The summer months when children are out of school will always be peak season in Panama City Beach and an area defined by Atlanta, Birmingham and Nashville figures always to be its primary market.
“But we are now seeing a lot of visitation from up the I-65 and I-75 corridors — Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, St. Louis,” Rowe said. “And Texas is a very important market for us. One market that is interesting to me is Orlando. We get a lot of people who come up here from there. That’s a testament to the experience we provide. Because living in Orlando, you’re just a few hours from everywhere in Florida.”
Visit Panama City Beach’s marketing efforts have evolved and expanded over time in response to the ways in which people obtain and consume information.
Given the resumption of international travel, Visit Panama City Beach is relaunching its marketing efforts in the United Kingdom.
The pandemic’s effects
The COVID-19 pandemic both disrupted and benefitted Panama City Beach.
On one hand, it forced the postponement of events owned and sponsored by VPCB. At the same time, people altered travel plans and extended their stays.
“If you are able to work remotely and your kids are going to school virtually, well, a lot of people chose to do that here,” Rowe said. “We have a safer environment than those in a lot of large metro areas. As an economic downturn, the pandemic for us lasted just about 60 days beginning in the middle of March 2020. When the governor reopened the state to shortterm rentals, we were able to get back to business in the middle of May, and we have been growing strong ever since.”
The pandemic meanwhile spurred the popularity of vacation rentals that enable visitors to “control their environment,” Rowe said.
“You can decide when you are going to engage, you don’t have to eat every single meal at a restaurant and you have more space. That sense of space and being able to get away from the crowd is incredibly important. Even though in the summer there are a lot of people on the beach, you still have the ability to enjoy your own little slice of heaven.”
For Rowe, Panama City Beach is an unpretentious place.
“Our visitors look like the average American,” he said. “People of different socio-economic levels come here — we have people who save up to come on vacation to the beach once a year, and we have other people who come here all the time and for whom money in no object. You’ll see Ford F-150 pickup trucks, and you’ll see Range Rovers. But this is one of those great places where everyone is welcome.”
Visit Panama City Beach owns the new Panama City Beach Sports Complex at the eastern end of an area that has come to be known as Breakfast Point, and it is working on plans to develop an indoor sports center that will adjoin the complex’s baseball diamonds and rectangular fields of play. That indoor facility — it will host volleyball matches and gymnastics meets, and VPCB is looking at wiring it for e-sports — will contribute to making visitation in Panama City Beach less seasonal.
Panama City Beach doesn’t drive off a cliff when school resumes anymore, and that, Rowe said, is a change that has occurred gradually over time.
“It used to be that the 100 days of summer were it,” he said. “There was a reason why Panama City Beach got into Spring Break when it did. It was an economic development strategy so businesses could start to bridge the gap between Labor Day and Memorial Day. Now, we have more year-round businesses. Many shopping malls are having a hard time given the advent of online shopping, but Pier Park is an exception. It’s an attraction. Retailers there are doing well, and there is very low turnover from year to year.”
Where does Rowe, promoter-in-chief of Real. Fun. Beach. go to find his little slice of heaven? He fly fishes but not for pompano or bream.
“I prefer being in a cold mountain stream,” said Rowe, who grew up in the West as the son of a National Park Service employee.
“I lived off and on for a decade in Colorado and fished many of the trout streams there,” Rowe said. “I went to Colorado State, and the Roaring Fork was my home water. I have not fished any of the streams up in the Yellowstone area, and the Madison and the Jefferson are definitely on my bucket list.”
Rowe recalled a time spent fishing a pool beneath the Navajo Dam in the desert in southeastern Colorado.
“The trout — big ones — were eating little flies. It was hard to see the flies we were using, much less tie them on. You would see the fish and float a fly by them and all of a sudden, one of them would hit it and those fish would just take off and you would pop more of them off than you could turn. But it was so much fun.”
At his mention of fun, Rowe’s thoughts come back home.
So does Rowe. EC
↑ With events and new facilities, Visit Panama City Beach, under the leadership of Dan Rowe, has succeeded in expanding the community’s tourist season. “It used to be that the 100 days of summer were it,” he said. He said Panama City Beach first sought to enlarge the Memorial Day to Labor Day window by positioning itself as a Spring Break destination. Of late, it has chosen to instead target families as preferred spring visitors.
