Fonville Press Market & Café

Fonville Press Market & Café occupies the spot in Alys Beach’s Town Center, the pedestrian-friendly heart of this New Urbanist community on Scenic Highway 30A, where the community’s very first coffee shop once stood. Its name and story trace directly back to that original gathering place. The original Fonville closed in February 2019, but the outpouring of support from residents and visitors convinced Jeremy Walton, then Alys Beach’s Vice President of Resort Operations, to bring it back in a bigger form. Working from homeowner surveys that showed demand for both a restaurant and a market, Walton and his wife Angela expanded the concept into the roughly 4,000-square-foot market, café, and cocktail bar that operates today.

The redesign leans into a mid-century Malibu look, with warm wood tones, brass accents, and a color palette that pairs salmon with dark green, all opening onto a plaza where guests can eat and drink outdoors with friends. The Waltons kept the past visible throughout the space, displaying original photos, bronze letters, and the brass book-shaped sign from the first Fonville, and they brought back menu favorites like the breakfast biscuit sandwich along with familiar staff from the original shop.

Today’s menu, developed by chefs Coleman Jernigan and Josh Rockhill, runs all day and mixes comfort food with homemade preparations: a Brisket Biscuit, a Frozen Acai Bowl, a Roasted Chicken Flatbread, and a Street Corn Salad share space with flatbreads like The Goat, topped with honey, goat cheese, sweet red peppers, and caramelized onion. Alongside the café menu, the market side sells wine, specialty groceries, sundries, and fresh fish and prepared foods that guests can take home to cook themselves, plus baked goods and to-go and catering options for anyone provisioning a rental home nearby.

The bar pours coffee in the morning and shifts into cocktails, wine, and craft beverages as the day goes on, fitting for a spot that functions as a central gathering place for Alys Beach’s Gulf-front community from breakfast through last call. Hours run daily, with breakfast and lunch served from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. and dinner from 3 to 8 p.m., so there is rarely a moment when the kitchen is fully closed. Live music shows up on select evenings, adding another reason to linger on the plaza after a meal.

Fonville Press sits within easy walking distance of the rest of Alys Beach’s dining scene, including The Citizen, another project from the Waltons just down the street, making the two restaurants a natural pairing for visitors splitting a day between the beach and the town center. That short walk reflects how the whole community is laid out, with homes, shops, and restaurants arranged around courtyards and lanes so that a car is rarely necessary once guests park for the day. Whether the goal is a quick espresso before a morning walk on the sand, a mid-day flatbread on the plaza, a bottle of wine and some groceries to stock a rental kitchen, or a full dinner with live music in the background, Fonville Press covers a lot of ground under one roof. Its combination of market, café, and bar, wrapped in a design that honors the original coffee shop it replaced, makes it one of the more layered stops in Alys Beach, equally useful for a fast coffee run and a lingering evening out. The address, 23 North Somerset Street, puts it right in the middle of the Town Center’s walkable grid of shops and restaurants.