Great Southern Café

Great Southern Cafe has anchored 83 Central Square in Seaside since 2006, when chef and owner Jim Shirley opened it as his flagship restaurant. The address puts the cafe at the literal heart of Seaside’s town center, a five minute walk from any home in the community that developer Robert Davis and his design team began building in 1981 as the country’s first New Urbanist town. Shirley opened the restaurant around a simple idea, that the dishes on a table tell the story of the people who cook them, and he built the kitchen on a blend of international technique and Southern roots, leaning on Gulf seafood and produce from nearby farms.

Shirley is a Pensacola native who draws on a lifetime spent on Gulf Coast waters and his family’s farming background. He has grown into one of the region’s best known restaurateurs, now overseeing a small group of Panhandle restaurants that includes 87 Central Square, The C-Bar, The Meltdown on 30A, b.f.f., The Bay, Farm and Fire, and North Beach Social, alongside Great Southern Cafe. He is also an advocate for what he calls New Ruralism, a push for sustainable farming practices at the edges of coastal towns, and his kitchens have picked up a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence and recognition from the James Beard Foundation over the years. Longtime 30A visitors still treat Great Southern Cafe as his signature project, the restaurant where his Southern-meets-worldly cooking style first took hold in Seaside two decades ago.

Two dishes in particular have carried the restaurant’s reputation for the better part of twenty years. Grits a Ya Ya, a rich, cheesy bowl of stone ground grits topped with shrimp in a spicy cream sauce, appears on menus and in food writing across the Panhandle as Shirley’s best known creation. The kitchen also turns out a Fried Green Tomato Eggs Benedict, a Southern spin on the brunch classic that swaps the usual English muffin base for a crisp fried green tomato. Both dishes sum up the restaurant’s approach of taking familiar Southern staples and refining them for a coastal dining room just steps from the beach, and both remain fixtures on the menu that regulars order trip after trip.

Great Southern Cafe serves breakfast starting at 8 in the morning, then rolls into lunch and dinner service that runs until 9:30 at night, seven days a week. Sunday is the one exception on the schedule: brunch runs from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., after which the kitchen resets and returns to its regular 8 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. hours for the rest of the evening. Guests can also catch a daily happy hour from 3 to 5 p.m., when the bar drops prices on liquor and wine by the glass, knocks a dollar off beer, and offers a dozen oysters for eleven dollars, a deal that draws a steady crowd of regulars to the bar seats through the late afternoon.

Because Central Square fills up fast during peak season, Great Southern Cafe releases reservations every Monday at noon for the following week, though walk-ins are welcome on a first come, first served basis. Visitors who park outside the town center can catch a free shuttle from the Grayton Central lot, running every 15 minutes between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m. and dropping riders at the Lyceum Gateway on Quincy Circle, just steps from the restaurant’s front door. Nearly two decades after it opened, Great Southern Cafe remains one of the anchor businesses of Seaside’s Central Square, the kind of restaurant that longtime 30A visitors plan a trip around and first time guests stumble onto the moment they wander toward the town’s white picket fences and brick streets. Call (850) 231-7327 or visit thegreatsoutherncafe.com to check current hours or join the reservation waitlist before a visit.