Iron & Grape Italian Kitchen

Iron & Grape Italian Kitchen opened in March 2025 inside a historic building at Sixth Street and Baldwin Avenue in downtown DeFuniak Springs, near the town’s old railway hub. Chef Todd Misener and his wife Kelli run the restaurant under their Big Love Restaurant Group, and they built the space around a scratch kitchen that turns out hand-rolled pasta alongside a curated wine list for lunch, dinner, and Sunday brunch.

Misener trained under Master Chef Jack Shoop for 17 years and still teaches at a culinary program near DeFuniak Springs, and that background shows in how the kitchen runs. Before opening Iron & Grape, he co-managed the Word of Mouth restaurant group’s South Walton properties, including Stinky’s Fish Camp and Red Fish Taco, so he arrived with a full career of coastal Florida kitchens behind him. Kelli oversees the front of house and the wine program, curating a list built to pair with the scratch Italian menu rather than an afterthought bolted onto it.

The building itself plays a role in the experience. Iron & Grape’s design leans into DeFuniak Springs’ history as an early 1900s railway hub, with iron accents worked throughout the dining room and cast iron serving pieces on the tables, a direct nod to the industrial character of the era. The restaurant spreads across a downstairs bar and an upstairs private event space called the Blue Room, and the owners have a speakeasy-style lounge in development for regular guests, adding another layer to a building that already carries a century of history on Baldwin Avenue.

On the plate, Iron & Grape leans on scratch cooking and hand-rolled pasta, the kind of labor-intensive kitchen work that separates a chef-driven Italian restaurant from a quick-service one. The wine list gets built around that food rather than treated as a side note, giving diners a reason to linger over a full meal instead of rushing through it. The restaurant describes itself as a place “where culinary craft meets warm hospitality,” and that matches how the space is set up: warm, historic, and clearly meant for people who want to sit down and stay a while.

Iron & Grape serves lunch from 11 AM to 2 PM and dinner from 5 PM to 9 PM Wednesday through Saturday, then shifts to a Sunday brunch from 11 AM to 2 PM, giving visitors a few different windows to catch the kitchen depending on the day of an Emerald Coast trip. The restaurant takes reservations but also welcomes walk-ins, a useful detail for travelers who did not plan a stop in DeFuniak Springs in advance. It is also available for private events, using the upstairs Blue Room for parties that want the historic building to themselves.

The restaurant sits at 660 Baldwin Avenue, DeFuniak Springs, FL 32435. Call 850-951-2233 for reservations or event inquiries. Baldwin Avenue runs through the heart of DeFuniak Springs’ Victorian-era downtown, close enough to Lake DeFuniak and the Chautauqua-era buildings that a meal at Iron & Grape fits easily into an afternoon of walking the historic district before or after.

Iron & Grape also offers gift cards and takes inquiries for events directly through its website, which makes it a workable choice for a rehearsal dinner, a birthday, or any other gathering that wants a private room in a building with real history behind it rather than a generic banquet hall. For Emerald Coast visitors used to beachfront seafood menus, a scratch Italian kitchen built around hand-rolled pasta and a real wine program stands out as a reason to make the drive inland to DeFuniak Springs, especially when it can be paired with a walk around Lake DeFuniak or a stop at the Chautauqua-era buildings that anchor the rest of downtown.