Modica Market

Modica Market has anchored 109 Seaside Central Square since 1988, when Sarah and Charles Modica opened it after retiring to the Florida Panhandle following more than fifty years running grocery stores together in Alabama. Seaside’s developers, recognizing the couple’s decades of retail experience, approached them about filling a real need in the young town: a proper grocery store that residents and visitors could reach on foot. What started as a practical corner market has grown into what the family now calls a leading gourmet specialty store, and three generations of the Modica family still run the business today, upholding the same standards Sarah and Charles set when the town itself was barely a decade old.

The market’s prepared food counter turns out hot, homemade soups, sandwiches, and Southern specialties every single day, alongside a bakery case stocked with chocolate, caramel, and carrot cakes made in house. The grocery shelves mix fresh produce and pantry staples with harder to find local and imported condiments, a solid cheese selection, ice creams, and coffee, essentially everything a Seaside cottage kitchen might need without a drive out to a bigger grocery store off 30A. Modica Market also carries a genuinely deep wine collection and a rotating craft beer selection, and it runs regular pint nights and wine tastings that turn the store into more of a neighborhood gathering spot than a straightforward grocery run.

For visitors staying in one of Seaside’s rental cottages, Modica Market functions as the practical anchor of a vacation grocery list, the kind of place where a family can walk over in the morning for coffee and a breakfast sandwich, then swing back through in the evening for a bottle of wine and a wedge of cheese to carry down to the beach for sunset. That range, from a fast breakfast order to a properly stocked wine and cheese board, is what separates Modica Market from a typical convenience store, and it is a large part of why the market has stayed a fixture of Central Square for more than three and a half decades.

Locals half joke that Modica Market runs on an every hour happy hour philosophy, a nod to how naturally the wine and beer selection turns a quick stop into a lingering conversation with neighbors on the sidewalk outside. The market opens daily at 7 in the morning and stays open until 6 at night, covering breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert runs for both residents and visitors staying anywhere in Seaside. Its spot inside Central Square, the walkable town center that put Seaside on the map as the first New Urbanist community in the country, makes it one of the few true everyday errands in a town built mostly around vacation rentals and restaurants. The market sits close enough to Great Southern Cafe and Bud & Alley’s that visitors often pair a stop here with a sit-down meal elsewhere in town, picking up dessert or a bottle of wine to carry home after dinner.

That everyday usefulness is really what sets Modica Market apart from the boutiques and galleries that fill most of the storefronts around Central Square. Where much of Seaside’s retail caters to browsing and souvenir shopping, Modica Market solves the actual logistics of a beach vacation, morning coffee, a packed lunch for the sand, dinner ingredients for a night cooking in the rental house, and a bottle of wine for the porch afterward. That practical role, combined with nearly four decades under the same family’s ownership, is why so many repeat visitors treat a stop at Modica Market as a non-negotiable part of any trip to Seaside. Call (850) 231-1214 or visit modicamarket.com for current offerings before a visit.