Willingham Seafood Company

Willingham Seafood Company is a locally owned seafood market on Boggy Bayou, billed as Okaloosa County’s only waterfront seafood market. It sells fresh shrimp, grouper, oysters, and other Gulf catch straight off the local shrimp boats docked nearby, and that “straight off the boat” claim is not just marketing language here: the market’s own fleet ties up at the dock behind the building, and customers can watch the day’s catch come off the deck before it ever reaches the counter.

Matt Willingham opened the market in 2007, but the family’s connection to this stretch of water goes back generations before the shop ever existed. His great-grandfather, Fate Willingham, was one of the signers of Niceville’s original city charter, part of a group locals still refer to as “the Niceville 333.” His grandfather, Euell Willingham, fished mullet on Choctawhatchee Bay out of a boat called the Miss Janice, and his great-uncle Pasco Willingham worked the same waters for decades, reportedly summing up his life’s work with the line, “I’ve always fished, but I ain’t never had a job.” That multigenerational fishing pedigree is exactly what customers are tapping into when they buy a pound of shrimp here instead of from a grocery store counter.

Three working shrimp boats, the Myra Gail, the Michele Dawn, and the Wilma Ree, are usually tied up at the dock and have become something of a photo stop for visitors walking the waterfront along John Sims Parkway. Beyond the retail counter, Willingham also runs a wholesale operation supplying restaurants and other markets around the region, which keeps the boats working even on days the walk-up counter is quiet. The case rotates with the season but regularly includes shrimp, oysters, grouper, and other Gulf fish, along with crabs, crawfish, and the seasonings to cook them all properly, so a single stop can cover most of what a home cook needs for a bayou-style seafood boil.

Matt’s own family history layers on top of the fishing side. His father, Jimmy Willingham, worked with the state’s fish and game commission in Franklin and Lee Counties before eventually founding Willingham Plumbing Company, a reminder that this is a family that has made its living from Florida’s water and land in more than one way across generations. That range, from mullet boats to plumbing trucks to a retail seafood counter, says something about how deeply rooted the Willingham name is around Niceville and Valparaiso.

The market’s location on Boggy Bayou puts it a short walk from The Boathouse Landing and an easy few minutes from Doc’s Oyster Bar on Tom’s Bayou, so a visitor can buy shrimp here for dinner at the rental house and then go taste someone else’s version of it that same night at either restaurant. It also sits close to the history that shaped this stretch of coastline: mullet fishing was such a defining part of life around Boggy Bayou that Niceville built an entire festival around it for more than four decades before the event wound down in recent years, and families like the Willinghams are a big part of why that tradition existed in the first place.

Because the shop is only open Wednesday through Sunday, it rewards a little planning, but for anyone assembling a Gulf seafood dinner while staying near Niceville, Valparaiso, or Eglin Air Force Base, this is about the most direct route from the water to the table the area offers. Watching Matt’s boats idle back in at the end of the day, then walking a few feet to buy what they just caught, is as close to the source as a seafood dinner gets on the Emerald Coast.