I had an interesting jaunt to Panama City Beach because luckily I have an adventurous Godmother. She lives in Naples, Florida, and I suggested last spring that we plan to get together either at her place or mine. She suggested we meet in Panama City Beach instead, because she wanted to explore the panhandle region and had recently signed up for a Margaritaville Party Weekend for two, planning to go alone. That area is called the Emerald Coast because of the color of the crystal clear water.
I flew in and arrived ahead of her because she had about a nine hour drive from home. After swimming in the Gulf for an hour, I decided to walk to the nearest pier which was not near at all. After a half hour of walking the pier was still a ways off and it was after 2pm. I hadn’t eaten so I backtracked to a cool-looking, thatch-roofed tiki bar which turned out to be Sharky’s. I sat in the outdoor bar area overlooking the beach where a bunch of guys started playing volleyball. I ordered one of their specialty drinks called a Nurse Shark, made with Bacardi Dragonberry Rum, Triple Sec, and Pineapple juice (I passed on the red dye — grenadine). I also had a 1/2 dozen huge oysters baked with butter, garlic, and Parmesan cheese, and served with cocktail sauce and horseradish. Everything was excellent. The menu said, “Market price,” for the oysters but I think they were only about $6.
We were in Panama City Beach for three dinners. One was a buffet at the hotel and one was at Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville. Neither meal was memorable in regards to the food (except for the key lime pie at the restaurant) but the group we were with was great fun. During the buffet there was a trivia contest to win a dinner gift card for $50 to a nice restaurant called Firefly. There were ten questions that were fairly easy, for example, the capital of New York, who’s on the $2 bill, etc. I thought the last question was the hardest, who is on the $500 bill, but my Godmother knew the answer (McKinley). We were one of three couples that had all of the answers right so the host said for each to pick a number between one and a hundred and whoever was closest would win. He told the number to the bartender who wrote it down. My Godmother said, “Should we say 99?” and I told her to make it 66, and the other two groups guessed numbers. At the last second I doubted my intuition and told her to change our number but it was too late. The host said, “One group has guessed the number exactly – 66!” I was really psyched. So our last night we went to Firefly.
The concierge at our hotel said Firefly is about the best restaurant in town and said to order the filet, which my Godmother did. We also both had she-crab soup, which came with a puff pastry dolloped on top. I’ve had a lot of crab soup living in Maryland and this was excellent. There was a martini menu and we both had the pineapple cosmopolitan – YUM! My entrée was grouper with a corn relish on white sauce with crispy potato strings. We split bread pudding for dessert which came with cinnamon ice cream – the chef makes everything on-site, even the different butters for the bread. There’s also a sushi menu (in fact a separate sushi bar/dining room) and a complete gluten-free menu.
The gift card would have been enough if we had ordered off of the sunset menu, but we were not given it or encouraged to order from it. The waiter said the filet on the sunset menu wasn’t as good of a cut, which struck me as an odd comment. But it was well worth it. We had a great meal, a really fun visit, and took a long walk on the beach afterward under a full moon.
