What a time to make a new post on my blog. My wife and I are expecting our first child, and we decided on one final trip to the panhandle for our baby moon (the panhandle is a nickname my wife is keen to point out is absolutely ridiculous given the rest of Florida is not pan-shaped — even as a Dali painting).
We have been to the panhandle a few times since we have family in Mexico Beach, and we absolutely love that area. We figured we’d treat ourselves to a fancy hotel & spa experience for the time away, and Rosemary Beach’s The Pearl fit just the bill.
On the road down here, we’ve started a tradition of stopping by White Oak Pastures for a good American grass-fed single-estate burger. Single-estate is a joking reference to the book A Bold Return to Giving a Damn, written by the owner of White Oak Pastures, Will Harris, which is, no exaggeration, how we save America.
First thing — read the book, and eat some good local meat from animals that have lived a damn good life.
For quite some time now, small town America has suffered a painstaking death led by greed and the insane desire to continue to make things cheaper even if it means the end of your family and its heritage. My wife’s family along with thousands of other American families come from a town that, well, used to be a town. Her town’s death came when the textile industry and specifically the West Point Manufacturing Company went bankrupt. The workers pensions were rendered worthless and just like that, a thriving town disappeared.
This is the sight of many of the towns we drive by on our way to the 30A, which by the way is the name of the historic highway going west on the handle of that non-existent pan. As soon as you turn into the 30A, you are greeted with absolutely immaculate landscaping, sidewalks, stunning homes and condos that sometimes get a little too close to the cookie-cutter hellscape that is American suburbia, but thankfully don’t cross over that line. What you have is absolutely stunning. Perhaps.. too stunning.
That is where the beauty just about ends. You see, Rosemary Beach and Alys Beach down the road, aren’t real towns. They’re an amalgamation of getaway homes and rentals propped up to look good with what I can only imagine is a hell of a pricy HOA. This is the setup because nobody actually lives here, there is no culture. Nowhere is this more evident than in the countless restaurants we went to in hopes that someone knew how to season their food. The juxtaposition of hoards of tourists coming down to eat from the conveyor belt of mass-produced food powered by a national food distributor whose only concern is Wall Street -- who knew i'd be witnessing the live-action remake of The Stepford Wives.
We went through the gamut of restaurants around here: Paradis, George’s, Havana Beach, Summer Kitchen Cafe, Surfing Deer, finally finishing at Pickle’s Burger and Shake because, well, at least they aren’t lying about what they serve. The brush strokes were all the same, the meat was always cooked well, the dishes themselves had no seasoning (for the exception of Pickles), and they were all sorely lacking in any sort of creative expression. Some were better than others for sure, but boy was the bar low.
There were many more spots we could have gone to but didn’t (I’m sure some folks will be quick to mention La Crema, or Edwards, which at a glance are just George’s by another name — after all they are all owned by the same group). The real issue I saw in all of these restaurants was in the actual quality of their ingredients. It became clear they are all ordering the same shit from a giant distributor (likely SysCo), and prepping it up to look like beach fare, and hoping you won’t ask things like oh, where’s your fish from? It breaks my heart that sitting next to the beach, with the culinary prowess of New Orleans looking at you in the distance, the best they have to offer is food that probably spent more time in a freezer and truck than it did alive.
When we first got here I was absolutely entranced by the almost Disney-like looks of Rosemary Beach — and to some degree I still am (despite hating Disney). But they decorated the idyllic architecture with trashy carnival fare and the crazy price tag to match. Humidity killed the salt shaker in this town -- in more ways than one.
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