Sunshine state... with a Deep South f lavour
Graeme Croser enjoys a taste of the Florida Panhandle
LONG intrigued by the fabled canal that links oceans and divides continents, I could scarcely hit reply quick enough when the message appeared in my inbox: ‘Fancy a trip to Panama City?’ In my haste I’d failed to notice that the town in question sits in north-west Florida. But I’m glad of my mistake.
To be specific, my destination was Panama City Beach, a resort town planted on a nine-mile stretch of white sand on the Florida Panhandle.
Just as its near namesake feeds both Pacific and Atlantic, so ‘PCB’ manages to transcend state lines, melding the sunshine and sand of Florida with a real flavour of the Deep South.
You can hear it in the locals’ distinctive southern drawl and see it on the menus, where gumbo and jambalaya vie for attention with the Stateside staples of burgers, ribs and chicken wings.
The food, you see, is the thing here. Over four glorious days I ate my way through enough to keep a family of alligators happy for a month and left just in time to avoid the worst of hurricane season.
Aside from a pair of sunglasses and a tube of factor 30, my most important accessory was a hire car.
While there’s a distinct exhilaration to hitting the open road in America, the car was a necessity for traversing the nine-mile stretch and, to be quite honest, eating in as many different establishments as possible.
On day one a recommendation pointed me in the direction of Andy’s Flour Power, a joint famed for its breakfasts, yet boasting a curiously well-stocked bar for premises that close at lunchtime.
To my left an order is placed for two screwdrivers and two mimosas. It’s 10am. It’s then that I notice the stage in the middle of the room is primed for weekend entertainment. Party town indeed.
I settled for an orange juice (neat), served alongside the special of corned beef hash, with eggs and a muffin, that proves a great advert for the on-site bakery, which dispenses cookies and cakes to go.
Slightly sad to have passed over Andy’s signature dish of French toast, I had a full stomach on which to explore St Andrews State Park.
St Andrews didn’t escape unharmed from Hurricane Michael, which blew in a couple of weeks after my departure but, happily, my friends on the ground report that the park is back up and running.
Spread over 1,200 acres, it’s relatively small but is best negotiated by car to appreciate the mix of beach, forest and wildlife all packed into a landscape that has a bay on one side and the ocean on the other.
The 500ft ocean pier feels like a walkway into the Gulf of Mexico and the views to the west offer a stunning vista of the PCB coastline.
The roads through the park offer several stop-off points – at one I was caught in the glare of a protective deer guarding her fawn and panicked a few hundred yards on as another waded into the menacingly named Gator Lake, oblivious to the lingering threat. Mercifully, she bounded off unharmed. At night I sat down to dinner at Firefly, a locally revered restaurant that has been frequented by the Obamas and whose chef cooked for the US Olympic team in 2012.
It deserves its reputation. Garnished with sherry, the shecrab soup was a complex, out-ofthis-world starter.
For a main I opted for the house favourite, stuffed filet mignon, and got the chance to pass on my compliments to Firefly owner Dave Trepanier, a country music mogul who left Los Angeles to settle in his wife’s home town. However, if Firefly provided a hard act to follow, the truth is I didn’t eat a bad meal during my entire stay in PCB.
Highlights included the shrimp boom boom at Spinnaker and the doughnuts at Thomas’s diner on the western end of town.
My final day featured some dolphin spotting on a sunset cruise with Island Time Sailing.
We didn’t have to look particularly hard to spot them.
The captain’s knowledge of the waters around St Andrews Bay seemed to conspire with the l desire of these sociable mammals to outdo each other in the greetings stakes.
The cut of the engine was the cue for a display of leaps and splashes that couldn’t have been better choreographed had the skipper stood on the stern with a baton in his hand.
Entertained, my final day ended with a wonderful dinner at the Grand Marlin, a short walk from the boat’s mooring.
Ushered to a table by the water, I ordered some blue crab claws in a garlic batter before moving on to a main of swordfish served with crispy caper brown butter.
Gazing out to the tranquil water, it never crossed my mind that such a terrible storm might be just a few days off-shore.
Nor would that knowledge put me off going back. Is it too late to book a spring break?