Top 5 Restaurants
Near Orange Beach
From a shipping-container fish camp on Perdido Pass to a white-tablecloth room over the marina, these are the five we send our own family to.
Orange Beach eats well in every season, but December is not July. A couple of the best rooms here are open to the air and heated rather than walled in, the busiest kitchens do not take reservations, and holiday hours tend to go up on the door instead of the website. So here are five places we actually eat, in order, with the winter caveats left in rather than trimmed out. Four of the five are inside ten minutes of the building.
The Gulf is built from stacked shipping containers on the sand at Perdido Pass, with picnic-table seating, fire pits and one of the best water views on the coast. The menu is short, fresh and changes daily. It is open year-round, but understand what you are booking: the dining is essentially open-air under cover, warmed by heaters rather than walls, so a December evening here is a coats-and-blankets affair. On a mild winter day at lunch it is superb.
In winter go at lunch rather than dinner. You get the same view with sun on you instead of a cold wind off the pass, and the line that defines this place in summer simply is not there. They do not take reservations, so arriving off-peak is the whole strategy.
Doc's has been a local fixture on Canal Road since 1984: fried shrimp, oysters, gumbo and po'boys in a screened, wood-paneled room with paper towels on the table. It is open daily 11am to 9pm and famously hard to keep closed. The family line is that they are last to close for a hurricane and first to reopen. No seasonal winter closure is published, which makes it one of the safer bets on a quiet December night.
There is a separate oyster bar along one wall with its own first-come seats. When the dining room quotes a 30-minute wait for a table of eight, four people can sit at the bar immediately and order the identical menu. Split the group rather than standing outside on the benches.
Cosmo's sits off the beachfront on Canal Road, in a burnt-orange room hung floor to ceiling with bright folk-art dog paintings. The kitchen is far more ambitious than the setting suggests, with hand-cut steaks, a working sushi bar, banana-leaf-wrapped sea bass and pecan-crusted redfish, alongside a plain burger that keeps kids happy. Roughly 200 seats spread across several small interior rooms and a large open-air deck. No reservations are taken, but live music plays nightly from March through October while you wait.
Cosmo's does not take reservations, so put your name in as soon as you arrive with a group of eight. Orange Beach's better restaurants thin out in winter rather than disappear, so expect a wait even in December. The bar menu is served all evening if the dining room is full.
White-tablecloth Louisiana cooking on the water at SanRoc Cay, with soft-shell crab, crab-crusted snapper and oysters Bienville, and the closest thing here to a real special-occasion dinner. It is open year-round and dinner only, from 5pm, with the last seating between roughly 9:15pm and 9:45pm depending on the night. The dining room looks over the marina, which is worth asking for when you book.
This is the one to book for Christmas week. It stays open through the winter, but the room is small and the holidays fill it. Reserve well ahead, ask for a window table on the marina side, and confirm the Christmas Day and Christmas Eve schedule directly, as holiday hours are not published in advance.
The Gulf Coast's most famous roadhouse straddles the Alabama and Florida line, and it is the single most reliable place on this list: open 365 days a year with live music every day, typically from 11am until late into the night. Multiple rooms and stages, oysters and bushwackers, sand underfoot in places. It is loud and it is a bar first, but it is also open on Christmas Day when almost nothing else is.
If Christmas Day leaves you with nowhere to eat, this is the answer, because it does not close. Daytime is much more family-tolerant than night; by mid-evening it is firmly an adult room. Take cash for the smaller bars, and note that you are crossing a state line into Florida.