A Plate of Destin Seafood

There’ll be corn dogs, Italian ice and sweet plantains. There’ll be chicken cooked anyway you wish — jerk chicken, curry chicken, grilled chicken. McGuire’s Irish Pub and Brewery will make you a root beer. Java Joz will serve coffee. And Ted Roberts will prepare funnel cakes.

Yet, with a name like “Destin Seafood Festival” many expect to see ... well, seafood.

In recent years, frozen, bagged seafood cooked by out-of-town vendors, such as from North Carolina, has been the norm when it comes to fish. And festivalgoers have noticed. “What we’ve all heard is that they don’t have any seafood at the seafood festival,” said John Karagas, director of operations for the Southern Restaurant Group. “It’s a lot of carnival-like food,” said John Comer, CEO of the Southern Restaurant Group.

Therefore, this year’s festival promises to be different: Let there be Destin seafood at the Destin Seafood Festival. That’s what Comer, Karagas and the rest of the Southern Restaurant Group say. All five of the group’s local seafood restaurants — Fisherman’s Wharf, Louisiana Lagniappe, the Back Porch, Cafe Grazie and Pompano Joe’s — will be set up cooking fresh seafood on site at the festival. It’ll be Oct. 6-8 at the Morgan Sports Center.

“We decided to participate this year because it seems like the local restaurants have turned their backs on the seafood festival,” Comer said. “To be the Destin Seafood Festival, there needs to be local seafood. And the local seafood should be that seafood that is served in the local restaurants.”

For the past two months, the Southern Restaurant Group has planned for the festival, including preparing menus, setting up site and scheduling employees. Karagas said they purchased $7,000 worth of equipment to prepare the seafood directly at the festival. “We’ll have a complete kitchen set up with grills and fryers,” Karagas said. “We’re doing it fresh like we do it at the restaurant. I want people to smell it, feel it and taste it.”

The Destin Area Chamber of Commerce has been aware of the lack-oflocal-seafood problem at the festival, and the chamber contacted the Southern Restaurant Group this year for assistance. “As long as I’ve been a part of the festival, which has been several years, we’ve tried to get the seafood back to the festival,” said Karen McCarthy, seafood festival board liaison. “We didn’t want the so-called ‘carni food’ either, but we didn’t have much of a choice.”

The Destin Seafood Festival was originally held on the Destin harbor, in close vicinity of several seafood restaurants. However, when construction along the harbor and other factors moved the festival to the Morgan Sports Center several years ago, it became more difficult for local restaurants to transport food to the site and provide the additional staff to man their booths, said Shane Moody, Destin Area Chamber president and CEO.

“There were logistic issues, and we understand that,” Moody said. “It’s not that the restaurants don’t want to participate, they just can’t.” For that reason, the chamber and the festival committee are certainly appreciative of the Southern Restaurant Group,

“What better way to serve the community than to give them what they’ve asked for for so long,” McCarthy said. “This is the beautiful Emerald Coast, and we want local seafood. That’s what it’s all about. I’ve seen the menu, and it’s wonderful. People are going to be very excited about it.”

Karagas said he hopes to help the chamber make the seafood festival a worldclass event, and their plan is to simply try to break even financially. “We’re not making any money on this event, and we’ve designed our menus accordingly,” Karagas said. “We just want to have fun and put something back into the community.”

Comer said, “We want to help the chamber make the festival as good as possible, and we’re trying to assist them in providing the seafood aspect of the festival and make it an event that everyone can be proud of.”

Yet even though the restaurants are expecting to earn minimal money at the festival, there may be longterm advantages, such as what Deborah Hannah experiences each year. Hannah, owner of Caribbean Café, a local catering business, has set up a booth at the seafood festival for 10 years, serving a variety of seafood, including coconut shrimp, calamari, fried seafood platters, and a shrimp and sausage vegetable medley. The exposure she receives each year makes the effort worth it.

“A lot of people take my information, take my card and I’ll cater parties for them in the future. It’s always been very good for my business,” Hannah said. Moody said between 25,000 and 27,000 people are expected to attend the seafood festival. That many people offers great publicity, he said. And with about 100 local arts and crafts vendors and entertainment such as Dave Mason and Kansas, this year’s event promises to be better than ever, he said. The stage area and the speaker systems have even been upgraded.

Published on Sunday, October 1, 2006