It’s vacation time again so we headed down to Cape San Blas, Florida for a few days. Typically when we rent a condo for a week we’ll eat out three or four times and cook for ourselves the rest of the time. Cooking in saves us a bit of money and reduces the aggravation of having to clean up and go out somewhere after a day on the beach when we’d much rather just chill for the evening. However, we took a short trip this year so we elected to eat out all three nights. We hit up a couple of places we’d been before and tried new place to change things up a bit.
Thursday night we opted for an old faithful…Indian Pass Raw Bar…one of those places that’s never disappointed. The Raw Bar is located on Highway 30A between Apalachicola and Port St Joe. We’ve learned over the years to go early or be prepared to wait. It has a very small dining area and, well, great things just take time. Unfortunately we didn’t get there early and ended up waiting nearly two hours. Fortunately, the skeeters weren’t bad and The Curry’s, a local trio were playing on the patio so we had some good entertainment to kill the time.
Once inside we grabbed some drinks from the cooler, placed our order and sat back to relax for a bit. I ordered my usual steamed shrimp, ConnieLou, not being much of a seafood fan ordered a barbeque pork sandwich and an ear of steamed corn on the cob, Ashley selected crab-stuffed shrimp and corn and Jenna decided on a bowl of gumbo and corn.
The Raw Bar is a bit of an oddity on the Gulf Coast. Everything is steamed, baked or grilled…nothing is fried. To make things even better, any seafood that is on your plate today was swimming in local waters yesterday…ya just don’t get much fresher.
As usual, everything was quite good. The steamed shrimp continue to be the reason that I demand at least one trip to the Raw Bar every time we’re in the area…but…I got a taste of Jenna’s gumbo and I believe I’m going to have to add a small bowl as a side during future trips. OK, and maybe another beer.
On the Thumbs Scale Indian Pass Raw Bar got 8 thumbs-up out of a possible 8 with a few toes thrown in…yeah, we like it and we’ll be back.
