Anytime we head to the Cape San Blas/Port St. Joe/Mexico Beach area for vacation there is one restaurant that we absolutely, positively have to eat at some time during our trip, and that restaurant would be the Indian Pass Raw Bar and Grill in Indian Pass, Florida. Connie and the girls have learned that there will be no debate about it; at some point during our trip we will be eating there. Fortunately they like it just about as much as I do.
Prior to our trip down last week I visited their website to check their hours. As I was scrolling through the results of a Google search to find their website I noticed a couple of restaurant reviews that mentioned a place called Indian Pass Uptown.
Wait, what?
Have they moved?
How could that be? They’ve been in the old building forever!
As I read further I learned that the folks that own the original Indian Pass Raw Bar have opened a second location in Port St. Joe. The phrase that really caught my attention was “No more two-hour wait!”.
You’re kidding me, right? No more waiting on the front porch or in the parking lot? No more mosquitoes?
Nope.
In fact, when we walked in we were seated right away. How could this be? Simple, the Port St. Joe location has four to five times the seating capacity as the original location.
By and large everything is pretty much the same as the original location (aside from the wait) with a couple of exceptions. The Indian Pass location is open Sunday and closed Monday and the Port St. Joe location is closed Sunday and open Monday. The other notable difference was the addition of ‘buffalo’ wings to the menu.
We arrived at Indian Pass Uptown promptly at 6:30 on Monday evening. As I previously mentioned we walked in the door and were shown to our table right away. We grabbed our drinks from the cooler and settled in with our menus…not that we really needed them. As usual, I ordered steamed shrimp and a cup of gumbo. ConnieLou decided to try the wings with steamed corn on the cob on the side and Ashley and Jenna both ordered the crab-stuffed shrimp, also with corn on the side.
The steamed shrimp, stuffed shrimp, gumbo and corn were just as expected. If we didn’t already know that we were in a different location we wouldn’t have been able to tell it by those dishes. They were exactly the same as we remembered from the original location. The wings were different and dang good! Unlike the typical buffalo wing that’s deep fried and tossed in a mixture of butter and hot sauce, Indian Pass’s wings are coated in a dry rub and baked (I didn’t mention that nothing is fried at Indian Pass, did I?).
So how did Indian Pass Uptown fare on the Thumbs Scale? Try an easy 8 out of a possible 8 and throw in a few toes for good measure.
Oh, I don’t know how true this is, but I understand that there may be a plan in the works for a location in Memphis, Tennessee. Can you imagine it? Shrimp, oysters, gumbo and a healthy dose of Memphis blues. I think I may feel a trip to Memphis comin’ on.
