Fresh Off The Boat at SanRoc Cay Marina in Orange Beach had one of the most eventful openings in recent Gulf Coast restaurant memory — a pandemic, a liquor-license backlog, a hurricane and a quarter-in-a-frozen-glass trick all before its first anniversary. The restaurant closed its doors in 2023, but its story is worth telling again, because it captures exactly what it takes to run a kitchen on the Alabama coast.
It Started at a Music Festival
The restaurant’s origin story begins, improbably, at the Hangout Festival in 2014, where Jerr McCutchen of Mobile handled entertainment logistics and David Buster ran food service. The two became fast friends, and by 2016 they were talking food truck. Talk became commitment when David bought the truck: Beachin’ Eats opened in 2018 and kept rolling for years afterward.
From Truck to Table
The brick-and-mortar came via a phone call from an attorney friend who owned the SALT restaurant space at SanRoc Cay Marina and was struggling to juggle restaurant and law practice. Jerr looked at the large kitchen and the water view at the marina at the mouth of Cotton Bayou and was sold. In August 2019 he told David — and their significant others — they were going for it. After a remodel and a brightening, the concept was “polished casual dining,” and the name came out of a brainstorm: “How about ‘Fresh Off The Boat’?” It stuck.
Then 2020 arrived. Jerr had left his job booking all the music at the Flora-Bama to open in April; in February he read a virologist’s warning about a new virus; and within weeks the world shut down. The restaurant finally opened in June 2020 — but it took two more months to get a liquor license because pandemic staffing had emptied the Alabama Beverage Control offices. “Needless to say, it was a crazy struggle to open a restaurant,” he said.
Hurricane Sally, and the Quarter Trick
Three months later came Hurricane Sally. The partners prepped thoroughly before the forecast even settled: every bit of food in the freezer under a 10-by-10 block of ice, and a quarter placed on top of a frozen glass of water — if the quarter sank after the power died, they’d know how far the food had thawed. All good. The restaurant reopened six days after the storm, as soon as power returned. “Sally brought the community together,” Jerr said. “Everyone helped each other, neighbor helping neighbor.”
The Food That Made It Work
Fresh Off The Boat built its reputation on Gulf fish — 63 different species crossed its menu over the years — with a daily chef’s special straight off the boat that was always the best seller and often the most unusual fish of the day. Shrimp and grits ran second, sautéed crab claws led the appetizers, and the house-made bread pudding closed the deal. Everything from the sauces to the seasonings was made from scratch.
For anglers, the Hook and Cook option turned a morning’s catch into dinner — the chef preparing your fish any way you wanted, hours after it came out of the water. Non-seafood eaters got hand-cut Certified Angus Beef steaks, and the lunch menu kept the food truck’s fish tacos alive. The beverage program leaned local: an extensive wine list, local craft beers and “really good bourbons.”
After the Boat
The restaurant operated through the 2023 season before closing abruptly that September, leaving the SanRoc Cay space — 27267 Perdido Beach Blvd. — to cycle to new tenants. The food truck Beachin’ Eats remained part of the owners’ story, and the private-events business that filled the off-season became the template for what came next.
The lesson of Fresh Off The Boat is the same one every coastal restaurateur learns the hard way: location is everything, preparation is everything else. The restaurant opened into the worst possible stretch — pandemic, license backlog, a category-2 hurricane — and survived all of it. What it couldn’t outlast was the ordinary math of the restaurant business. But for three years at one of the prettiest settings on Perdido Beach Boulevard, it was exactly what its name promised.