Cabana Cafe: Lots of Choice for Friends, Family
112 Seascape Blvd., Miramar Beach, 424-3574
Hours: Open daily, 7 a.m.-2 a.m., Reservations: Accepted


By Bruce Collier
June 14, 2008 Issue

Cabana Cafe, located in the Seascape Resort property, serves breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week. We ate dinner there on a recent Thursday. As it happens, Thursday is “Cabana Kids Night.” In addition to balloons, airbrush tattoos, and other kid-friendly trimmings, children under 12 get their entrees for 99 cents (with purchase of adult entrees). Needless to say, we did not dine alone.

Inside the door is a combination bakery and ice cream store, dispensing cookies, cakes, brownies, and frozen treats. Down a short hall is the main dining room, with a bar in the back. Suspended on the walls are televisions, muted with closed-captioning. There are tables large and small, and everyone gets a view of the pool and patio just outside. The walls are decorated with brightly colored, tropical-themed paintings and prints.

The place filled up with families, and stayed full all the time we were there. Cabana Cafe’s menu offers a little of everything. There are starters, salads, soups, pasta, subs, paninis, grilled sandwiches, pizzas, and full meals. Some of the choices are standard - burgers, Buffalo chicken, BLTs - but there are some less-typical options.

We started with an appetizer of fried eggplant, breaded with smoked sea salt and drizzled with a rosemary cream sauce. The slices were hot, crisp and greaseless, though the seasoning (both salt and rosemary) was a little light that night. Still, fried eggplant is satisfying stuff.

Other starters that night were house-made potato chips, sausage and mushroom quesadilla, lobster salad, fried mozzarella, seared tuna, boiled shrimp, Buffalo shrimp, and bruschetta. Not many restaurants offer lobster and potato chips on the same menu, so you can’t complain about narrow choices.

I tried the soup of the day—crab chowder. I was glad I did. The soup was thick, and filled with thinly-sliced small potatoes, with the peeling still on, which added to the texture. The other soup is French onion.

We ordered two of the more substantial main courses. I got a plate of pasta with clams, onions and prosciutto, in a sauce of butter and fried sage. My friend ordered the duck breast. Our server, Holli, was running off her feet that night, sharing duties with one other server and some senior management people. They kept the tables filled and the kids relatively quiet. The children were well-behaved and seemed to be having fun with their burgers, fries, and little pizzas. That’s a tribute to both the staff and their parents.

Our entrees arrived. My friend had ordered her duck with sides of asparagus and sauteed mushrooms. It came with the mushrooms and mashed potatoes. Holli apologized and went back into the kitchen for some asparagus. We got to keep the potatoes.

The duck was cooked as ordered, served sliced with a crisped rim of fat (some like that, some don’t - I do). It was topped with a fresh salsa of onions and sliced seedless grapes. My duck-loving friend approved, and made it through everything but a few forkfuls of the bonus potatoes.

I ordered the clam pasta because it sounded different, and it was, in a good way. The angel hair pasta was laced with plump little clams, bits of onion, and morsels of crisp prosciutto. The sauce was light but savory, and I enjoyed the combination tastes of butter and herbs, and the chewy, crunchy clams and ham.

Other choices, to name a few, are range of stone-fired pizzas, with a top-it-yourself option, a Cuban sandwich variation including sweet pork and creole mustard, beach burgers, grilled, deli, and hot-pressed sandwiches, fish tacos, oyster and shrimp po-boys, lobster ravioli, shrimp scampi, boiled shrimp and andouille sausage, grilled chicken with pesto, beef filet or New York strip, chicken marsala, and dinner-sized salads. In all, there are more than 60 items.

Even so, we had to try dessert. That night there was apple pie, German chocolate cake, ice cream, and a hot fudge brownie sundae. We ordered the latter to share. Good idea. The thing was huge, and caught the eye of a family sitting adjacent to us. Mom’s eye, not the kids’, I mean. There was a lot of everything - big scoop of ice cream, big brownie, and lots of real hot fudge (not chocolate syrup, which belongs in milk, if anywhere). We ate it all, eventually.

As we left, the kids and parents were still streaming in. I noticed a bandstand had been set up, so the youngsters may have been treated to some up-and-coming Jimmy Buffet to go with their meals and tattoos. Summer lives at Cabana Cafe.

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