CEO on waterfront restaurant acquisitions, despite storms: 'Like a dream'

Florida restaurateur Greg Powers can take a punch. And he can punch back, too. 

Consider the past summer: His company, St. Petersburg-based Beachside Hospitality Group, acquired a trio of prominent Manatee County beachfront restaurants, spending $31 million on the properties alone, county records show. Beachside bought the businesses for an undisclosed price from Chiles Hospitality, founded in 1979 by Ed Chiles.

Then came Hurricane Helene. And after that Milton. Damage to the three locations — Sandbar on Anna Maria, Beach House in Bradenton Beach and Mar Vista on Longboat Key — was significant. All have since reopened.

And in a mid-November interview, Powers, undeterred by hurricanes, says he and the company, which oversees 15 Florida restaurants, aren't backing away from its core model: operating waterfront eateries.

“I was kind of walking on cloud nine, pinching myself, saying, I can't believe we acquired these three locations,” Powers recalls of the Manatee County restaurants. “It's like a dream…and that dream kind of got leveled out a little bit, but it's just another bump in the road. It’s a test.”

Yes, chef

Powers says he's “always looking, always listening” for more opportunities, particularly along shorelines.

“From the beginning, we have been looking for waterfront locations in nice tourist markets with a lot of beach traffic,” Powers says of the company, which did $70.2 million in revenue in 2023.

It has six locations in Pinellas County and one restaurant apiece in St Cloud, New Smyrna Beach, St. Augustine Beach, Fort Pierce and Daytona Beach. It also has a location in Fort Myers that was “destroyed two years ago, and we're still in the process of getting approval and permits to rebuild,” Powers says. Nine of the restaurants are under the Crabby’s banner, featuring casual eats like grouper nuggets, coconut shrimp and crab legs.

Image via Mar Vista Dockside Restaurant & Pub / Facebook

The Manatee County restaurants Beachside purchased are a little bit different. “The food profile is chef-driven at all three of those locations,” Powers says. Among the menu items at Beach House, for example, are honey-fig glazed salmon and lobster and crab napoleon.

“We do not employ chefs” at the other restaurants, he continues, explaining they instead have culinary teams that “deliver consistent products” by following recipes. “What they do and what we do are the same,” Powers says, “but it may look a little bit different coming out of the kitchen.”

Menu changes, challenges

Beachside Hospitality Group plans to make some adjustments to the menus at the Manatee County restaurants that Powers says he hopes will make them even more beloved. 

“Some of the lunch fare could be a little bit more affordable for everybody,” Powers says, noting a cheeseburger at one of the locations is in the mid-$20s, a price he intends to lower.

The plan is to add a little more seafood to the menu at the Manatee County restaurants too, according to Powers.

At Beachside Hospitality restaurants, “we feature a lot of grouper,” he says. “In our menu engineering, that's a fish that we really want to introduce out there because it's so popular in our other areas.”

Another menu item Beachside plans to offer at its Manatee County locations is Bairdi crab, a signature dish at its other restaurants.

“I believe we sell about 1% of the world's catch,” Powers says of Beachside Hospitality Group. “We either steam it or roast it, and it's just really good. It's a lot of meat, a lot of fill in the shell.”

Its restaurants also feature Argentine red shrimp, which he notes is wild and “sweeter than most shrimp out there…it resembles lobster in flavor.”

But the focus on seafood does pose some problems. 

“Our core challenge is getting the proteins that we want, because we’re outside of chicken," Powers says. "We’re not using any farm-raised items — it’s all got to be caught from the sea, for the most part."

The company faces quotas on how much Bairdi crab it can get from year to year, he says. “Based on that, we have to scramble, because we cannot offer it year-round, since we run out at a certain point,” Powers says. “Then we have to find the next best” item like king crab, he says.

Hurricane impacts

Another challenge in the waterfront restaurant business, is no surprise, hurricanes.

All of the Gulf Coast restaurants owned by Beachside shut down for varying lengths of time this fall due to Hurricane Milton, according to Powers. He too was displaced after the storm damaged his Clearwater home.

The three Manatee County restaurants were closed from the Oct. 9 hurricane until November.

In the Sandbar, “there was about 2 feet of sand throughout the entire restaurant,” Powers says, while at the Beach House, the deck took the brunt of the storm.

Image via Beach House Waterfront Restaurant / Facebook

“Mar Vista got 4 feet of water in it,” he adds. “So each one of the repair jobs has been different.”

The hurricane affected more than just restaurant operations; it also cost the company in terms of events.

“I don't know how many weddings we had to refund because of this hurricane,” Powers says. Upon reopening in November, he notes there were four weddings in one week at Sandbar.

'The right market' 

Powers says his “anything along the shoreline" mantra in spite of hurricanes stems from a belief that the risks and issues are outweighed by the positive benefits of owning waterfront restaurants. 

“You're in an environment which leads itself to your customers being happy” and employees have the “same frame of mind,” Powers says.

“We have a lot of repeat customers,” he continues. ”During a week, we might have somebody show up four times, and then they go back to Wisconsin or Chicago or wherever, but they came to all of our locations and they want to let us know about it.”

Customers have responded positively in specific areas the company has targeted, he says, noting there are four locations on Clearwater Beach within miles of each other.

“It's the right market,” Powers says. “There's plenty of customers out there.”

The company would like to open a second location in Fort Myers Beach and is looking in the city of St. Augustine to complement its beach location there as well.

Powers says Beachside Hospitality Group has been approached about some properties in Daytona Beach and is interested in the Panhandle, Boca Grande, Fort Lauderdale, Miami or even the Keys, although he notes that is a bit far.

One thing Beachside Hospitality seeks out is existing businesses it can take over.

“We do like acquiring restaurants that are currently run and somebody wants to sell it,” Powers says, “as opposed to finding a piece of property that we really like and building it.”