Casual Dining Restaurants in Vero Beach
VERO BEACH 32963, the newspaper for the Vero Beach barrier island, and VeroNews.com, Indian River County's new online newspaper, are pleased to offer this online Dining Guide.
Here are some casual dining restaurants you may wish to visit in Vero Beach. For more information about each restaurant, please click on the link below.
Casual Dining Restaurants on the Barrier Island
12A Buoy Offshore Grill: The place for fresh seafood
(reviewed the week of 05/26/11) After two years and many visits, I feel confident in saying some of the best fresh seafood in these parts is currently found at the 12A Buoy Offshore Grill in Fort Pierce. Fine dining this is not. Even by “family restaurant” standards, this restaurant, now in its third year at the foot of the South Bridge in Fort Pierce, is nothing fancy. READ FULL REVIEW
Chelsea’s on Cardinal: A nifty pre-theater choice
(reviewed the week of 01/27/11) If you are looking for a beachside spot for a light dinner before an evening at Riverside Theatre, a cozy cafe in a corner of Chelsea’s gourmet shop on Cardinal might make an excellent choice. Now in its first season of serving lite bites and small plates in the late afternoon/early evening, Chelsea’s After Hours quickly has developed an enthusiastic following among islanders looking to dine early and light. READ FULL REVIEW
Long Point Cafe: Fresh fish for dinner, two nights a week
(reviewed the week of 03/18/10) A mile and a half north of the bridge over the Sebastian Inlet, a roadside café next to a bait-and-tackle shop serves breakfast and lunch six days a week to campers at the adjacent Long Point Park, fishermen and an assortment of locals. But on Fridays and Saturdays, the Long Point Café also serves dinner to a pretty much full house which increasingly includes visitors from our barrier island community. READ FULL REVIEW
Mulligan's Beach House
Fried clams, lobster rolls at New England Eatery & Pub
(reviewed the week of 08/19/10) When we were flying into the Melbourne Airport regularly in 1987, and driving down A1A to our home under construction on Vero’s South Beach, we discovered the New England Eatery in Melbourne Beach — a casual restaurant (okay, very casual) that had opened the year before. The restaurant’s specialties, the sign on the wall said, were Ipswich clams (otherwise known as whole belly clams, not to be confused by non-New Englanders with clam strips) and Maine lobster rolls. READ FULL REVIEW
Nino's Italian Restaurant
Red Onion
Riverside Cafe
Sea Grill: Great potential, but still a work in progress
(reviewed the week of 03/25/10) While it may be one of the beachside’s niftier restaurants someday, the Sea Grill in the Surf Club Hotel (formerly the Vero Beach Inn) is still a work in progress. The setting has enormous potential: The island’s largest tiki hut restaurant, overlooking the hotel’s new pool, has windows on three sides that unzip on warm nights, enabling you to dine virtually alfresco while enjoying the sounds of the surf. READ FULL REVIEW
Shutters (Disney)
Waldos
Casual Dining Restaurants on the Mainland
Ay Jalisco
Bangkok
Bombay Marsala
First Bites: BrewGrrs Burgers and Brews
(reviewed the week of 01/06/11) Months behind schedule but just in time for the season, a new casual concept eatery featuring brews and burgers, BrewGrrs, finally opened its doors a few days before Christmas in the old Modern Age building at the eastern end of Miracle Mile. It’s fair to say there is nothing exactly like this restaurant in Vero Beach. Offering 36 beers on tap, a dozen burger options, and a variety of sports airing on big-screen TVs, BrewGrrs is something of a cross between a brewpub and the Miller’s Ale Houses found elsewhere throughout the South. READ FULL REVIEW
C.J. Cannon's
Dockside Grille: Not quite the same
(reviewed the week of 07/02/09) While the Dockside Grille on Royal Palm Pointe last season seemed like an almost interchangeable option to Bobby McCarthy’s beachside restaurant, several recent visits have persuaded us that the Dockside – while still featuring a similar menu– no longer is up to Bobby’s standards. Sure, on any given night, some of the dishes are still good – particularly if you stick with the juicy burgers and the tasty fl atbreads. But when you move into the steaks and seafood, it becomes more hit and miss. READ FULL REVIEW
First Bites: El Toro Tacos & Tortillas at the Patio
(reviewed the week of 09/16/10) For the first time in recent memory, Vero has a new restaurant that is truly different. El Toro Tacos & Tortillas at the Patio (a name that in a matter of hours seems to have been shortened by popular demand to El Toro) features cuisine that might best be described as nouvelle Mexican. For fans of the old Patio, which has been something of a Vero landmark forever, Waldo Sexton’s historic building at first glance doesn’t look dramatically different. But those who liked the Patio’s traditional fare (yes, there were some) will quickly discover this is a totally new restaurant – a Mexican restaurant — in what otherwise seems a familiar setting. READ FULL REVIEW
Five Guys
Update: A pleasant surprise at the Greenhouse Café
(reviewed the week of 06/09/11) As a rule, we review restaurants approximately once a year. But when we hear that our review of a Vero restaurant is out of date – that a new chef is presiding over the kitchen, or a new menu approach has been introduced, or service has gotten a lot better – we try to squeeze in an update so readers are not making plans based on out-of-date information. So it is that we returned on a Friday evening to the Greenhouse Café, a casual American bistro across from the Post Office in Vero’s old downtown, after we heard that all three factors described above had occurred since our last visit in February. READ FULL REVIEW
Harbor Cove Restaurant: Fresh fish, reasonable prices
Some 15 years ago, we discovered a new restaurant at what was then a new marina just across the drawbridge at the southern tip of our barrier island. Then as now, if you drive south on A1A and make a quick left turn at the end of the causeway into the Harbortown Marina, a slalom course of twists and turns through the parking lot brings you to the dockside restaurant. There, it is easy to settle in at a table on the deck, watch the comings and goings at what has become one of the busier marinas around, and pretend you are still on the island and not on the edge of Fort Pierce. READ FULL REVIEW
Joey's Bistro: Packed for dancing, not for dinner
(reviewed the week of 05/06/10) Joey’s Bistro, which seems to be doing quite well as Vero’s liveliest evening bar scene and late-night dance club, is clearly struggling as a restaurant. On a recent Friday night, the outdoor bar on the porch was hopping. But the big dining room inside -- with its soaring ceiling and main floor filled with empty tables at 8 pm – unfortunately had a bit of a cavernous feel with diners tucked away in about half the booths around the perimeter. READ FULL REVIEW
Marsh Landing
Mr. Manatee's
New England Fish Market: Follow that truck
After years of enjoying fresh seafood from the New England Fish Market at many of Vero’s best restaurants, we decided to go directly to the source. On a recent drive back to Vero from a day in South Florida, it was getting late, we were hungry, so we stopped off in Jensen Beach at the New England Fish Market and Restaurant – home port to those big white trucks you see so frequently delivering the catch of the day to Vero fine-dining establishments. READ FULL REVIEW
P.F. Chang’s: Would that we only had one in Vero
Whenever I hear a new upscale restaurant is opening in Vero, I hope against hope the cuisine will be Chinese. Thus far, no such luck. Usually, it’s another Italian restaurant. While I like Italian cuisine as much as anyone, we have on a per capita basis more good Italian restaurants here than they have in Verona. READ FULL REVIEW
Saigon Sushi: Some good dishes, but...
In the two decades we have been dining out in Vero, we have been on the lookout for a dependable Asian restaurant – one where you know you are going to get good Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese or Japanese food, time after time, whenever you choose to visit. For 20 years, we have been searching for that elusive dining place; visits to Vietnamese, Thai or Japanese restaurants have always been hit or miss affairs (mostly misses), and notwithstanding the enthusiasm of many for the venerable Szechuan Palace, we would contend that Vero continues to badly need a good Chinese restaurant. READ FULL REVIEW
Sake
Siam Orchid
Villa Nova: Good Italian cooking, but...
(reviewed 07/05/09) What do you say about a Vero Beach Italian restaurant that is going strong in its second decade(!) even though its service always has ranked somewhere between indifferent and slower than slow. You probably would say it must have very good Italian cooking — why else would people dine there — and on that score, you would be absolutely right about Villa Nova. READ FULL REVIEW
Vincent's Restaurant and Pizzeria
