Captain Charlie's Reef Grill
This gem is hidden in a small shopping mall off of US1 in Juno Beach. You can’t see it from the highway but the locals sure know where it is. We went early (6:30p) on a Sunday afternoon and it was hard to find parking. The place was filled and they took our name and told us the wait was about 20 minutes. They pointed us to their smaller location a few door down in the same mall where they serve lunch and have a bar.
The wait was actually shorter than that and we took our draft beers over to the restaurant. We had agreed to sit at first available (which includes the bar in the larger restaurant). We were seated at the bar on the side that has the open kitchen. At first I had doubts about sitting there since a little bit of the kitchen heat kind of spills over to the eating area, but we decided it would be interesting to watch the cooking action. That proved to be a great idea. If you are into cooking, those are the best seats in the house. Those cooks are awesome. They are fast and know their stuff. It is impressive to watch them cook 3 or 4 dishes each at the same time. There were a few of them. From where we were seated we could see two perfectly, but knew there was a couple more down the isle.
The place is booming. The owners were part of the serving crew. The service was good and the food was better. We decided to have a few appetizers so that we could taste a few of the dishes. We had grilled scallops, fried calamari with marinara sauce, and the tuna spring rolls with a spicy soy sauce. For desert a wonderful Cream Brule and a multiflavor home made ice cream that had ginger and mango and something else very fresh and tasty.
There were many pasta dishes, oysters, shrimp, fresh fish that we actually saw being prepared. The many has more than 100 different items to choose from.
A definite repeat!
