Hunt’s Oyster Bar & Seafood

Hunt’s Oyster Bar and Seafood has been a fixture at 1150 Beck Avenue in St. Andrews for long enough that Destination Panama City’s own oyster trail write up calls it an iconic Panama City eatery and a nostalgic experience, language the city’s tourism office does not use loosely. The restaurant’s whole identity is built around the raw bar: oysters shucked right at the counter in view of the dining room, served in a setting the tourism board describes as casual and no fuss, the kind of place locals have been bringing visitors to for decades.

Seafood at Hunt’s comes from Tarpon Dock Seafood Market, a supplier the restaurant names directly on its own menu, and the kitchen builds its starters, oyster preparations, and dinner plates around whatever is coming in fresh that day. The restaurant is open Monday through Thursday from 11 in the morning to 9:30 at night, extends to 10 on Friday and Saturday, and closes entirely on Sunday, a schedule that reflects a kitchen built around a working week rather than tourist traffic. Hunt’s also describes itself as casual and kid friendly, and it offers online ordering for guests who want takeout instead of a seat at the bar.

The restaurant maintains an active online presence beyond its own website, with a Facebook page, an Instagram account, and even a TikTok, which is more social media reach than most of the small independent seafood spots in St. Andrews keep up with. That presence, combined with its long standing name recognition in the neighborhood, makes Hunt’s one of the more thoroughly documented restaurants in this stretch of Panama City. A sister location on St. Joseph Bay operates under the same family of restaurants, but the Beck Avenue location is the original St. Andrews spot and the one that shows up in nearly every local guide to Panama City oysters.

For anyone new to Panama City looking for a straightforward introduction to Gulf oysters, Hunt’s is usually the first name that comes up, both from residents and from the city’s own tourism materials. It sits an easy walk from Uncle Ernie’s, Salty Oak Brewing, and the rest of the West 10th Street corridor, which makes it simple to fold into a longer afternoon spent exploring St. Andrews on foot.

Gulf oysters served at raw bars like Hunt’s typically come from a mix of wild harvest beds and cultivated aquaculture operations along the Florida and Alabama coastline, an industry that has shifted considerably in the years since Apalachicola Bay’s traditional oyster fishery collapsed under a combination of drought, upstream water management disputes, and overharvesting. That broader regional context is part of why sourcing from a named local supplier like Tarpon Dock Seafood Market matters to regular customers, since it offers some assurance about freshness and origin in an industry where supply can be unpredictable from one season to the next. Diners who are new to raw oyster bars should also know that health authorities generally advise people with compromised immune systems, liver disease, or certain chronic conditions to avoid raw shellfish, a standard caution that applies at any raw bar and not something specific to Hunt’s itself.