Chef Pat’s Seafood & Grill

Chef Pat’s Seafood & Grill sits at 2876 North State Road 7, a stretch of the old US 441 corridor that runs the length of Lauderdale Lakes and carries most of the city’s independent restaurants. The business is registered with the Florida Division of Corporations under the name Chef Pat’s Cuisines, Inc. (document number P14000049300), listed as an active Florida corporation, and it also does business locally as Chef Pat’s Seafood & Grill, the name posted on the storefront and used in directory listings.

The restaurant is built around a seafood-forward menu, and its category listing with wholesale fish and seafood dealers points to a kitchen that buys and portions its own product rather than relying on pre-packaged inventory, a common practice among the seafood counters that line State Road 7 in this part of Broward County. The plaza itself sits roughly a mile south of the cluster of strip centers around Oakland Park Boulevard and North State Road 7 that anchor much of Lauderdale Lakes’ commercial life, in a stretch of the corridor shared with a handful of other small, independently run seafood and Caribbean kitchens.

Chef Pat’s keeps long daily hours by small-restaurant standards, opening at 7:30 in the morning and running through the evening, Monday through Saturday, with the week split into two blocks: a slightly shorter Monday-through-Thursday schedule that closes at quarter to eight, and a Friday-Saturday stretch that runs about an hour later, to quarter to nine. Sunday hours are not published in the directories that list the business, which is common for smaller, family-run seafood spots in the area that either close or run limited hours on Sundays.

The restaurant accepts debit cards and the standard major credit cards, along with cash, checks and Diners Club, according to its directory listing, and it carries a second phone line in addition to its main number, which is typical of operations that handle both a dine-in counter and phone-in or catering orders. As of this writing there are no third-party customer reviews attached to the business’s Yellow Pages listing, and the page still displays the default invitation for a first review, so the notes here rely on the directory data and the corporate registration rather than accumulated diner feedback.

Lauderdale Lakes carries one of the highest concentrations of Caribbean-owned food businesses in Broward County, a reflection of the city’s large Jamaican, Haitian and broader West Indian population, and Chef Pat’s location on North State Road 7 puts it within a few blocks of several other small, independently owned seafood and Caribbean kitchens, from Carl’s Seafood a few doors south to the cluster of Caribbean take-out spots around the Shops at Oriole Estates a half mile north. For anyone driving State Road 7 through Lauderdale Lakes looking for a seafood plate outside of a chain restaurant, Chef Pat’s is one of the small operators worth knowing by name and address rather than by a corporate sign.