Frenchy’s Rockaway Grill

Frenchy’s Rockaway Grill sits directly on the Gulf of Mexico at 7 Rockaway Street on Clearwater Beach, and it is the largest of the restaurants in the Frenchy’s family, a group of beachside seafood spots built by Michael Frenchy Preston starting in 1981. Preston opened his first restaurant, the Original Cafe, on Baymont Street that year with a simple goal of serving fresh Gulf seafood to both locals and the tourists who were already discovering Clearwater Beach. Rockaway Grill followed a decade later in 1991, built as the flagship location with open-air, beachfront seating right on the sand.

The restaurant has built a local reputation around its She Crab soup, a dish that shows up on the menu alongside a broad range of fresh seafood, sandwiches, and what the restaurant describes as Floribbean-style dishes, a blend of Florida and Caribbean flavors that leans into citrus, spice, and grilled preparations suited to a beachfront setting. Two full bars keep the crowd moving during the day and into the evening, and the restaurant books live music daily, giving Rockaway Grill more of a destination feel than a quick lunch stop. Sunset views over the Gulf are part of the draw, especially for the dinner crowd that times a visit around the evening light.

Frenchy’s Rockaway Grill keeps a schedule built for beach hours, open from 11 in the morning until 10 at night Sunday through Thursday, and staying open an hour later, until 11, on Friday and Saturday nights. To keep up with demand for fresh stone crab, Preston built his own seafood supply operation, Frenchy’s Stone Crab Company, which traces its roots back to 1916 as the Ozona Fish Company before Preston acquired and rebranded it. That connection between the restaurant and its seafood source is part of why Frenchy’s has been able to keep stone crab on the menu through the Florida harvest season, which runs from mid-October through the start of May, and why the group hosts an annual Stone Crab Weekend festival that has run since 1984 and now draws visitors from outside Florida.

While Frenchy’s has grown into a small family of restaurants across Clearwater Beach and one location on the Dunedin Causeway, each restaurant remains under the same local ownership that started with one cafe on Baymont Street more than four decades ago, rather than any outside investment group or franchise system. Rockaway Grill, as the largest and most beach-forward of the group’s locations, gives visitors a clear sense of what built the Frenchy’s name in the first place: fresh Gulf seafood, an unpretentious beachfront setting, and a kitchen that has been run by the same local family since the early 1980s.