Private Hibachi Chef in Seacrest Beach

Seacrest Beach is built for groups, and our booking sheet shows it. The town's centre of gravity is the enormous lagoon pool, and the rental houses that ring it are large, close together, and rented by parties rather than couples — twelve, sixteen, twenty people under one roof, often two families or a full bridal party. That means Seacrest is where we cook our biggest dinners on 30A and where a second chef comes along most often. It is also mercifully straightforward to work in: the houses are newer than Seaside's and Grayton's, driveways are real driveways, and decks are wide enough that we do not have to negotiate. The one Seacrest-specific thing worth knowing is the tram. Guests use it to get to the beach, and it runs the internal streets, so we keep our unload clear of the route.

Six by four feet, level, open sky, three feet of chef clearance. In Seacrest the driveway and the rear deck both usually work, and for a large group the driveway is often better because it gives us room for a second station. Houses backing onto the lagoon pool sometimes have a paver patio that is ideal. We do not set up on the community pool deck itself — that is shared space and not ours to occupy. Heat mats under any decking. For twenty-plus we set two stations and run two seatings back to back, which needs about ten by five feet total.

In off 30A, arriving 45 minutes before the seating. Seacrest's internal streets are narrow and shared with the beach tram and a steady flow of golf carts, so we want one driveway space held for the unload rather than a street park. Most houses here are not individually gated, which makes access simpler than Rosemary or Alys, but the sheer density of rentals means street parking is gone by late afternoon in season. Send the house name as well as the street — several Seacrest streets have very similar names.

Seacrest is our biggest bachelorette volume after Rosemary Beach, and the groups are larger — fourteen to twenty is normal. At that size the whole restaurant question is already dead: there is no eight o'clock table for twenty on a Friday in June, so the choice is split the group or bring the dinner in. We do the second thing, usually with two stations so nobody eats forty minutes after anyone else. The lagoon-pool houses also generate a specific booking we like: the group has been at the pool all day, everyone is tired, and dinner at the house is the only version of the evening that actually happens. Birthdays here are usually the two-family kind, with a kids' seating first and the adults after.