7/22/14
It was a Tuesday, and I had had the idea for us to meet up after work and drive down to Gulf Shores and watch a sunset and go swimming at night… but of course we had to eat first.
Fish River Grill #2 is located in the Foley Plaza strip mall about half a mile past downtown Foley. We’ve been passing it on the way to the beach for years and finally decided to give it a try.
The menu consists primarily of seafood, burgers, and poboys. The cool thing that makes this place stand out though is the addition of some lesser known and more adventurous dishes such as Cajun pistols, frog legs, fried gator bites, and a seafood BLT.
I must’ve been hungry because everything on the menu sounded good.
They start you off with a cup of complimentary Swamp Soup. I don’t know exactly what’s in it, but our waitress described it as “greens and beans.” It makes sense once you taste it. I enjoyed it. Nikki wasn’t really into it, so I may or may not have eaten both mine and hers. It tastes better than it looks… or sounds.
It took a long time to decide what we wanted, but Nikki ultimately decided on grilled white fish with fries and fried okra.
It was good… which is fine, but not when you’re expecting great… not when the restaurant is part of Alabama’s top 100 places to eat before you die.
After way too much deliberation, I decided to play it safe and go with a classic, a shrimp poboy. The shrimp were pretty fresh and cooked well, but I found myself cheating on this poboy with thoughts of other poboys… namely the shrimp poboy at Market by the Bay in Daphne and the one at Roshell’s in Mobile.
I had a really good feeling initially, but we both felt that the food didn’t quite live up to the hype. That being said, I would like to go again and try something different, perhaps a burger or some frog legs. Next time we’re in the area though and we want burgers and seafood, we’ll probably just hit GooRoo’s Grill in Robertsdale.
And if you’re wondering about our plans to catch the sunset and go night-swimming in the Gulf, none of that worked out like we planned. We were in the restaurant the entire time the sun was setting, and when we got down to Gulf Shores to put our feet in the water, we realized it was so dark we couldn’t see at all. We couldn’t even find the moon, which was extremely creepy… So we walked over to the Hangout and caught the latter part of Banditos’ set. It wasn’t what we had planned, but it ended up being a lot of fun. Good live band from Birmingham if you get a chance to see them.
FISH RIVER GRILL #2
608 S. McKenzie Street
Foley, AL 36535
251-952-3474
a regional pairing 