We don’t usually eat in chain or hotel restaurants on vacation because we like to experience the local cuisine. But the Holiday Inn on Navarre Beach puts on quite a seafood buffet on Friday evenings. We had Plain or spicy steamed snow crab, steamed clams and mussels, cold peel-and-eat shrimp, baked cod, fried clam strips, hush puppies, fried popcorn shrimp, clam chowder, shrimp and sausage gumbo, stuffed crab, shrimp Creole on rice, new potatoes, crawfish cakes and a lot of other dishes I can’t remember. Even if none of these items were the "best of this dish I’ve ever eaten", it was an extremely enjoyable way to try many different regional dishes (I know, snow crab is hardly native to the Gulf). They had gone through 140 lbs of crab legs when we got there at 7pm. Stick to the buffet. My sister-in-law had a simple chicken basket and it was pretty raw. I guess they pay most of their cooking attention to the seafood that night.
The younger crowd happily ate grilled cheese and hot dogs. They don’t know what they are missing.