Sean Murphy invites you to 'eat here'

Sean Murphy, proprietor of the award-winning Beach Bistro on Anna Maria Island, has ordered a new gastronomic experience. He aims to meld the extravagant with the essential and do it in an easygoing, comfort food, eat-it-here kind of way.

In fact, Murphy’s restaurant venture is simply called, “eat here.”

“We are debunking upscale formality,” Murphy says. “We’ve taken all the flavors at Beach Bistro and put them with more accessible fish and beef products.”

Murphy’s concept, too, is more than just a new menu that plays off Beach Bistro. For one, although Beach Bistro has the lone location on Anna Maria Island, the plan is to build a stable of eat heres, starting with the Gulf Coast.

The first eat here opened in December on Holmes Beach. A second eat here is set to open on Main Street in downtown Sarasota in November, and Murphy has begun to scout locations in Tampa and St. Petersburg for future eat heres.

In addition to more locations, Murphy tinkered with the high-end restaurant model he built at Beach Bistro. That restaurant consistently earns one of the top dining spots in Florida in annual Zagat’s guides.

Eat here, Murphy says, offers smaller plates than Beach Bistro and does it in a more relaxed atmosphere. The menus, for example, are printed on regular paper, stapled together and given to customers on clipboards. The napkins are cotton kitchen towels.

“It has a cool and hip feel, but it’s still casual and welcoming,” says Murphy.

Finally, the eat here model depends on a quick and easy opening. The Holmes Beach location was built-out in a month and cost about $250,000 — ultra-fast and inexpensive in the restaurant industry.

Murphy, who opened Beach Bistro with his wife in 1985, brought on two passive partners for eat here. One, part-time Longboat Key resident Skip Sack, who once owned multiple Applebee’s and is a past president of the National Restaurant Association, helps Murphy look for new locations.

“I think it’s a great concept because it’s a niche no one else is doing,” Sack says. “It’s not like a chain.”

The eat here idea, Murphy says, goes back five or six years, when he saw customers shift their attitudes about dinner out. “I began to notice dining out was becoming much more about being entertained,” Murphy says.

Murphy noticed the trend at the Beach Bistro and at the Mangrove Grill in Palmetto, a restaurant he helped open in 2004. Murphy also works in a consultant role with the restaurant at The Concession, a private golf club in east Manatee County.

Although the shift to new dining-out attitudes is a big reason behind eat here, the No. 1 lesson Murphy teaches budding restaurant owners, that food comes first.

“It’s always about the food,” Murphy says. “You have to get an ‘A’ every time.”

Eatery Excerpts
Sean Murphy goes straight to the meat when he explains the menu differences between Beach Bistro and eat here. 

BEACH BISTRO
Beach Bistro, the well-known restaurant Murphy owns on Anna Maria Island, serves rack of lamb. Murphy’s eat here serves pot roast.

The Beach Bistro menu, includes maple leaf duckling, which comes with a cognac demi-glace and costs $42.

EAT HERE
The eat here menu includes entrées ranging from $9 to $17. Many appetizers are in the $5 to $8 range.
Designed and written by Murphy, the eat here menu also pokes fun at stuck-up foodies. The pan-cooked mussels, for instance, come with “frites (pretentious fries).” Also, there’s fried (tempura) beets, “because Sean’s grandmother would roll over in her grave.”

There’s the titanic salad, a plate of chilled iceberg lettuce and Maytag blue cheese that’s the “last thing everyone on the ship saw — iceberg & blue.”