Why The Best Corner In Seaside Now Belongs To A Tiki Bar

For as long as most residents can remember, the first restaurant you passed walking down to Coleman Pavilion was a wood-fired pizza counter. This spring, that exact spot started pouring rum drinks out of ceramic mugs instead. The pizza didn't disappear. It moved two blocks over, onto the highway. And once you understand why one had to give up beachfront foot traffic for street frontage while the other one took its place, you start to see how every storefront in this town gets assigned, not just who happens to be renting it this year.

What actually changed at the pavilion entrance

The Daytrader Tiki Bar & Restaurant opened this spring in the space that used to belong to Bud & Alley's Pizza Bar, right at the entrance to Coleman Beach Pavilion. It's a Polynesian-and-Gulf concept from chef Nikhil Abuvala, who already runs Roux 30a, Nanbu Noodle Bar and Nanbu Too, and it landed with real backing: 130 seats, most under cover outdoors, designed with Jonathan Douglas & Associates handling the architecture and Stantec on the interior and landscape work. According to the Michelin Guide's writeup, the menu runs from boiled peanuts seasoned with anise and togarashi to a coconut custard cream pie with passion fruit sauce. Seaside itself describes it as the town's first new table-service restaurant debut in over a decade, which tells you this wasn't a pop-up filling a vacancy. Someone made a deliberate bet on that address.

Pizza Bar didn't close. It moved into the flagship Bud & Alley's building, where it now sits roadside, fronting Scenic Highway 30A directly, right next to its sister concept, Taco Bar, which used to hold its own separate storefront closer to the water. Founder Dave Rauschkolb described the move as putting them "two sisters joining hands in one convenient place." Both restaurants now share one building, one kitchen logistics chain, and one address on the highway instead of two.

Here's the shuffle laid out plainly:

Why a beach-entrance corner and a highway corner aren't interchangeable

This is the part that's easy to miss if you only clock it as "a new place opened." The pavilion entrance is the single most valuable piece of foot traffic in Seaside because it catches people who weren't planning to eat there. They're walking down from a rental with a beach chair and a cooler bag, they pass a bar, and they stop. That kind of location rewards a concept built on impulse and escape, which is exactly how the Daytrader team talks about itself, a place designed to pull people out of ordinary life for an hour.

Pizza Bar didn't need that kind of walk-up traffic anymore. It's been a Seaside fixture long enough that people already know where to find it and plan around it. Trading pavilion foot traffic for a highway-facing spot next to Taco Bar consolidates two established, destination-level restaurants into one operation with one supply chain, one back of house, and two menus people already seek out by name. It's a trade of impulse visibility for operational efficiency, and it only makes sense once you realize the two restaurants were never competing for the same kind of customer.

The rest of Central Square didn't move at all

While the Bud & Alley's family was rearranging its footprint down by the pavilion, chef Jim Shirley's cluster on Central Square stayed exactly where it's been. Great Southern Café, C-Bar, b.f.f. and 87 Central Square Wine Bar are all still anchored around the same courtyard they've occupied since Shirley opened Great Southern Café there in 2006. That's a different kind of business logic entirely: instead of chasing foot traffic patterns, that cluster built its own gravity, enough that people come looking for it specifically rather than passing by on their way to the beach. Grits à Ya Ya doesn't need a pavilion entrance. People already know where the grits are.

So the town isn't reorganizing itself all at once. Two different restaurant groups are making two different bets about what kind of location their concept actually needs, and watching where each one lands tells you something real about how they see their own customer.

What this means for a normal Tuesday

If you're planning an evening around Central Square this week, the map looks like this. Grab a slice or a taco plate roadside at the Bud & Alley's building if you want something familiar and fast before the beach or the amphitheater. If you're in the mood for something you haven't had in Seaside before, walk down toward the pavilion for the Daytrader instead, especially if sunset timing matters, since that corner catches the last light before the dunes. And if you're staying put in the square itself, the Shirley cluster hasn't changed a thing. Order the mojito. It's still made the same way.

The parts of the week that never moved

Whatever happens to the storefronts, the town's actual weekly rhythm has stayed fixed for years, and it's worth knowing if you're timing errands or deciding when to have people over:

• Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. — the Seaside Farmers Market takes over the Amphitheater, with local vendors and craft chefs
• Wednesdays through August 10 — the summer concert series runs at 7 p.m. at the Amphitheater
• Fridays at 8 p.m. — Central Square Cinema screens family movies outdoors under the same stage lights
• Mondays, 6 to 7 p.m. — the Great Seaside Treasure Hunt runs through the streets for kids
• Weekday mornings starting in May — Camp SEASIDE runs for kids ages 5 to 12

None of that changed when Pizza Bar packed up and the Daytrader moved in. The amphitheater doesn't care who's serving pizza two blocks away.

The bones underneath the reshuffle

Seaside marks its 45th year as a town in 2026, founded in 1981 by Robert and Daryl Davis on land Davis's grandfather bought back in 1946. Forty-five years is long enough for a lot of tenants to come and go inside the same grid of streets and the same central square, and that's really what this spring's restaurant shuffle is. The buildings and the walking paths haven't changed. What changes is which concept gets matched to which kind of foot traffic, and this year that math finally put a tiki bar at the best corner in town.

If you live here, none of this requires a decision. Just an updated mental map for where dinner is now. But if you're the kind of person who notices when a town's storefronts get reshuffled and wonders what else is shifting quietly underneath, that instinct is worth trusting. When you're ready to talk about what's happening with property here, not just restaurants, 30AMY HOMES is glad to have that conversation. Schedule a Personal Consultation whenever the timing is right.