Bud & Alley's Menu

Bud & Alley's Restaurant Review:

Bud & Alley's combines haute cuisine with beach-casual attire and trappings. The Seaside mainstay (you remember Seaside --- the perfect, picket fence-lined town seen in the movie "The Truman Show") celebrates sundown every day by blowing a steam engine bell and awarding the patron who guesses the time most accurately a free drink. That bit of revelry happens in the Rooftop Bar, a suave spot for erudite conversation, or your best facsimile thereof. The dining room below is a casual and unpretentious place, where the menu is all understated sophistication. The cooking style nods to the coastal Mediterranean, Basque country, Tuscany and the America Deep South. Oysters Seaside is baked Apalachicola beauties with shrimp, scallops, calamari, cilantro, garlic and lime in a piquant mélange, and there are tempura-fried soft-shell crabs with rémoulade, or heads-on shrimp amped-up with garlic and shallot. The wine list is also notable.