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Which is the best restaurant in your city?

I’ve eaten at a lot of restaurants in Sarasota. We’ve got everything here—high-end steakhouses, waterfront restaurants, great seafood, little local joints, and plenty of places built specifically for the tourist crowd.

But if somebody comes to Sarasota and asks me one simple question—“Where should I eat?”—I already know my answer.

Owen’s Fish Camp.

It’s the place I recommend to people, and I recommend it because I actually go there myself.

Is it the fanciest restaurant in Sarasota? No.

Is it some polished, corporate place where everything feels perfectly manufactured? Definitely not.

And that’s exactly why I like it.

It Just Feels Like Sarasota

There’s something about Owen’s that you really can’t manufacture.

It’s tucked away in Burns Court, surrounded by old Sarasota character, and the entire place has this laid-back, old-Florida feeling to it. You’re not walking into another restaurant concept that could just as easily be sitting in Tampa, Miami, Atlanta, or Chicago.

You know you’re in Sarasota.

That matters to me.

When somebody visits this city, I don’t necessarily want to send them to the newest multimillion-dollar restaurant with perfect lighting and a giant marketing budget.

I want to send them somewhere they’ll remember.

Owen’s is that place.

The Whole Experience

Obviously, the food has to be good—and it is.

It’s a fish camp. Seafood is the star of the show, and that’s exactly what you should expect when you’re visiting a coastal Florida city.

But what makes Owen’s my pick isn’t one particular dish.

It’s the whole experience.

The food. The atmosphere. The people. The location. The character.

There’s an authenticity to the place that’s getting harder and harder to find.

You can spend a fortune building a beautiful restaurant, but you can’t just buy character. Character develops over time. It comes from the building, the neighborhood, the people, and thousands of nights of people sitting around eating, drinking, laughing and making memories.

Owen’s has that.

Our Little Hidden Gem

Calling Owen’s a “hidden gem” might be stretching it these days because plenty of people know about it.

But to me, it still feels like our little Sarasota gem.

It feels local.

And when friends come into town and ask me where they should go, I tell them Owen’s.

I’ve done it plenty of times.

That probably says more than any restaurant ranking ever could.

Think about it: when somebody you know comes to your city, you’re putting your own reputation behind the recommendation. You don’t send them somewhere because Google says it’s good. You send them somewhere because you know they’re going to walk away saying:

“That place was cool.”

That’s what I want somebody to experience when they visit Sarasota.

Best Doesn’t Always Mean Fanciest

I think we’ve gotten a little confused about what “best” means.

The best restaurant doesn’t necessarily have to have the highest prices, the longest wine list, the fanciest building or the hardest reservation to get.

Sometimes the best place is simply the place you keep wanting to go back to.

It’s the place you recommend without thinking about it.

It’s the place that somehow captures the personality of the city around it.

For me, Owen’s Fish Camp checks all those boxes.

So if you’re coming to Sarasota and you ask me where you should eat, I’m not giving you a list of twenty restaurants.

I’m giving you one.

Go to Owen’s Fish Camp.

Get some seafood. Enjoy the atmosphere. Take in a little bit of old Florida.

And when you’re sitting there thinking, Man, this place is pretty damn cool, you’ll understand exactly why I sent you there.

— Nicholas Francis
Modern Day Dealer
NFAFinance.com