RESTAURANT NEWS | FLORIDA
Atlantic Beach Gets a New Oceanfront Table
Coastal Farmer inside Dune House Hotel & Spa serves local produce, seafood, cocktails, and beachside dinners.
COASTAL FARMER | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Eric Barton
6:55 a.m. ET, July 6, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
A new hotel restaurant has opened in Atlantic Beach with the kind of patio that makes lunch feel like a better life decision.
Coastal Farmer is now open inside Dune House Hotel & Spa, the 193-room independent hotel that opened in March along the stretch of Northeast Florida shoreline where Atlantic and Neptune Beaches meet. The restaurant sits just off the beach, with an open-air patio that guests can reach from the sand or Ocean Boulevard, which means the whole thing is already making a strong case for oysters, a cocktail, and forgetting whatever you were supposed to do after lunch.
The all-day restaurant serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days a week, with a kitchen built around local farms, nearby fisheries, calling it “tide-to-table” seafood. Chef Daniel Tederous and chef de cuisine Nicolas Kes are leading the menu, working with Congaree and Penn, Black Hog Farm, Down to Earth Farm, County Line Produce, Berry Good Farms, Safe Harbor Seafood, and Mayport C&C Fisheries.
“We’re cooking with what the coast gives us, from what the farmers grow to what the boats bring in,” Tederous said. “The goal is food that’s honest and seasonal, simple in the best sense, and unmistakably of this place.”
Inside, the restaurant leans coastal hotel without going full seashell shop: warm woods, rattan, soft linens, and greenery. Kiwi Dabold, the hotel’s director of food and beverage and the restaurant’s general manager, is leading the dining room and bar program, which includes wines, cocktails, local spirits, and Florida brews.
Tederous took a roundabout path to the kitchen, studying business communications at the University of Georgia before returning home to Marietta and working at a small barbecue restaurant. He later moved to Nava, a fine-dining Southwestern restaurant outside Atlanta, then spent part of his career cooking in Hawaii, where fresh local seafood became part of his vocabulary. By 2020, he was chef de cuisine at Emeril’s Delmonico Steakhouse in New Orleans, learning the art of simple preparations, properly handled fish, and the long, unglamorous climb behind restaurant cooking.
The real draw here may be the geography. Florida has plenty of restaurants that sit across the street from the sand, or close enough to the water to make a heroic claim about oceanfront dining. Coastal Farmer has the rarer thing: a patio where guests can walk in from the beach, order lunch or dinner, and keep the Atlantic close enough to make shoes feel optional.
