Since we’ve been vacationing in Gulf Shores for all of my thirty-five years, it’s hard to come up with something new to do every time we visit. We have our favorite places to eat and things to do, but otherwise we stay close to camp or live on the beach. I have had several friends encourage us to visit The Hangout for breakfast, but we had never been before this year. Let me go ahead and say that The Hangout is one of our favorite dinner spots. For atmosphere. It is super family friendly {until 11 o’clock at night}, offers great bands, a beautiful view and lots of fun things for the kids to do while you are waiting the {requisite} two hours. BUT, the food is not my favorite. It isn’t bad, there are just better places to eat for what you spend. We still go at least once during our stay, because sometimes atmosphere outweighs the menu. And who doesn’t love to dance on tables during dinner?
I managed to convince Josh that we should take the kids for breakfast one morning during our stay and it did not disappoint. They serve a buffet breakfast, every day of the summer, from 8 to 10:30 and it was probably the most reasonably priced meal we ate the entire week {$12.95 for adults and $6.95 for children under 12}.
There are several princesses {we saw Rapunzel, Ariel and a few other friendly mermaids} and pirates who visit your table during the meal and bring you eye patches, bandannas and princess bracelets. Ella thought she was too old for all of this, but it only took her about 15 minutes to decide she could have fun anyway.
I’ll be honest – my expectations for the food were pretty low. But y’all, it was delicious. It’s certainly the best breakfast on the beach for the money we spent and they bring the buffet right to your table! The passed beignets while we were waiting and the buffet platter included eggs, sausage links, bacon, breakfast potatoes and cheese grits. They happily refilled it as many times as we needed while we were eating. If you aren’t a fan of the buffet style breakfast, they did have a short menu of other breakfast favorites.
At some point, all of the kids leave the table and head over for story time and then they go on a treasure hunt to find the pirates’ missing booty. I followed them around for a bit, because they were a little shy at 8 o’clock in the morning! The story gave them their first clue and then they had to find palm fronds with several other clues leading them to the buried treasure.
Sophie was BEYOND thrilled with her gold doubloons. She might have hidden them and had us find them on the beach more times than I can possibly count.
We loved the breakfast so much, that we convinced Gran and K to go back with us later in the week so that Hudson could meet the pirates. Ella was much less “cool” this time and had a blast showing Hudson where to find the buried treasure. The story was a little different and the selection of princesses seems to vary depending on the day, which bodes well for future visits.
We’ll be adding this breakfast to our regular repertoire of beach excursions because everybody left with a smile on their face!
