How the son of a Florida governor ended up leading a landmark Bradenton Beach restaurant

Ed Chiles must be doing something right.

In a challenging business, where many new restaurants fail within a year or two, Chiles Hospitality is celebrating the 30th anniversary of Beach House Waterfront Restaurant, 200 Gulf Drive N., Bradenton Beach.

Beach House is Chiles’ third restaurant. In 1979, he bought Sandbar Food and Spirits, 100 Spring Ave. in Anna Maria.

In 1989, he acquired Mar Vista Dockside Restaurant & Pub, 760 Broadway St. in Longboat Key.

All three operate under the Chiles Hospitality umbrella, which also includes Gamble Creek Farms and an in-house bakery.

“I’ve been in this business 45 years. It’s amazing,” Chiles said this week.

Florida by Trips to Discover, a digital travel publication, would agree that Chiles is doing something right.

Earlier this year, Trips to Discover named Beach House Waterfront Restaurant and The Sandbar Restaurant two of the 15 best beachfront restaurants in Florida.

To mark the 30th anniversary of Beach House Waterfront Restaurant, Chiles Hospitality has announced a 1990s-throwback menu of favorites dishes, including coconut shrimp, a barbecue platter, pan-seared crab cakes, steak tacos and beechnut grouper. Also making a comeback for dessert is blueberry cobbler.

Chiles, 69, is the son of Lawton Chiles, U.S. senator from 1971 to 1989 and governor of Florida from 1991 until his death in 1998.

At one time, Ed Chiles considered a law career. But instead, he parlayed his political science degree from the University of Florida into a career as a restaurateur.

In a way, it wasn’t a huge stretch because his father owned four Red Lobster restaurants, including the very first one, which opened in Lakeland.

The revenue flow from the restaurants is what allowed his father to step away from his legal practice and enter politics, Ed Chiles said. “He didn’t have to bill hours as an attorney.”

Although born in Lakeland, Chiles spent many childhood summers on Anna Maria Island. As he began considering careers, he came back to Anna Maria Island and thought it would be fun to have a seafood restaurant there.

“We started to look at places here and found that the Sandbar was for sale with seven lots on the beach. It was doing $350,000 a year in sales and we bought it,” he said.

“This was such a great piece of property. We thought if you could make a nickle and hang on, the property would grow in value,” he said.

Chiles learned the restaurant business at Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami Beach, starting as a dishwasher and moving on to working with oysters and clams.

“That was my beginning in the business. I love being around people and I love food,” Chiles said.

When Chiles acquired the former Harbor House restaurant, later renamed the Beach House Waterfront Restaurant, in 1993, he knew it was a risk. With its seating capacity of 550, it would be by far the largest of his restaurants.

He went to Katie Pierola, then-mayor of Bradenton Beach, to ask what he could expect from the city regarding his plans to extensively remodel and rename the restaurant.

“We will not put up barriers. We will knock them down,” Chiles recalls Pierola saying.

“Bridge Street was pretty rough in those days. It needed new blood, changes. It needed to be elevated,” Chiles said.

With the promise of support from City Hall, Chiles started six months of renovations before reopening as Beach House Waterfront Restaurant.

Over the next three decades, Beach House had three more renovations to maintain a contemporary, fresh look.

“We have people from all over the world coming here,” Chiles said.

Ed Kos, 49, head wait for the restaurant, has worked at Beach House eight years.

Kos says that he loves the customers, the challenging environment and Chiles’ emphasis on environmentally friendly practices.

“There is no resting on your laurels,” Kos said.

Protecting the environment

Sustainable practices at Chiles Hospitality include composting table scraps and oyster shell recycling, which go to Chiles’ Gamble Creek Farms in Parrish to grow organic herbs, produce and fruits.

Chiles is a founding member of Solutions to Avoid Red Tide and a board member of Gulf Shellfish Institute, which launched the All Clams on Deck Initiative. That initiative encourages the use of hard-shell clams to filter the waters of Tampa Bay while absorbing nutrients and algae responsible for red tide.

In 2021, Chiles sounded the alarm about protecting coastal water quality after a giant pond holding millions of gallons of contaminated water at the Piney Point industrial site sprung a leak, threatening homes in the neighborhood, and triggering a release into Tampa Bay.

“We can’t afford to ignore this,” Chiles says of environmental threats. “To do so, would be at our own peril. I worry about what’s coming. We live on the largest gulf in the world and it’s under pressure. We have a lot more people and a lot more development.

“I’m concerned for my 18-month-old grandson, that he gets to have the good fortune to grow up in paradise like I did.”