Myrtle Beach Has Two Restaurant Booms Right Now, and Only One Is Built to Stick Around

Drive past Broadway at the Beach this month and you will see a 40,000-square-foot building that did not exist a year ago, holding a working distillery, a brewery, a restaurant, and a live music stage under one roof with a screen big enough to watch from the parking lot. Drive six blocks over to 9th Avenue North and you will see something much smaller: a breakfast spot adding a second location so the Saturday line doesn't wrap the block.

Both openings count as "new restaurants in Myrtle Beach." They are not the same story. One is a bet on visitors who fly in for a week. The other is a bet on people who will still be ordering shrimp and grits there in five years. If you live here, the second one is the one worth paying attention to.

The Big Numbers

Ole Smoky Distillery and Yee-Haw Brewing Co. opened their joint venue at 1214 Celebrity Circle in May 2026, and the scale tells you who it is for. Ole Smoky started as a small operation in Gatlinburg in 2010 and grew into the most visited distillery in the world. Yee-Haw runs out of a historic railroad depot in Johnson City with locations already spread across Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, Nashville, Knoxville, and Greenville. Both are proven visitor draws from other tourist towns, now planted at Broadway at the Beach.

A few weeks later, Guy Fieri's Downtown Flavortown opened on June 10, 2026 inside the former JC Penney at Myrtle Beach Mall, a 50,000-square-foot dining and entertainment operation with seating for 400, more than 100 arcade games, duckpin bowling, and over 60 televisions. It was developed with FACE Amusement Group, the same company behind the original Flavortown in Pigeon Forge. Same playbook, different beach.

Neither of these is a bad addition. They will pull cars off the highway and dollars into the local economy. But they were built to work whether or not a single person in the building lives within twenty miles of it.

Six Blocks Over

Historic 9th Avenue North is having its own moment, and it looks nothing like Celebrity Circle. Winna's Kitchen, known for lemon ricotta toast and shrimp and grits, opened a second location on 9th Avenue while its original Main Street spot goes through a renovation, with plans to eventually run both at once. Boteco VIP brought a Brazilian menu and a livelier bar scene to 503 9th Avenue North. The Dolly Llama is doing desserts a few doors down, and The Tasting Room on 9th, open since 2025, gives the stretch a slower, wine-forward option. Nearby Nance Plaza has started hosting seasonal concerts, the kind of thing you walk to on a Wednesday rather than plan a trip around.

None of these openings require a rental car full of out-of-town guests to make sense. They require regulars.

Before the mall, this stretch of downtown was the whole shopping district. Carolyn Mates, whose mother ran the Helen Mates Dress Shop at 807 Main Street for years, remembers a pharmacy on one corner and a post office around the next, with foot traffic criss-crossing the street all day. As she put it, "we didn't have a mall."

That history matters because the building her mother's shop once occupied did not get demolished. It got reused.

What's Actually Opening, By the Numbers

The pattern holds even when you step outside downtown. Pita Bar Kosher opened at the corner of 31st Avenue and Kings Highway, filling a dietary gap the Strand has historically underserved, the kind of niche business that only makes sense if there is a year-round population large enough to support it. Up in Carolina Forest, South Coast Beer Project opened June 1, 2026 at 5020 Carolina Forest Blvd with turf, pond views, an 18-foot movie screen, and a lit path connecting it to The Sneaky Beagle next door, a layout built around families who live close enough to walk between the two on a normal Tuesday.

The Theater Nobody Is Selling You a Ticket For Yet

The clearest evidence of the local bet is a building that has not opened yet. The 300-seat performing arts theater under construction at 807, 809, and 811 Main Street combines three structures that have stood since 1938, including the space that once housed Helen Mates Dress Shop and the original Broadway Theater. The City of Myrtle Beach broke ground on the $22.3 million project in July 2024 in partnership with Coastal Carolina University, and the university confirmed the operating terms: CCU gets a minimum of 150 use days a year for its performing arts programs, the city keeps 30 days for its own events, and 100 days are open for third-party rental.

That breakdown is the whole point. A theater with 150 guaranteed university use days means classes, rehearsals, and performances running on a school calendar, not a single annual gala that shows up once and disappears. The project also drew historic tax credits by renovating the 1938 buildings instead of tearing them down, and it sits inside a federal Opportunity Zone as part of the city's Arts and Innovation District, a downtown zoning area that covers Main Street, Broadway Street, Oak Street, and 9th Avenue North.

The Test That Matters

If you want a quick way to sort any "new in Myrtle Beach" headline into one category or the other, ask what happens to the business on a random Tuesday in February. The 40,000-square-foot venues and the 50,000-square-foot entertainment mall are built for a visitor base that peaks in June and thins out by October. The 9th Avenue North spots, the theater with its guaranteed use days, the kosher counter on Kings Highway, and the brewery built around a playground in Carolina Forest are built for the version of Myrtle Beach that exists after Labor Day, when the crowds are gone and the people left are the ones who live here.

Both versions of Myrtle Beach are real, and both are growing at the same time. The bigger projects will change traffic around Celebrity Circle and Kings Highway on weekend nights, and they will do their job well. But the smaller bet on 9th Avenue North is the one that tends to get buried under the bigger headlines, even though it is the half of this year's story that actually changes what a Tuesday looks like if you live here.

We track this kind of thing because it is the texture of daily life in the Myrtle Beach area, not because it has anything to do with a transaction. If you already call this place home, we hope this saved you a search. If you know someone weighing a move to the Grand Strand and wondering what a neighborhood actually feels like day to day, that is the kind of conversation Carrie Gerald is glad to have. Contact us anytime.