"We've talked about the distillery for a number of years," Myrtle Beach Mayor Mark Kruea said this spring, watching construction close in on the lake at Broadway at the Beach. "It's nice to have the distillery become a reality."
That distillery, a shared Ole Smoky and Yee-Haw Brewing Co. venue built from the ground up on the lakefront, has been the shiny story locals have watched all year. It opened in May at 1214 Celebrity Circle with a beer garden, tasting rooms, and enough event space to host concerts. It's an easy thing to point a camera at. But the more revealing move at Broadway at the Beach this year isn't the new building going up. It's the original one coming down, and the fact that the company tearing it out is the same company that put it there.
The Restaurant That Opened With Broadway Itself
Landry's Seafood House didn't just open at Broadway at the Beach. It opened days after Broadway at the Beach did, back in July 1995, making it one of a handful of tenants that have been on the property since its very first summer. Thirty-one years later, Landry's is set to close this fall, before the offseason makeover begins, and the space will be rebuilt as Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., the "Forrest Gump" themed seafood chain. It'll be the first Bubba Gump in South Carolina and the only one left in the Carolinas, after the Charleston location closed back in 2019.
Here's the detail that changes how the closure should read. Landry's Seafood House and Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. are both owned by the same hospitality company, Fetitta Entertainment, which runs more than 600 hotels, restaurants and casinos. No landlord had to push out a struggling tenant here. One operator looked at its own seafood concept and decided a different one, running under a different name in the same footprint, works better on this stretch of lakefront in 2026.
The Second Time This Has Happened In A Year
Broadway watchers have actually seen this play before. TBonz Gill & Grill, part of the same stretch for roughly three decades, closed at the end of 2025. It's currently under renovation to reopen as New Morning Breakfast, operated by Homegrown Hospitality Group. Same pattern: an operator retiring its own long-running brand and replacing it with a new one in the same physical space rather than handing the address to an outside chain.
| Original tenant | Roughly how long it ran | What's replacing it | Status as of late August 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| TBonz Gill & Grill | About three decades | New Morning Breakfast (Homegrown Hospitality Group) | Under renovation |
| Landry's Seafood House | 31 years, since days after Broadway's 1995 grand opening | Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. (Fetitta Entertainment) | Closing this fall; no opening date announced, expected in 2027 |
Two closures in about a year, both self-inflicted by the operators who owned them, is not the same story as a mall losing tenants it can't replace.
Why A Company Closes Its Own Restaurant
Broadway at the Beach draws an estimated 14 million visitors a year, enough foot traffic that it's tracked as the most visited shopping center in South Carolina. A property doing that kind of volume doesn't need somebody else's concept to rescue it from a dark storefront. What it needs is to know which of its own brands performs best under that much traffic, and Fetitta Entertainment appears to have run that math and landed on Bubba Gump, a brand still riding "Forrest Gump" nostalgia three decades after the movie, over its own Landry's banner.
That reframes the fall closure. It isn't a sign Broadway is struggling to fill space. It's closer to the opposite: a company confident enough in its own portfolio to gut a 31-year location and start over, betting the new name pulls better than the old one did.
What's Rising While The Old Signs Come Down
The distillery isn't the only construction happening at the same time as these closures. Broadway at the Beach has also flagged a lakeside seafood restaurant called Big Fish, expected to open with outdoor seating directly on Lake Broadway, plus a handful of smaller additions:
- Alice's Haunted Little Bookshop
- Duckmania
- Imagination, an educational toy store
- Slime Kitchen, a hands-on slime-making attraction that's already open
Kruea has also floated something bigger down the line: a possible surf resort, the kind of project that would combine a hotel, waterpark, and beach access into one destination on the same 350 acres. Nothing formal has a timetable yet, by his own account, but it's the direction Broadway's ownership is pointing.
What Doesn't Change
None of this touches the complex's older, non-food anchors: Ripley's Aquarium, WonderWorks, the Hollywood Wax Museum, and Legends in Concert have all been fixtures for years and aren't part of this particular wave. The turnover right now is concentrated in food and drink, and specifically in the handful of restaurant spaces that have been there since the 1990s. If your routine at Broadway is dinner on the lake, expect a different sign this fall. If it's the aquarium or a round of mini golf, nothing about your Tuesday night changes.
The Takeaway If You're There Every Few Weeks
The next time you're walking past the lake and notice scaffolding where Landry's used to be, it's worth knowing what you're actually looking at. It isn't a business that couldn't make it. It's a 31-year-old anchor tenant getting swapped out by its own parent company for a brand it thinks will perform better in the same spot, the second time that's happened at Broadway in about a year. That's a different kind of change than a strip mall losing stores it can't refill. It's a company actively reinvesting in itself at the same moment it's pouring concrete for a brand new distillery a few hundred feet away.
Watching those kinds of shifts, who owns what, why a chain closes itself instead of getting replaced, what's actually new construction versus a rebrand, is part of how Kirk Stalvey keeps track of the Grand Strand day to day. If a conversation about buying, selling, or just understanding what's happening in your corner of Myrtle Beach ever comes up, book an appointment anytime.
