New PCB restaurant features old photos

PANAMA CITY -  Dee Brown hasn't forgotten Panama City Beach's past.
    
It's memorialized on the walls of his new restaurant in decades-old snapshots of beach landmarks such as Miracle Strip Amusement Park and the Hangout, a popular Panama City Beach eatery of the 1950s and '60s.
    
As an homage to that longclosed restaurant, Brown named his new Front Beach Road oyster bar Dee's Hang-Out.
    
"It's a work in progress," Brown said of his walls Monday afternoon, as he took a minute to relax after a hectic lunch crowd.
    
A Bay County native, Brown opened Dee's Hang-Out, a restaurant he described as an oyster bar with exceptional food, last week.
    
"We're not trying to be everything to everybody. We just trying to do what we do well," Brown said.
    
His menu includes a variety of Cajun and Gulf Coast specialties such as jambalaya and po-boy sandwiches, as well as Brown's fresh oyster dishes, crab cakes and she-crab soup.
    
There also are daily lunch and dinner specials.
    
Brown said Sunday night's lunch specials included a blackened catfish with etoufee sauce, and he called Dee's menu "food that I grew up on and the majority of Panama City identifies with it."
    
A longtime chef for area restaurants, including The Treasure Ship, Shade Tree Restaurant, Big City Fish and the Bay Point Yacht and Country Club, and a graduate of New York's Culinary Institute of America, Brown said the new Hang-Out allows him to do more hands-on cooking, as opposed to serving as on-site food manager.
    
"I've cooked for thousands. I just wanted to start cooking for a few," Brown said.
    
Customers who knew him from the other restaurants were starting to filter into Dee's, with workers from some of the neighboring Front Beach Road resorts also coming in for lunch, Brown said.
    
Brown said he had been using his Front Beach Road restaurant primarily for his catering business that services the nearby Shores of Panama resort.
    
The catering business has slowed down somewhat the last couple of holiday seasons, Brown said, something he hopes to supplement with additional business from the new Hang-Out.
    
Dee's opens at 11 a.m. every day except Tuesday, when it's closed, and is open for lunch and dinner.