If brunch is the meal you build the day around, Garden Street Bistro at 105 South 3rd Street serves its full brunch and lunch menu from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. every day it's open, which is every day except Tuesday. Readers of the Fernandina Beach News-Leader voted it their 2026 Readers' Choice for brunch.
The bistro opened on January 1, 2020, and it got here a little backward. A lifelong pizza chef rented an old bistro in a historic building to turn it into a pizzeria, and when people kept walking in asking for pancakes, he opened for breakfast first. The pizzeria followed in the fourth year. Pizza Street Kitchen now shares the kitchen and the address, making New York style and Sicilian pies from a dough starter kept since spring 2022, served from 11 a.m. on every open day but Wednesday.
The restaurant's own brunch favorites are brioche French toast, the crab cake omelet, shrimp and grits, and tableside mimosas. The menu also carries homemade biscuits and gravy, crab and grits, and the Atlantic Roll, a toasted house roll loaded with fish dip, a crab cake and blackened local shrimp. Dinner (seafood, steaks, pastas and pizza) is served only on Mondays and Fridays from 3 to 9 p.m., and there's now a full liquor bar.
You can sit in the indoor dining room, at the bar, or out in the courtyard, where dogs are welcome. Tables can be reserved online, walk-ins are welcome too, and parties over 20 go through the private party team. Indigo is a block over on South 2nd Street, and the breakfast roundup covers other morning options, including Beach Diner south of town.