Dining in Roanoke Island, NC: Manteo's Waterfront Restaurants, Named and Sourced

Queen Elizabeth Avenue: Manteo's Waterfront Dining Row

Poor Richard's Sandwich Shop + After Hours Bar, at 303 Queen Elizabeth Avenue, opened in 1984 under founder Richard Brown, who reportedly put up the "Poor Richard's" sign after customers kept mistaking his original name, Ship's Galley, for a seafood restaurant. Tod Clissold bought the business in 1998 and still owns it. That name is worth pausing on: The Coastland Times reported in June 2022 that Tod Clissold -- the same owner -- was appointed to fill a vacant Manteo Board of Commissioners seat, and Manteo's hub page on this site already documents that Clissold went on to win the town's November 2025 mayoral election. The sitting mayor of Manteo owns a sandwich shop and after-hours bar on its waterfront boardwalk -- a genuinely specific, sourced local detail, not a recycled one. The daytime counter serves Boar's Head deli sandwiches (Reuben and roast beef are the recurring favorites in press coverage) from a wood-paneled dining room styled like a ship's cabin, with a back porch overlooking the boardwalk; the After Hours Bar side, added in 2002, runs live local music into the evening.

A few doors down at 208 Queen Elizabeth Avenue sits a restaurant that has changed its name three times without changing hands. Sharon Enoch opened The Full Moon Café there in 1995 as a sandwich-and-quiche spot; her husband, Paul Charron, started home-brewing in 2002, and by 2011 the business had become Full Moon Café and Brewery, distributing its "Lost Colony" beer to more than 30 Outer Banks accounts. In 2017 the whole operation was unified under one name, Lost Colony Brewery and Cafe, "to eliminate customer confusion," per Outer Banks This Week's account of the rebrand -- and Charron and Enoch have owned it throughout. Current listings (Yelp, Tripadvisor, OpenTable) now show it operating as Lost Colony Tavern at the same 208 Queen Elizabeth Avenue address, serving British- and Irish-leaning pub food alongside its own beer. Note the irony this research turned up directly: search engines still surface older "Full Moon Cafe" and "Lost Colony Brewery and Cafe" Yelp listings flagged CLOSED -- which reflects the renaming, not an actual closure of the business at that address, but it's exactly the kind of noise a reader should expect and verify past before planning a visit.

The 1587 Restaurant & Lounge operates out of the Tranquil House Inn on the Manteo waterfront, serving seasonal Southern-leaning fine dining -- dishes cited in coverage include seared Hatteras vermillion snapper, Mattamuskeet jumbo lump crabcakes, and a hereford ribeye -- with a copper-top bar and water views from every seat. It is the inn's own restaurant rather than a separately owned business, per the inn's site. At 207 Queen Elizabeth Avenue, Avenue Waterfront Grille was documented by Outer Banks Voice in 2016 as owned by Thomas and Maria Williamson, serving locally sourced seafood, steak, and burgers -- but this research also turned up a HappyCow listing marked CLOSED, a commercial listing describing the same address as an "established business" combining a restaurant, retail shop, and yoga studio, and newer references to "Avenue Grille and Events," which reads as an events/wedding-venue-leaning rebrand. This site could not confirm whether 207 Queen Elizabeth Avenue currently operates as a walk-in restaurant, an events venue, or both -- that is a real, disclosed gap, not a guess either way.

Off the Avenue: Ortega'z, Blue Water Grill, and Downtown's Other Kitchens

A block off the water at 201 Sir Walter Raleigh Street, Ortega'z Southwestern Grill and Wine Bar is owned by Marcelo and Lisa Ortega and serves Southwestern fare built on local seafood and produce -- wasabi shrimp tacos and mojo pork nachos are the dishes most repeated in coverage -- with a wine list drawn from the regions the owners are from, Northern California and Chile. The restaurant was featured on Food Network's "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives" in August 2012, a booking corroborated independently by the show's own location-tracking sites. At 205 Budleigh Street, the Hungry Pelican is a downtown deli built around a large made-to-order sandwich menu plus house-made salads and soups -- a lunch-counter counterpart to Poor Richard's rather than a competitor to it.

Down at Pirate's Cove Marina, on the Manteo side of the Washington Baum Bridge, Blue Water Grill & Raw Bar serves wild-caught fish and locally farmed oysters with a tiki-hut bar and marina views -- a different setting from the downtown boardwalk cluster, oriented toward boaters and the marina's sportfishing crowd. And on US 64/264, the highway corridor rather than the historic downtown waterfront, El Shaddai Chicken serves Peruvian food -- ceviche and lomo saltado are the dishes most cited -- a genuinely notable data point simply because it's the one specifically Peruvian restaurant this research turned up anywhere on Roanoke Island, and it complicates any assumption that the island's food scene is seafood-shack-and-fried-fish only.

Wanchese: One Confirmed Restaurant on a Working Waterfront

This site's Roanoke Island hub page already documents Wanchese's real economic shift -- Wanchese Fish Co.'s 2024 closure after 88 years, and Davis Boatworks' roughly $30 million-a-year sportfish-boatbuilding business -- and that narrative isn't repeated here. What's new to this page is Wanchese's dining side, and it is thin by comparison to Manteo: this research confirmed exactly one restaurant, O'Neal's Sea Harvest, on Harbor Road inside the Wanchese Seafood Industrial Park. It began as a fish house unloading and processing commercial catch, and expanded into retail seafood sales and a dedicated restaurant-and-market building that opened in 2011; Outer Banks Voice's 2016 profile traces the O'Neal family's operation of it, with founder Benny O'Neal retiring that year and handing the business to his children, Ashley, Colby, and Nicole Harper. The restaurant serves lunch year-round -- oysters, soft-shell crab, and dock-fresh catch, prepared with a self-service ordering system built for the working boat crews it originally served -- and employs roughly 20 people. That single confirmed name is itself a data point: Wanchese's dining scene, unlike Manteo's, has not been built out into a visitor-facing restaurant row, which tracks with the hub page's documentation of Wanchese as a working waterfront rather than a tourism draw.

What Changed on This Page, and What Still Isn't Confirmed

The previous version of this page stated, accurately at the time this site published it, that no restaurant names for Manteo or Wanchese had turned up in its research. That was true of the research actually done, but it undersold what's genuinely findable: a further, more targeted pass -- searching Manteo and Wanchese dining specifically, rather than folding dining into broader Roanoke Island history research -- surfaced nine named, address-level, cross-sourced restaurants within a few search cycles. That's the corrected version above. It is a real example of the difference between "no source confirmed this" and "this wasn't researched thoroughly enough yet," and this site would rather admit that gap than let a thin page stand.

What's still genuinely unresolved: Avenue Waterfront Grille's current operating status (restaurant vs. events venue vs. both) at 207 Queen Elizabeth Avenue, disclosed above rather than guessed at. No current menu prices were independently verified for any restaurant named on this page -- cuisine style and signature dishes are sourced from press and business coverage, but treat any specific price as unconfirmed until checked directly. Addresses here come from business listings and news coverage, not a site visit or USPS lookup, so treat them as reliable but not certified. And this list, while far more thorough than the previous version, is still not represented as exhaustive -- downtown Manteo likely has additional restaurants, food trucks, and seasonal pop-ups this research pass did not surface, and Wanchese may have informal or seasonal food options beyond O'Neal's Sea Harvest that weren't found. Hours, seasonal closures, and ownership can all change quickly in a small tourism-dependent town; confirm current status directly with each business before visiting.