While every summer at Milton’s Gator’s Seafood is a special one, 2025 marks the 50th season for the small, family-owned and locally loved summertime restaurant at 4030 Farrington Road.
When owner Bill Farrington considers how his father, founder Earl “Gator” Farrington – who started the business alongside his wife, Voncille Farrington, in the summer of ‘75 – would feel about customers still lining up at the door half a century later, he would laugh and laugh and laugh.
“He would find it so funny,” Farrington said. “He had it in his mind as his ‘little fish joint,’ he couldn’t imagine anyone would be interested enough to read about it.”
When his father’s health declined and he was no longer able to run it in 2012, Bill Farrington’s wife and children were the ones who came to him advocating to keep it open.
“I told them they’re crazy. I was like, ‘You have no idea what it takes to do this, even if it’s two days a week. You don’t understand how hard the restaurant business is,’” he said. “After thinking about it, I was like, ‘If my wife and children want to continue this … I always thought it would be selfish for me to just say no to them. I need to at least try.’”
Farrington couldn’t help but feel nostalgia for the place at the heart of his childhood memories.
“The building was built in ’74, we opened in May of ’75. That place has not changed,” he said.
Not only does the location of the restaurant that sits side by side with Farrington Lake transport customers back in time, but the menu built around the local seafood, cheese grits and other Southern specialities hasn’t changed much either. The only major tweak that comes to mind for Farrington is their twist on a hot mullet, which, through experimentation, led to the creation of a new hot shrimp appetizer that was just too good not to put on the permanent menu.
“We’ve tried to stay faithful to what they did,” Farrington said.
Fifty years doesn’t happen by accident, and you can trace Gator’s longevity to his parents’ work ethic and his father’s close attention to detail. If you were doing it wrong − boy, would he let you know.
“If I cleaned a fish, and I left scales on the fish, that wasn’t acceptable,” he said. “Little things he worked hard at.”
However, none of it would have happened without God’s grace to them, Farrington says. He also credits the friends and family who have kept Gator’s standing through every fire, flood (numerous floods), and major damage from Hurricane Ivan. Without some serious help, any of those could have been the demise of the down-home seafood joint.
It’s the regulars he enjoys catching up with every summer, and his wife, Jennifer Farrington, is the first face to welcome them into the dining room. The Gator’s family merges with his own, as his family works to get plates of hot fried mullet out on the tables, and his 2-year-old granddaughter devours a plate full of fried shrimp, marking a new generation’s memories for the Farrington family.
He also loves seeing the staff come together each year, made up of teachers off for the summer, people they go to church with and their immediate family.
While the work is hard, something that happens within the walls of their cozy kitchen bonds them.
“In the summer, we have a really good time,” Farrington said. “There’s a lot of fun that goes into it.”
Putting the fun aside, he recalls a conversation from a former employee about just how impactful his time at Gator’s had truly been.
“He told me, ‘To this day, if it had not been for your dad treating me like a son and that place down there that I worked in while I was that age before I went off in the Marine Corps, I have no doubt as a teenager I would have committed suicide,’” Farrington recalled. “’That’s how much that place means to me,’ he said.”
Farrington is well aware that being open eight hours every weekend from the start of the summer to the college football kickoff isn’t the most profitable business plan, but he’s not in it for the profit. He’s in it for the people.
Each year, he decides if their team has it in them to open for another summer, and 50 years felt like a major milestone that kept willing them to sign on for another.
While he doesn’t know what the future holds for Gator’s – not even next summer – he encourages customers to come out and continue to be part of his family’s story and soak in the memories while they can.
“It’s one of those things that we’ll do it as long as we can do it. It’s got a lot of nostalgia to it,” he said. “If you’ve been there when you were younger, it brings back a lot of memories for people.”
Gator’s Seafood is open from 5-9 p.m. on Friday and Saturday now through Aug. 23.
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This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Milton summer-only restaurant Gator’s Seafood celebrates 50 years of mullet and memories
Reporting by Brittany Misencik, Pensacola News Journal / Pensacola News Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
