Main Street North Myrtle Beach Restaurants Are Changing

Walk down Main Street in North Myrtle Beach this summer and you will notice the gap before you notice what filled it. The building that used to hold Duffy Street Seafood Shack is gone, or going, depending on the week you drive past. A few doors down, a taco stand and beer garden now sits in the space that used to be Fenway Grill, doing brisk business out of a building its own operators describe as temporary. Melt, the ice cream shop generations of North Myrtle Beach kids have begged their parents to stop at, is relocating rather than closing.

None of this is random. It is the visible first phase of a multi-year rebuild of the historic strip, and understanding the sequence matters more than reacting to any single storefront change. The short version: what you are eating at this summer is not the finished plan. It is a placeholder built specifically so the block does not sit empty while the real project gets built behind it.

What Actually Happened to the Old Spots

Fenway Grill closed, and into that space moved OD Taco Co., a restaurant and beer garden that opened this spring with a target date of May 15. Duffy Street Seafood Shack's building was slated for demolition as the opening move of the same project. Melt is not disappearing. It is moving within the same footprint, which matters if you have been telling out-of-town guests where to get a cone after the beach.

The family behind this is the Worleys, longtime owners of several properties along this stretch of Main Street. Harold Worley, a former Horry County councilman, has owned property here for years. His son, H.G. Worley Jr., is now heading up the redevelopment through a newly formed operating company, Worley Hospitality Corp. That detail matters for how you should read what is happening here. This is not an outside developer buying up a beach town's identity and flipping it into something generic. It is a family that has owned this block deciding to take a more direct hand in running what happens on it.

"Once you live and breathe a community for years, you know what works and what doesn't," Worley said.

That is a different posture than most redevelopment stories. It is also why the taco stand exists at all instead of the space just sitting vacant for a year or two while the permanent building gets designed and permitted.

The Two-Phase Plan Behind the Taco Stand

The project appears in development filings as Shag City USA, and it is structured in two distinct phases with very different timelines.

OD Taco Co. is explicitly a bridge business. It is currently operating in the old Fenway Grill building, but the plan has always been for it to move into the permanent phase-two building once that is finished. Worley was direct about why the family didn't just wait.

"I'm not a big fan of buildings sitting empty," he said, describing the family's preference for a "laid back beach town vibe" that fits what Main Street already is rather than something imported.

If you are trying to picture what Main Street looks like a year from now versus three years from now, this table is the answer. The taco stand you see today is a two-year appointment, not a permanent tenant.

Main Street's Other Quiet Investment

While the Worleys work on their private redevelopment, the city has been making its own smaller, quieter bet on the same stretch. In April, North Myrtle Beach set aside $50,000 for a facade grant program aimed at the city's historic Main Streets. Qualifying businesses can receive up to $25,000 to refurbish storefronts, on a matching basis, meaning a business has to put in the same amount the city contributes.

The eligible streets are Main Street, Windy Hill, Sea Mountain Highway, 17th Avenue South, and 37th Avenue South, so this isn't a Main Street-only program, but Main Street is squarely in scope. According to the city, the program pulled around eight applications in its first year, with hopes of growing participation going forward.

Two separate forces are working on the same three blocks at the same time this year: a private family investing in a two-phase rebuild, and a city program nudging existing storefronts toward new paint, signage, and outdoor seating. Neither one depends on the other, but if you live here and have wondered why Main Street feels like it's mid-renovation from multiple directions at once, that's the explanation.

Why a Local Family Running the Taco Stand Matters

There's a version of this story where a developer from out of state buys the block, tears everything down, and builds something that could be anywhere. That is not what's happening here. The Worleys already owned this ground. Harold Worley's history on the Horry County Council and his son's decision to personally operate the interim restaurant rather than lease it out to a chain both point the same direction: continuity of ownership, even as the buildings themselves change.

That distinction is worth sitting with if you've lived in North Myrtle Beach long enough to remember when Main Street felt like it might get swallowed by the same kind of chain development that reshaped stretches of Highway 17. The bet here is that the family who has watched this block for decades has a better sense of what belongs on it than an outside firm would.

The broader dining scene around North Myrtle Beach backs up that this isn't an isolated move. White Heron, a coastal-inspired seafood restaurant from the team behind Drift and Imperfecto Cantina, is set to open this fall in a former seafood restaurant space on Highway 17 South. A few miles south at Broadway at the Beach, Ole Smoky Distillery and Yee-Haw Brewing Co. opened a 40,000-square-foot combined distillery, brewery, and event space this spring, the first joint location for either brand outside Tennessee. Main Street's rebuild is part of a wider wave of investment across the Grand Strand this year, not a standalone project.

What This Actually Means If You Live Here

For the rest of 2026, expect the block near the old Duffy Street Seafood Shack site to look unfinished, because it is. OD Taco Co. will keep operating out of the former Fenway Grill space as the two-story building goes up around it. Melt will be settled into its new spot rather than its old one, which is worth mentioning to anyone visiting who still has muscle memory for the old location.

The bigger shift, the 40,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space that phase two brings, is not going to change your evening walk this year or next. That piece of the plan is targeting 2027. If you're the kind of resident who tracks these things out of habit rather than necessity, the taco stand is your marker. When it moves into a permanent building, that's your signal that phase two has actually arrived, not just been announced.

In the meantime, Main Street keeps doing what it has always done: shag dancing at Fat Harold's, cold beer on a patio, a strip that changes slowly enough that you can still recognize it, even while the block closest to Duffy's rebuilds one temporary business at a time.

If you're weighing what any of this means for property near Main Street, or you just want a second opinion on what a name like Worley Hospitality Corp signals for the neighborhood long term, Natalie Dawn Rakoci has spent years watching how these coastal blocks actually develop, not just how the renderings promise they will. Let's Connect.