The Building at 1045 B-Var Road Keeps Changing Names. This Time, the Kitchen Might Be Why It Sticks.

Drive down toward the Holden Beach bridge on B-Var Road and you'll pass a low, sprawling building with 200 seats and a wide deck facing the Intracoastal Waterway. If you've lived in Supply for more than a few years, you already know this address by more than one name. It was Betty's Waterfront Restaurant first, run by a woman locals still describe as a genuine flapper girl and something of a legend around town. Then it became Lou-Lou's. Then SmacNally's. Now it's The Wharf at Holden Beach, and the man who took it over used to be SmacNally's silent partner before he decided to run the place himself.

Four names on one waterfront address is not a coincidence. It's a pattern, and the pattern tells you something most restaurant write-ups skip past: the view was never the hard part. Getting a kitchen to match it was.

The View Was Never the Problem

Every version of this building has had the same thing going for it. It sits right on the ICW near the end of Ferry Street, close enough to the water that boats can pull up and dock for free while their crews walk in for dinner. That's a genuine advantage in a town like Supply, where most dining options cluster along Highway 17 or sit set back from any water access at all. A restaurant here doesn't have to work hard to sell the setting.

What each earlier version struggled with was everything past the setting. Reviewers who remember Lou-Lou's and SmacNally's describe standard, unremarkable seafood-shack food, the kind of menu that leans entirely on the deck chairs and the sunset to carry the meal. That's a viable business model in a beach town, right up until someone else on the same stretch of water decides to actually cook.

Enter a Chef Who Cooked With Emeril

Tom Burruss took over the building and hired Emile Chagnon as executive chef, and Chagnon's résumé is not what you'd expect to find running a kitchen off B-Var Road. He previously owned four restaurants in the Pittsburgh area before retiring to southeastern North Carolina in his early forties. He has cooked alongside Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse. According to local food writers who covered the opening, he got the job the old-fashioned way: he walked in, offered to cook for Burruss for free for a week, and was hired after two days.

That's a different kind of bet than the building has seen before. Chagnon's approach, by his own description to local press, is to take everyday dishes people already know and push them a little further than expected. The tasting he walked visiting food writers through backs that up: a tuna poke bowl, a crab dip, blackened shrimp and bruschetta on toast points, crab bites, and a full soup flight. That's a menu built by someone who used to run four kitchens of his own, not someone filling out a template for a seasonal seafood shack.

Reviewers have noticed the shift. People who remember the building's SmacNally's era as forgettable are now describing dishes with real seasoning and technique, the kind of praise that doesn't get written about deck views alone. The Wharf still books live music on the patio (Will Travis has played recent Easter Sunday sets), still welcomes dogs, and still offers free dockage for anyone arriving by boat. None of that changed. What changed is what comes out of the kitchen once you're seated.

The building never needed a better view. It needed someone willing to cook like the view mattered.

It's Not Just One Address

If The Wharf were the only example, you could chalk it up to one ambitious owner making a good hire. But a few miles away on Stone Chimney Road, a second business tells a version of the same story.

The Sea Biscuit Cafe opened as a breakfast and lunch spot run by a chef who previously worked as a country club executive chef. It's a small, farm-to-table operation, the kind of place with connect-four boards at the tables for families waiting on food. The menu leans into scratch cooking with specific, sourced ingredients rather than generic diner fare: a 7-ounce grass-fed Brasstown ribeye served with eggs, shrimp and grits, sweet tea brined chicken with spiced waffles and braised blueberries, biscuits built from scratch rather than reheated from a case.

That's not the menu of someone testing whether a breakfast spot can survive on convenience alone. It's the menu of someone who ran a bigger kitchen somewhere else and decided this town was worth doing real cooking in anyway.

Put those two openings side by side and a pattern starts to look less like coincidence:

Neither restaurant is new construction. Neither is part of a chain or a group expanding down the coast. Both are older buildings or modest storefronts taken over by chefs who spent years running kitchens with higher stakes than a small coastal town usually sees, and who chose Supply on purpose rather than landing here by default.

What This Actually Says About Supply

The easy version of this story is "new restaurant opens near Holden Beach," and you've probably read that version already on three other sites. The version worth paying attention to is different: Supply's most interesting food right now isn't showing up because a developer built a new shopping plaza and filled it with tenants. It's showing up because individual chefs with real credentials elsewhere are landing in this specific stretch of Brunswick County and deciding to stay.

That matters for anyone who already lives here, because it changes where you look for a good meal. The generic advice is to check whatever's newest along the highway corridor. The better advice, based on what's actually happening, is to watch which older addresses and out-of-the-way buildings suddenly get a new name and a new chef behind them. The Wharf's building had three failed attempts before someone with Chagnon's background walked in and made an offer nobody expected. Stone Chimney Road isn't a strip you'd normally scout for breakfast, and yet that's exactly where a former country club chef decided to open.

If you're already local, the practical takeaway is simple. Next time you're heading toward Holden Beach for the evening and want something better than the usual fried basket, The Wharf is worth the stop, especially on a night with live music on the patio. And if you're the kind of person who plans a weekend around a good breakfast, Stone Chimney Road deserves a detour before you assume the highway strip is your only option.

The building at 1045 B-Var Road will probably keep testing new names over the years, because waterfront addresses in small coastal towns always do. What's different this time is that the kitchen finally caught up to the view, and that's a much better reason to make the drive than the address alone ever was.

If you're settled in Supply and keeping an eye on how the town keeps changing, whether it's a new kitchen on the water or a shift in what's for sale nearby, Natalie Rakoci pays attention to the same details you do. Let's Connect anytime you want a local read on what's actually happening around here.