Downtown Fernandina Beach restaurant
A small French restaurant in a Victorian cottage on South 2nd Street in downtown Fernandina Beach — Provençal cooking in a handful of rooms, and the island's most distinctive dinner setting.
Le Clos is a French restaurant in a Victorian cottage on South 2nd Street, and it is the most distinctive room to eat in on Amelia Island.
A late-nineteenth-century cottage in the historic district, with the dining spread across a small number of rooms rather than one space. The scale is the point: this is a house someone lived in, and eating in it feels closer to a dinner party than a restaurant service.
That makes it a small operation, which has a practical consequence — see reservations below.
Provençal French, in the southern-French idiom rather than the classical Parisian one: olive oil, herbs, seafood, and the sort of cooking that suits a coastal climate. On an island whose default is fried grouper, that is a genuine change of register.
South 2nd Street, in the walkable core, a block or so off Centre Street. Free public parking on the edge of the historic district serves it, and the waterfront, the marina and the rest of downtown's kitchens and bars are all a short walk away.
The pattern holds: Centre Street carries the visible frontages, and the cross streets carry the rooms people book ahead for.
A small restaurant in a domestic building has very few tables. Book, and book early — Thursday through Saturday certainly, and weeks ahead for any festival weekend or a holiday.
Walking in on a Saturday evening in season is not a realistic plan.
The address, phone, hours, which nights it serves, the price band, the current menu, and who is cooking. All of it is on our verification list and none of it is stated here as fact.
For a small chef-driven restaurant that matters more than for anything else on this site: a room like this can change hands, change nights, or close for a season, and a page written from a distance ages quickly. Call before you plan an evening around it.
A rating, ours or anyone else's — this site carries no review scores at all, and a build check enforces that. Nor a price we have not confirmed. What we will say is that this sits at the upper end of downtown's range.
This is a special-occasion dinner rather than a casual one, and it works best on the second or third evening of a trip, after you have eaten the local shrimp somewhere loud and want something different.
Downtown's other upper-end rooms — the converted-house restaurants on the cross streets and the newer Centre Street kitchens — sit in a similar bracket with a different accent. For the most formal dining on the island, the Ritz-Carlton on the south end is the answer, at the cost of a drive and an evening inside a resort rather than in a Victorian street.
Amelia Island's largest annual event, held in downtown Fernandina Beach on the first full weekend of May. Three days of shrimp, a juried fine arts and crafts show, a pirate parade, live music and street closures across the historic district.
Details unconfirmed
Fernandina Beach's New Year's Eve street party in the downtown historic district, built around a lit shrimp lowered at midnight — the town's answer to the ball drop, and a fitting one for a working shrimping port.
Details unconfirmed
A craft beer festival held annually in the autumn in downtown Fernandina Beach, pouring from regional and further-afield breweries in the historic district — a ticketed tasting event rather than a street party.
Details unconfirmed
Part of Amelia Island dining — our full guide to the complete amelia island, florida visitor guide.