The Restaurants on Scenic Highway Keep Changing Names. The Family Running Them Hasn't.

When Skopelos on the Bay closed on Scenic Highway, the name disappeared from the strip. The family that ran it didn't. A Scenic 98 Coastal profile traces what happened next. Chef Gus Silivos and his wife Bianca took Nancy's Gourmet and Catering, the business they'd opened across the street a decade earlier, and renamed it Agapi Bistro + Garden. The octopus and the Skopelitiki pita came with it. If you've eaten either at Agapi in the past few years, you've eaten a dish that outlived the restaurant it was born in.

That's the thing about the short run of Scenic Highway that cuts through East Pensacola Heights. From a distance it looks like a normal restaurant row, the kind that turns over every few years as leases expire and concepts fail. Look closer and the story is more layered. Some names have changed, while people and kitchens have carried on in a few of these places.

Two doors, one kitchen family

Gus Silivos was born on the Greek island of Skopelos and moved to Pensacola with his family at age 11. His grandfather had come to America decades earlier to work for a brick company up north. Gus earned a business degree at the University of West Florida, then a culinary degree from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, in 1982. He came home and became Executive Chef at his family's namesake restaurant, Skopelos.

In 1999 he opened Scenic 90 Cafe, a diner concept modeled on the Greek-run diners he'd encountered around New York during culinary school. In 2010 he opened Nancy's Gourmet and Catering across the street from Skopelos. When Skopelos eventually closed, Gus and Bianca didn't try to resurrect it. They rebranded Nancy's into Agapi Bistro + Garden, Greek for "ultimate love," and kept the catering arm running under the Nancy's name. Since 2021 the same team has operated all three concepts, Agapi Bistro, Scenic 90 Cafe, and Nancy's Catering & Events, sitting next to each other on the same stretch of highway.

The staff has stayed put along with the buildings. In a Scenic 98 Coastal profile, Gus said: "We have people who have been with us for more than 30 years." Agapi has also built a wine club that now runs a waiting list to join, with roughly 100 members meeting monthly for themed tastings, a blind tasting every December, and a March lineup that spotlights female winemakers.

The building that stayed a restaurant

The address where Skopelos on the Bay once served its last meals now houses Calvert's in the Heights, a British-leaning pub known for a BLT that regulars compare to a homemade version and for a staff willing to clear tables for dancing when a band plays. Different owners, different menu, same footprint of Scenic Highway doing the same job it's done for years: feeding this stretch of the neighborhood.

Across the street, Scenic 90 Cafe occupies a diner building that reads like a piece of mid-century Florida left intact. It sits at a bend in the road under live oaks, its stainless steel and glass brick facade largely unchanged since the 1950s, with a counter just inside the entrance and a mix of booths and tables behind it. The building didn't have to be preserved for nostalgia's sake. It's still a working diner, serving breakfast through dinner, because a working diner is what the corner has always needed.

The grocery that didn't blink at a Publix

A few blocks down, Apple Market has anchored Scenic Highway since 1996, when David Apple bought what had been Joseph's IGA from its original owner. It calls itself the Biggest Little Store in Town, and the description holds up: a butcher counter, Boar's Head deli, a coffee shop, a deli hot bar, and a wall of local art that the store has turned into a rotating gallery for emerging and established Pensacola artists.

In 2017, a Publix opened two miles away in East Hill, the kind of arrival that tends to end small independent grocers. Apple Market didn't fold. It kept serving the same neighborhood it always had, close enough to walk to, small enough to know regulars by name, distinct enough that a chain two miles off never fully replaced what it does. Nearly a decade later, the parking lot the market sits behind is still rarely empty.

What fills in around the anchors

The rest of the row is younger, and it's dense. Several of these spots sit within a tenth of a mile of each other, close enough that a short walk covers most of a day's meals:

• Aunt Katie's - Welcome to Breakfast, an all-day breakfast spot a few doors from Agapi
• Georgio's Pizza, an Italian counter locals return to for carryout as often as a sit-down slice
• Fannie Lou's Ice Cream, the dessert stop at the far end of the short walk
• Don Cha Peruvian Food, a newer addition praised for its hospitality as much as its menu
• New Yorker Deli & Pizzeria, a deli and pizza combination within steps of Calvert's
• Constant Coffee & Tea, the cafe stop between Agapi and Scenic 90

Farther down Scenic Highway, two older landmarks bookend the newer cluster. Jerry's Drive-In has served burgers and banana milkshakes since 1939, when it opened as a barbecue joint. J's Bakery has been turning out pastries and cakes in the East Pensacola area since 1946. Between them, the highway's food scene spans nearly ninety years without a single stretch of vacant storefronts to show for it.

Why the turnover looks bigger than it is

Drive down Scenic Highway once and you'll clock a dozen restaurant names, a few of them unfamiliar even to people who've lived in East Pensacola Heights for years. Drive it again knowing the history and the picture flips. Agapi and Scenic 90 and Nancy's are one operation, not three. Calvert's occupies a building that's been feeding people since long before it existed under that name. Apple Market has been in the same spot since a name most current shoppers have never heard, Joseph's IGA, was still on the sign.

On this stretch of highway, some names have changed, while some of the people and kitchens behind them have stayed. The next time you order the octopus at Agapi, you're eating a dish that survived the closing of the restaurant where it was invented. Its story is one example of how some parts of Scenic Highway's food scene have carried on as names changed.

If you're weighing a move to a stretch of Pensacola where some restaurants have outlasted their own names, Luxpoint Real Estate can walk you through what living on this side of Bayou Texar actually looks like, day to day.