The sign out front on Restaurant Row says “Finn’s” and you probably drive past it assuming it’s another mid-tier tourist spot grinding out fried shrimp baskets for families who don’t know where else to go. That assumption is wrong, and it’s worth correcting before your trip.
Finn’s Beach Bar & Grill sits on North Kings Highway in the stretch of restaurants between 76th and 82nd Avenue — what locals call Restaurant Row — and it has a back deck that hangs out almost over a small tidal creek. You can sit out there in the late afternoon when the light goes flat and gold and watch the herons work the mud. Nobody is piping in Jimmy Buffett. Nobody is wearing a foam pirate hat. It’s just a deck, some weathered wood, and the marsh doing its thing.
The menu skews toward seafood, which makes sense, but the kitchen isn’t trying to wow you with technique. What it does is source well and not overcomplicate things. The shrimp and grits runs about fourteen dollars at lunch and it shows up with local shrimp that still have some snap to them — not the rubbery imports that haunt lesser kitchens up and down the strip. The grits underneath are stone-ground and actual, not the instant kind reconstituted with cream and hope. A few sliced scallions, some andouille, a ladle of tomato-based gravy. That’s the whole dish. It’s good because it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is.
Dinner gets a little more ambitious. The grouper special changes based on what came off the boats that week, which is either reassuring or annoying depending on how decisive you are. Most evenings it’s blackened or pan-seared and it runs somewhere between twenty-four and twenty-eight dollars depending on the preparation. Split an order of the she-crab soup to start — it’s richer than you might want on a hot night, but you’ll finish it anyway.
The bar is unpretentious in a way that feels deliberate rather than neglected. Local draft beers on tap, nothing exotic, priced like a neighborhood place. The bartenders know regulars by first name and newcomers by drink order within about ten minutes. Happy hour runs late afternoon into early evening and takes a few dollars off drafts and well drinks.
Parking is its own small adventure — the lot fills fast on summer evenings, and you may end up a block away. Go before six if you want the back deck without waiting. By seven on a Friday in July, there will be a wait and it won’t be short.
What Finn’s actually is, once you’re there, is a functional local bar with a kitchen that takes its seafood seriously and a piece of outdoor real estate most restaurants in Myrtle Beach would trade a lot for. The tourists who find it tend to come back. The ones who walk in expecting something glossy and leave confused are missing the point entirely. The point is the deck, the creek, and the shrimp that taste like shrimp.
