Where to Eat Lunch in Holmes Beach: Club or Wrap

If you’re trying to figure out where to eat lunch in Holmes Beach and you’re tired of picking between the same two or three usual orders, the Notables section of our breakfast/lunch menu is built for exactly that problem. It’s three items, no filler: a club, a wrap, and a sandwich, each built differently enough that “what do you want for lunch” actually has more than one real answer. Here’s what’s in the two that get ordered the most, plus a shorter case for the third.

Where to Eat Lunch in Holmes Beach: The Roast Beef Waldorf Club

The Roast Beef Waldorf Club is $16: freshly sliced roast beef, melted cheddar, sliced apple, horseradish cream, and Romaine lettuce stacked on a ciabatta bun, served with house chips. The apple and horseradish cream are what set it apart from a standard deli club — the apple keeps the whole thing from tasting purely savory, and the horseradish cream carries a real kick instead of a background note, enough to cut through the cheddar without taking over the roast beef underneath it. It’s a knife-and-fork order if you want it to be, or a handheld one if you don’t; either way, the ciabatta holds up through the whole plate.

Chicken Bacon Ranch Wrap: A Lunch Wrap Worth Ordering on Anna Maria Island

At $14, the Chicken Bacon Ranch Wrap rolls grilled chicken, bacon, spinach, tomato, mozzarella, and creamy ranch dressing into a flour tortilla, served with house chips. It’s the lighter of the two Notables, and the ranch is doing more work than it looks like on paper — it’s the dressing and a chunk of the moisture both, which is why the wrap doesn’t need much else to hold together. If you’ve been searching for wraps on Anna Maria Island that don’t taste like an afterthought built around a salad, this is the one to order.

Wraps themselves are a newer idea than most people assume. Per Wikipedia’s entry on the wrap sandwich, the format “in its Western form probably comes from California, as a generalization of the Mexican and Tex-Mex burrito, and became popular in the 1990s” — a flour tortilla standing in for bread is a relatively recent lunch habit, not an old one, even though it now shows up on nearly every casual menu on the island.

Club or Wrap: Which One to Order

If you’re deciding between the two, it mostly comes down to how you want to eat it. The Waldorf Club is the sit-down order — a ciabatta bun holding roast beef, melted cheddar, and that horseradish cream together means it wants a plate and a few minutes, not a walk down to the sand. The Chicken Bacon Ranch Wrap travels better: it’s lighter, it’s already rolled, and it doesn’t fall apart the way a stacked sandwich can once you’re a block from the table. Neither one needs modification to work — order the club if you’re staying for lunch, the wrap if lunch is coming with you.

Rounding Out the Notables

The third option in the section is the Grouper Sandwich — Gulf black grouper encrusted with a crumbled bacon and panko, baked, and topped with our house bacon and tomato ranch slaw on a warmed ciabatta bun, market price. It’s the one Notable that isn’t a deli-style build, and it’s the order for a table that wants the kitchen doing more of the work than the toppings. Between the three, the section covers a club, a wrap, and a baked fish sandwich — whatever “lunch” means to you that day, there’s a real answer in that one part of the menu.

All three run the same lunch hours as the rest of the breakfast/lunch menu: 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., seven days a week. Stop by 5350 Gulf Drive in Holmes Beach, or call 941-251-3681 if you want to check what’s in the kitchen before you make the drive over.