A dog at Tiger Point Golf Club jumped into the course pond, climbed out dripping, and made straight for a golfer's sandwich. The dog belonged to someone drinking at the course's bar, not playing the round. By the time the golfer looked up, lunch was gone.
It sounds like a throwaway story about a bad dog. It was actually the moment that split a golf clubhouse in Gulf Breeze into two separate restaurants with two separate kitchens, two separate sets of hours, and two very different crowds who rarely cross paths anymore.
A Golf Bar the Neighborhood Outgrew
When Stephanie Sharpton and her husband Leo Folse took over The Pointe in 2021, the restaurant already sat inside Tiger Point Golf Club, open to the public, serving hand-cut steaks and fresh seafood to golfers and non-golfers alike. Sharpton has said the goal from day one was giving locals a place that felt like their own. As she put it in a Pensacola News Journal feature on the expansion, "we don't have a lot down here, and our community deserves a great place."
The problem was that people took her up on it. The bar at The Pointe became popular enough with the surrounding neighborhood that it started interfering with the golfers it was built to serve, and the sandwich incident was the last straw. The course eventually limited the bar to golfers only, cutting off the very crowd Sharpton had set out to serve in the first place.
Two Rooms, Two Rulebooks
Sharpton's real solution wasn't a rule. It was a second building. She constructed an entirely new open-air bar called The Tiki Republic just outside The Pointe's doors, paired it with a pizza kitchen called The Pointe Pizza, and let the two spaces run on their own separate logic.
Walk into The Pointe today and you're choosing between the Soundside dining room, with views of Santa Rosa Sound and the Tiger Point fairways, or the Greenside sports bar and its wall of eighteen televisions. Walk past it to the Tiki Republic and you're at picnic tables and a shaded bar, playing cornhole or jumbo Connect Four, ordering a pinsa pizza by the slice.
The two operations don't even run on the same clock:
| The Pointe (indoor) | Tiki Republic + Pointe Pizza (outdoor) | |
|---|---|---|
| Monday to Wednesday | 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. | 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. |
| Late night | Friday and Saturday until 10 p.m. | Thursday through Saturday until 10 p.m. |
| Sunday | 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. | 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. |
The indoor room keeps a fairly standard restaurant schedule, weekday close at nine, weekend close pushed to ten on Friday and Saturday only. The outdoor bar opens an hour earlier every single day and treats Thursday like the start of the weekend rather than the end of the week. That's not an accident of scheduling. It's a bar built around people who live nearby and might wander over for a midday drink on a Tuesday, not around a dinner reservation.
"This is my baby, I am constantly making it better," Sharpton said of The Pointe.
A Kitchen Built Backward From the Bar
The Pointe Pizza started as an old outdoor snack shack that Sharpton converted into a specialty kitchen rather than trying to route tiki bar orders through the main restaurant's line. The pies use a Roman-style pinsa crust, made with a sourdough fermentation process that Sharpton has described as easier on the stomach than a standard pizza crust.
The menu leans into the tiki concept rather than competing with the dinner menu next door. The Mia Pia is a Hawaiian-style pie with pineapple, spam, and thinly sliced jalapenos. The Palapa takes the same crust in a Mexican direction, with street corn dip, ground beef, chorizo, cilantro, jalapeno, and Tajin. Dessert is coconut ice cream served in the shell. None of it reads like clubhouse food. It reads like food built for people sitting outside for a couple of hours, not people finishing a round and heading home.
Inside, The Pointe still runs the fuller menu: hand-cut steaks, chef-inspired pastas, a Sunday brunch. The split isn't just architectural. It's a genuine fork in what each kitchen is trying to do.
The Build-Out Took Ten Weeks, and So Did the Cigars
Builder Evelio Santino put up the entire Tiki Republic structure from the ground up in about two and a half months, and the details since then have been added in layers rather than all at once.
- Fishing buoys shipped in from the Bahamas
- Vintage wooden golf clubs mounted as decor
- A rotating collection of tiki mugs for sale behind the bar
- Hand-rolled cigars from Haze Gray Cigars, a Pensacola-based, veteran-owned company whose War Dog line names cigars after military branches
Sharpton has said there's enough demand for cigars on the course that she eventually plans to start a cigar club. Meanwhile, dogs are still welcome, just under different terms this time. There's a shaded, tiki hut-covered water station for them near the bar, a small but pointed acknowledgment of exactly what caused the last conflict.
What Two Best-Of Titles Actually Prove
The Pointe has picked up Best of the Bay and Best of the Coast honors for Best Restaurant in Gulf Breeze and Navarre in 2023, 2024, and 2025. That distinction matters more than it looks. Those awards don't measure best golf clubhouse dining. They measure best restaurant, period, against every free-standing option in two towns.
A clubhouse restaurant winning that category three years running is a sign the split actually worked. The Pointe stopped being judged as an amenity attached to a golf course and started being judged, and winning, as a destination on its own terms.
Still Around the Corner
One recent review from a Tiger Point resident summed up what the whole redesign was for: living in the neighborhood, it's convenient to have a good restaurant "around the corner" to visit with neighbors and out-of-town guests. That's the plainest version of the thesis. The golf course didn't add a restaurant that happens to be open to the public. The restaurant added a golf course to its list of neighbors, then built a second building to make room for the rest of them.
If small shifts like this one, a stolen sandwich turning into a full second bar, are the kind of thing that makes you glad you live where you live, that's exactly the texture Sara Davis likes tracking around Gulf Breeze. Start your coastal home journey whenever you're ready, or just keep an eye out for what The Pointe tries next.
