For most of the past decade, Highway 9 through Longs was where you passed things, not where you stopped for them. The gas station, the church signs, the long stretches of pine before the road opened up into North Myrtle Beach. When Big E's Country Buffet and Seafood shut its doors at 1250 Hwy 9 E in 2024 after a run of neighborhood complaints about noise, the building sat empty long enough that people stopped expecting anything to replace it.
Something did. Chef Laura Smith took over that same address in 2025 and opened Chef Laura's Seafood, Steak & Hibachi, a menu that runs from fried chicken and mashed potatoes to hibachi and green curry in the same dining room. The restaurant currently holds a 100 out of 100 health score on record, and the reviews mention a "Mexican burger" alongside grilled mahi and Thai fried banana, which tells you the kitchen isn't trying to be one thing. What's more interesting than the menu, though, is the timing. Chef Laura's didn't wait for a finished, freshly paved Highway 9 to open. Horry County had targeted spring 2026 for wrapping the SC Hwy 9 East widening project, which means the corridor was still an active work zone when the restaurant opened its doors in 2025. Betting on a road that isn't done yet is a bet on the people who already live along it, not on drive-by traffic that would rather take a different route until the cones come down.
The Road Is Torn Up, and the Openings Kept Coming
That pattern shows up more than once. A few miles off Highway 9, on Highway 90, Michael Hill opened Conner's Porch Swing in 2025, a lunch-and-dinner spot serving burgers, sandwiches, Chicken and Eggplant Parmesan, and a pan-fried chicken dish called Craic Chicken with whiskey cream sauce. Hill, 41, had spent his career cooking in other people's restaurants before opening his own.
"A lifelong dream of mine."
That's how he described it. The restaurant's name carries its own weight too. Hill and his family named it for a son who was stillborn in a previous marriage, and he's said he wants the business to eventually support other families who've lost children early. It's a detail that has nothing to do with real estate and everything to do with why a town's food scene ends up feeling like it belongs to the people in it rather than to whoever's driving through on a Friday.
Up on Highway 9 itself, Hwy Nine Grillhouse opened at 1800 Highway 9 with a seven-day schedule, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., and live entertainment most nights, not something a business adds if it expects most of its customers to be one-time beach traffic. Live music on a Tuesday is a bet on regulars.
None of these three openings needed the road construction to finish first. They opened during it. That's the detail that separates "Longs is growing because it's cheap" from "Longs is growing because enough people already live here to support a kitchen on a bad traffic day." The second story is a lot harder to fake.
What's Actually New to Eat
Here's a quick rundown of what's changed on the ground, alongside the anchor that's been quietly running the table longer than any of them.
| Restaurant | Location | What It's Known For |
|---|---|---|
| Chef Laura's Seafood, Steak & Hibachi | 1250 Hwy 9 E | Southern plates, hibachi, and Thai dishes in the former Big E's space |
| Conner's Porch Swing | Highway 90 | Chef-owned, scratch menu, catering for events |
| Hwy Nine Grillhouse | 1800 Highway 9 | Burgers and seafood, open daily with nightly live entertainment |
| Parkway Bistro | 2126 Highway 9 E, Bldg D | Family-owned Italian, ranked first among Longs restaurants on Tripadvisor with 151 reviews |
Parkway Bistro is worth calling out on its own. It's been operating out of the Parkway Business Center for years, well before this latest wave of openings, and it's the kind of place locals mention almost reflexively when someone asks where to eat in Longs. Reviewers point to the Chicken Francese and the crab-stuffed mushrooms, and the fact that it's still the top-ranked restaurant in town after newer competitors moved in says something about how loyal that customer base is. New restaurants opening around an established one usually means the area has more mouths to feed, not that the market's gotten crowded.
The Farm Stands That Never Needed a Road Project
While the restaurant scene has been catching up to Longs's population, the area's farm economy never had to. Hand Farm Market, at 2045 West Bear Grass Road, has been selling produce directly off the property for years, and it's still listed with the South Carolina Department of Agriculture as an active roadside market. It's part of a small cluster of local growers that includes:
- Chase Family Farms
- Taylor's Blueberry Farm
- Jimmy Cox Peaches
These aren't seasonal pop-ups riding a trend. They're working farms that have supplied the area long before any of the new restaurant names showed up on Highway 9, and they're the reason a lot of Longs residents already buy meat, eggs, and produce within a few minutes of home rather than driving toward the coast for groceries. It's a supply chain that runs the opposite direction of what people usually assume about a beach-adjacent town, inland to local, not coastal to imported.
Put the restaurant wave next to that farm economy and the pattern is easy to miss if you only look at one or the other. Hand Farm Market and its neighbors have spent years selling directly to households already here. Chef Laura's, Conner's Porch Swing, and Hwy Nine Grillhouse are newer, but they're following the same logic: build where the people already are, not where the tourists happen to be driving through. A farm stand on West Bear Grass Road and a hibachi counter on Highway 9 aren't usually mentioned in the same sentence, but they're solving the same problem, feeding a population that's grown large enough to support businesses that don't depend on beach season at all.
A Town That Stopped Needing the Beach to Justify Itself
None of this means Longs has become a destination in the way North Myrtle Beach or Myrtle Beach proper are destinations. It's still quieter, still more rural, still the kind of place where a five-acre lot and a farm stand are a short drive from each other. But the pattern across the restaurant openings, the established anchors, and the farm economy all point the same direction: businesses here are increasingly built for the people who already live down the road, not for whoever happens to be passing through on the way to the water.
Horry County's own timeline had the SC Hwy 9 East widening work wrapping this past spring, which means the friction that greeted these restaurants when they opened should be behind the corridor by now, one less obstacle for a town that's already proven it doesn't need perfect road conditions to keep its kitchens full.
If you're already calling Longs home and keeping an eye on what's changing in the area, or if you know someone thinking about a move here and want a local read on what a listing price actually reflects on the ground, Liat Edri has been working the Grand Strand market long enough to know which of these changes matter and which are just noise. A conversation costs nothing and might save you from guessing.
