The Dunes Restaurant

The Dunes Restaurant sits on South Croatan Highway in Nags Head, part of the steady run of restaurants, bars, and shops lining the Bypass corridor between the Atlantic and Roanoke Sound. It's classified as a brewery and bar as much as a restaurant, and the posted hours back that up: the doors open daily at 7 a.m. and run until around midday, with a slightly later close of 12:30 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. That's a morning-into-early-afternoon window, so this reads as a breakfast-and-brunch stop on the Nags Head strip rather than a dinner destination.

It falls in the moderate ($$) price range, which fits the casual, drop-in feel of most Croatan Highway restaurants in this stretch of the northern Outer Banks — the kind of place you can grab a meal on the way to or from the beach without planning ahead. A full bar rounds out the food service, which makes it as workable for a casual drink as it is for a meal before or after time on the sand.