The McElroys started in 1957 with an A&W root beer stand on the corner of Howard and Gill in Biloxi. When Hurricane Camille wrecked the coast in 1969 and the Small Craft Harbor had to be rebuilt, they bought the little snack bar in it, and in February 1974 Mickey and Jane McElroy turned that into McElroy’s Harbor House. Katrina destroyed it in 2005. They rebuilt on the same spot, elevated, and the payoff is a deck that looks over the shrimp boats in the harbor straight out to Deer Island. Chargrilled oysters are the order. Fifty years on it is one of the last old-school Biloxi seafood houses still standing where it started, and it still feels like a place where fishermen eat lunch.
