One of the Coast’s most anticipated restaurants is ‘just days away’ from opening
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- The Downtowner in downtown Gulfport is led by owner Robert St. John.
- The remodeled Tripplett-Day Drug Co. is larger and features Gulfport photos.
- The menu features Southern breakfasts and lunches, including St. John’s fried chicken.
The iconic Triplett-Day Drug Co. in downtown Gulfport is completely remodeled and reimagined and now Robert St. John is preparing for the debut of his community café.
St. John provides Facebook updates on the progress at The Downtowner and this week’s video is encouraging for those eager for their first breakfast or blue plate lunch.
“We are just days away from opening this place. Really fired up,” the owner of New South Restaurant Group reported this week.
Training is underway, and he told the Sun Herald the restaurant will open once the staff is ready. Most of the crew members are veterans of the restaurant business, he said, and almost half working front of the house have worked for the company before.
“Y’all are going to love it,” St. John said, as he wandered through the restaurant on the corner of 14th Street and U.S. 49.
Come on in and sit down
The Downtowner is larger and more open than the Triplett-Day pharmacy and lunch counter that operated there for 65 years. The combination soda shop, diner and pharmacy closed March 31, 2020, when the owners retired soon after the start of the COVID pandemic.
St. John announced in October 2024 that he was opening The Downtowner, and despite construction delays, proceeded to create what he says is the “most Gulfport restaurant ever in Gulfport.”
The walls are covered with old Gulfport photos and memorabilia that salute the city’s history. St. John put out a call for residents to bring in their trophies to be on display and customers will be able to choose a table, a booth, a counter stool with high back or a seat in the private dining room.
Coast and Southern fare
St. John operates six restaurants and a bakery in Mississippi, has written more than a dozen books, leads group travel excursions and now is ready to expand to South Mississippi, where he spent happy times as a kid.
The Downtowner will be part coastal and decidedly Southern, with breakfast and lunch menus similar to The Midtowner, one of St. John’s Hattiesburg restaurants.
Customers will wake up to healthy or hearty breakfasts, along with omelettes, pancakes, waffles and sides like praline bacon, oversized Cathead biscuits, grab-and-go breakfast sandwiches, specialty coffees and mimosas and screwdrivers for weekends and vacations.
St. John’s signature fried chicken tops the lunch menu. The blue plate specials, something South Mississippi diners have clamored for, give a choice of several meats plus a long list of Southern sides like fried okra, black-eyed peas, turnip greens and cheese grits. Sandwiches, salads and breakfast all day selections round out the lunch menu.
St. John said they’ll be bringing pastries from their Loblolly Bakery in Hattiesburg, which are so good people stood in line on cold winter mornings to buy king cakes at the pop-up Mardi Gras sales.
All the elements combined will make The Downtowner a place that will feel like it’s been in Gulfport since 1948 and will feel local, St. John said.
Sun Herald photographer Jackson Ranger contributed to this report.
This story was originally published May 28, 2026 at 2:28 PM.
