Shephard’s Ocean Flame

It was a plentiful buffet. We went for the crab legs basically. They were on the small side. They did have sushi but not a big selection. The Brazilian rotisserie style chicken tasted like leather. Tried three small pieces of fried calamari. One piece was enough. My husband had the prime rib. He said it was a little under cooked. He usually orders medium rare but this was almost raw. I tried three raw oysters. They were excellent. I also tried a small portion of a rare tuna stir fry. It was very good. My husband also tried the flounder stuffed with crabmeat and lobster sauce. They were very small pieces but he thought they were the best tasting thing he had eaten. Service was very good. Cleaned up used plates right away. Refilled drinks quickly. We never, ever eat desserts but the desserts were to die for! I had a small ramekin of lava cake. My husband tried a few different things. He enjoyed them all. If you are into desserts, it’s worth the trip for just the desserts! Would I return? Yup!

I really came here with high hopes… I am beyond disappointed. The view is the only way this place earned the one star. Ms. Pat the hostess was the best part. The food tasted bland, cold, and very typical of hotel breakfast food. Our server was rude, aloof, and overwhelmed with tables. When we expressed our discuss to «Raelene» she was unapologetic & took her time bringing our check. Never again, thanks for the waste of time.

Place was inside hotel, right on water. All the food was amazing plenty options for vegetarians who don’t eat anything with eyes. Multiple different types of cold salads and build your own salad bar. Lots of meat and seafood options as well. Desserts were great. Don’t show up too late those they will cut off the Buffett at closing time. Our waitress was very nice as well.

This restaurant is excellent on multiple levels! We have been there many times. In fact, if we are going to Clearwater Beach, we generally make a point of dinner here… big perk = parking is free if you eat with them. Now let’s talk food… salad, sushi, steak, crab legs, pasta and the list goes on. Plenty of options and everything is excellent!

Worse food I had in a long time, the ribs taste like tomatoes sauce, the pizza sauce taste like catchup, swordfish over cooked, the salad bar very minimum selections and the green were plainly expired. The food rotation slow, plainly, I have not been to a buffet in years, maybe I had forgotten the desperation of people eating, and I can deal with that, but the tasted of the food at this place is not even worth $ 5.99.
I would not recommend it to anyone.

One of the best buffets ever! I have not been impressed in general with restereaunts in Tampa, however this place certainly exceeds the others. Everything was fresh, seasoned appropriately and very tasty. Every type of cuisine tasted as it should have. Great food with a terrific view too!

Two stars for cleanliness and the view. The fried food was cold, mashed potatoes tasted like instant and the crab legs were over cooked. Based upon the reviews I thought my husband and I would have been in for a treat. Please don’t get your hopes up for the Salmon or Mahi Mahi both were dry. I pray I came on an off night because I never left a buffet hungry and this place has outstanding reviews.

If you like buffets, this is the Best in Clearwater! Seafood, Prime Rib, Oysters and Sushi, plus I’m just barely describing all of it! The staff is top notch and the food is always hot and tasty! Thank you guys and gals!

I was struggling between giving 5 stars or just 4, and here’s why…
First, the place wasn’t too crowded for the evening, and the atmosphere was good. It’s fine for kids.
All the food I ate was great, and I’d consider the salmon and the prime rib entrée quality. All the seafood I ate was pretty good, and at least as good as better restaurants that I’ve eaten at. The desserts that I ate were great! The mint pudding was so good I had three of them, and I finally had to stop because I was getting bloated. Diet blown!
While there I ate three servings of the (baked?) salmon, one of prime rib, one of burnt coffee crusted pork, fried shrimp, swordfish, some other fish, mashed potatoes (very tasty!), seasoned and sliced potatoes, rice, salad, melons, some other fruit, and a bunch of different desserts.
They also had a bunch of food that I don’t eat: sushi, crab legs, and several other combinations of rice and seafood. They also had cold shrimp and some other stuff at the salad bar.
The struggle with the 4 versus 5 stars is with the selection, but only as compared to my favorite buffets, which usually have a bunch of different serving bars. As I mentioned, the selections of what I ate were great quality for any buffet and I have fairly plain and unexciting tastes, but I am used to a larger selection. (I guess, conversely, a larger selection of lesser quality is not good.)
Also, relative to my favorite seafood buffet, this place is pretty expensive. That, in combination of a bit less of a selection makes me feel like 4 stars. (Again, to be fair about the price, I probably ate about $ 45 worth of salmon if it had been a regular restaurant.)
The service was great, the food was great, the desserts were great. It’d be too expensive to bring a family with any frequency.
Maybe I’ll over-​analyze it some more and bump it to 5 stars… If you like seafood and like a selection instead of committing to a single selection, this would be a good place to go.

This place had a terrific buffet for the seafood lover as well as a non seafood lovers! They even had plenty of gluten free options for the 2 people in our party who needed that option. The Gluten Free Chocolate cake for dessert was excellent! I would recommend you give it a try!
The sunset views were amazing!
The staff was friendly, polite and very accommodating!
Thank you to the chef, pastry chef and our server Johnny! We will be back next time we are in Clearwater Beach!

Excellent selection for Sunday brunch. If the weather permits, try to get an outside table for a bay side view.
Wide selection of food and though it is causal dining, the setting is nice enough to impress. Typical brunch selection for Florida; omelette, carving stations, various seafood, and yes, bottomless mimosas.
The waitstaff was attentive and friendly.
Bonus, you know this is Shepard’s on CLW Beach so you know parking is difficult; however, free validated parking.

They always have great buffet dinners here. Bottomless crab leg and prime rib carving station are the biggest draws here. On a recent night that we’ve been here, they were many reservations so walk-​ins were basically either outside seating or bar seating. We ended up sitting at the bar for our dinner.
They have so many different good cocktail choices at their full bar. The beer selections are a bit limited though. I thoroughly enjoyed my sangria. Once you put your order in for your drinks and have an assigned waiter, you’re pretty much free to go to the buffet and partake in their many variety of cuisines. They have sushi, pan-​Asian food, salads, varieties of meat at the carving station, crab legs, Variety of desserts, etc. The crème brûlée was my favorite dessert there. You can refer to the many photo postings of the food on this site (I didn’t bother take any pictures).
Everything is made at the highest quality by their skilled culinary specialists. It was all a wonderful dining experience. As far as the atmosphere goes, the music is good and the Interior decour has a trendy, clean vibe. I’ve never had the opportunity to try their brunch buffet, but I heard it’s pretty good too.
This place of course is located within the Shepards Beach resort in Clearwater Beach. It overlooks the water. It’s underneath their locally famous nightclub and adjacent to their outdoor bar/​club (which is host to many different beach concerts throughout the year) just outside the restaurant. Very popular in the summertime!
This place is absolutely worth checking out for either breakfast, brunch, lunch, and/​or dinner at least once in your life.

Buffet with a great variety of delicious food. Signature drinks to go with the standard price for the buffet with lively music outside. Had so much fun.

I was very impressed with the selection and atmosphere. This seafood buffet is one of the best I’ve ever had. There was a nice selection of salads and a huge selection of seafood including some of the best crab legs I’ve ever eaten. It offered a modern décor with romantic lighting and I was given one if those towels that they put in the bowl of hot water for you. I would definitely recommend this restaurant. If it weren’t for a couple of good items being room temperature instead of hot I would’ve given it five stars.

The absolute best dinner buffet in Clearwater.
The quality of the food is well worth the price.
Our Server Mark was on his game plan Friday night, he had a couple of big tables, and was still able to offer us quality service.
We will absolutely be back again!

Mediocre. Hubby and I tried this place on vacation. Went inside and the buffet looked good, the wait staff was okay, not busy at all for a Tuesday night. $ 32 for the buffet I was looking forward to the crab legs but they were dried out. So went for the steak, it was good. All the meats were good. Salads, desserts as well were average. If your a huge meat eater this would be for you.

Christmas at Ocean Flame — Bah Humbug
Never, never, never go there on Christmas. The food was fair at best. Many trays remained empty. There were no crab legs. I felt ripped off. This buffet was worse than buffets at half the price. I have been there twice before and the food was wonderful. This company was greedy and shoved in as many patrons as they could without regard to quality. I am so angry right now, I probably won’t go back.

Holy Bazooka this place was AMAZING!!! We had been looking for a buffet that had seafood. I searched online to find a place, but wasn’t having good luck. I came across Shephard’s on Unilocal.Super clean place! Amazing food. The lobster bisque was out of this world! Wait staff was so friendly!
Go here when you are very hungry! You will not be disappointed!

We went for Thanksgiving and I enjoyed the non-​seafood items and the meat carving guys were really fun. I think it was well-​managed: the restaurant stayed clean, the trays stayed stocked, and the buffet lines were manageable. My problem with this place is the ambience. The tables are uncomfortable and pushed close together, you have to walk through the ground floor of a tacky hotel to get there, and there were people eating Thanksgiving dinner in shorts, sandals, and wife beaters. My other problem was the seafood: the oysters were bland (this is strange right? You don’t do anything to a raw oyster to make it flavorful, I think it was probably the source.) The turkey, sauces and most of the veggies were delicious. The ham, though the ham carvers claimed it had won awards, was too sweet. You could do better at this price point.

If you want a decent seafood meal, go next door to Jimmy’s Fish House, up the road to Frenchy’s Rockaway or Clear Sky, which are all excellent. Do NOT pay the $ 33 for Shephard’s buffet expecting a quality meal. Food quality is NO better than Golden Corral and costs more than 3x as much. Service is terrible. Go here if you want horribly overcooked meats, mushy crab, dried out clams, and flavorless desserts. It’s all you can eat, but it is crap. Anyone who gives this place five stars has either lived in a mole hole their whole life or works for Shephard’s. IT IS AWFUL.

We had the Sunday Brunch Buffet at Shephards. The choices are all over the place. You can have sushi, pastries, bacon, sausage, corned beef hash, biscuits and gravy, shrimp and grits, pepper steak, the carving stations, cold crab legs or cold shrimp AND dessert. There were also salad selections, but with that many choices, who wants salad. The best thing was the shrimp and grits. The ribeye on the carving station was well done and the pork and ham were dry. The prime rib from the carving station was good. The desert selection was great. The brunch includes mimosas. The server was very friendly and gave us passes to get into the night club but we ran out of drinks on numerous occasions. If you want to try Shephards, try the brunch, it is less expensive than the regular dinner buffet with a ton of options.

So we came here for dinner on a Sunday night. It was pretty slow. I’m not sure if that is partly to blame for my grievances. Also it’s important to note that we do eat most seafood, but we don’t eat any other meat, so there are a number of items we did not try — steak, pork tenderloin, duck, etc.
So we were seated at a table that hadn’t been thoroughly wiped down. the hostess flicked away a few offending pieces of corn. Not really sure why she didn’t just seat us at the clean table right next to it. The drink menu was decidedly… sticky. The pages are fully laminated so hopefully they clean them off regularly and this was just a fluke but it was a gross fluke. There was definitely sauce residues and whatever the hell else on several of them.
Took a while for a server to get to us to get our drink orders, but once he took them, they came out quickly, and they were pretty great. There’s a fair selection of beers, and though the selection of specialty cocktails was somewhat modest, they all sounded pretty good. Some of them were a little… yknow, standard froufy tropical beach resort nonsense. I skipped those.
The mussels were good. The tuna was way overcooked. No swordfish, sadface. Crab legs were. hit or miss. Some of the shells got a bit on the soft side. The sushi was… subpar, even for buffet standards. Various veggie sides were. good but unremarkable. The salad bar was… sort of sad. Ruby Tuesday would give them a run for their money. There was a pretty fantastic fruit salad, with tons of pineapple and strawberries and raspberries. I was excited when I saw the dessert area. Tons of cute little mini portions of delights like crème brûlée and tiramisu and flan (seriously the most adorable flan you’ve ever seen. I bet you didn’t realize flan could even be adorable). Unfortunately the delights weren’t really delightful. They were… okay, but not great. Not even all that good.
Overall. «Meh». When the final total after tip comes to over $ 100 for 2 people, you just hope for more. Maybe if you eat a veritable shit ton of food, it could be worth it.

I had no idea how great the food was going to be in this place when I first reserved. The moment I walked in, I knew that it would be a different type of restaurant experience. I have to say that this was one of the best meals that I have had in a long time. I believe that this was the best restaurant in Clearwater Beach. The seafood buffet was exquisite and the service was awesome. I enjoyed every minute of my time there. The view while sitting outside was also magnificent. I highly recommend this restaurant.

Excellent buffett

Not a good experience. Food was ok but waiter caused me to not want to go back.

Let’s be frank: This is a seafood buffet. Go in knowing that, and knowing you are going to gorge yourself on crab, shrimp, oysters, swordfish, prime rib, ny strip, and maybe sushi and you will have an amazing time.
In the Bay area, I don’t know of a finer buffet to be honest. The meats are good quality for the cut, well prepared and very flavorful, and so tender cutting with a butterknife was no issue. Chicken, pork, sausage, 4 cuts of steak (flank, tbone, strip, prime rib) were all good from the cutting board. In addition there was steak au poivre and braised lamb on the steam trays.
The seafood was really worth my money: swordfish (my favorite and very moist), cod, salmon, tilapia all done just right. Oysters on the raw, curried mussels (yumm!), steamed clam, and mounds of steamed shrimp. A sushi station doing sashimi rolls fresh. All that is beside the point because lets be honest, you’re here for crab legs and they do not disappoint.
Now I cant speak much to carby sides like mashed potatoes, rice, pasta, because I’m on a low carb diet but they seemed ok. There was also seafood and Conch chowder which I couldn’t have.
My companions tried the desserts: I’m told the peanut butter pie was excellent. The blackberry cheesecake looked tasty.
Final note is there is an attached bar so the drink selection was good, though honestly Ive seen better.

From the service to the food, I’m overly-​satisfied! Ate so much, I was feeling nauseated. Snow crabs were humongous, it made it easy for the men to break them open. They were so moist that it didn’t need any butter or cocktail sauce. The oysters on a half shell were cleaned so well that I didn’t have to inspect for rocks, dirt or pearl as the last time I had one elsewhere a year ago, I crunched into something that looks like a hard rock and ended up losing my appetite and avoiding all oysters.
They had great sushi except the rice was dry but that’s probably from sitting out. The only other minor disappointment was they did not allow men with sleeveless shirts when dining-​in. They suggested the men to purchase from the clothing outlet next door, luckily it was only $ 2.
Our waitress was so sweet. Made sure all of us were content before we left. The frozen cocktail drink was so delicious that I drank so fast and had a brain freeze.
This is 5-​star even regardless that we had to leave and go buy a shirt, it’s because they saved and secured my credit card in which I forgot to collect after paying our bill.

Greatest steak and seafood collection I can recall finding in a buffet. The prime rib is outstanding. The shrimp, oysters, Alaskan Crab, sushi, etc. makes for an overwhelming choice. The quality and service is also great. I prefer the patio to watch the main stage and everyone on their boats, jet skis, etc.

After shopping for a venue to have a wedding reception I selected Shephard’s Ocean Flame because my sister had her reception here because I remembered it being beautiful. The place is beautiful and the outside area is great for photos.
Everyone who attended commended me on how great the food was. «There’s something for every taste to unleash your inner foodie» lol. There was a scheduled reservation which everyone had to be prompt for but something came up so we were late. The staff could have made all of my guests wait until we arrived an hour later, but they were kind enough to seat them after 30 or 45 minutes of waiting. Though the buffet is a little pricey everything tasted great! I had a lot of fruits and veggies but there was plenty of meat, seafood like crabs and lobsters that the guests enjoyed.
Overall, I am glad we choose this place for our reception and had a great time!

We came on a Thursday for breakfast buffet, meals to cook right in front of you. Good variety and tasty treats to eat. Food was delicious and fresh, view to the outside where the ocean was is gorgeous. You are able to walk around as soon as you finish your meal. We payed $ 12.59 per person to eat. We were satisfied and pleasantly full and delighted. Our waitress was sweet and fun Sheila was her name. If you are in Clearwater I would recommend it, if you are hungry and want to enjoy the scenery.

So far I give this place 2 stars, the 3^rd star is for my waitress Leah, and the music from the Tiki bar next door. The price was ok, but the buffet itself was very small. All the rant that people told me about this place is not what I experienced.
Don’t get me wrong, the food wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t the BOMB like people explained.
Now the drinks were awesome, I had a Kiwi mix drink and my fiancé had a blackberry cocktail and dayum, they did not skimp on the alcohol… DELICIOUS
I DEFINITELY would come back here just for the entertainment and the drinks… lol

This place! One of my favorites! If the temperature is allowing and the «lets pig out» vibe is right, we drive 45 minutes to come here. Best $ 40 bucks you’ll spend. AYCE everything, beautiful sunset and great wait staff. Wasn’t amazed with the wine and beer selection and my cocktails were never anything to brag about so I’ve learned to just stay away from the alcohol and opt for a cup of coffee or tea post meal because it gets that serious.
I always leave here wowed. Because coming here is like impulse shopping. You’re just like screw it, I’ll have one of each. And this new, classy twist they’ve put on it ever since renovating and renaming it to Open Flame is very diggable. The soups are always great! I’m okay on the flatbread station because filling up on bread at a buffet is a waste. MEAT STATION! They’ve changed it to not only freshly carved meats but also single portion servings like chimichurri drizzled lamb strips on top of buttered polenta. Prime rib, filet mignon cuts. Sausage selections. They have various seafood options like fra diavolo, mussels in curry sauce, stuffed fish. Raw bar options like cocktail shrimp, crab legs of course. Lots of salads and sushi to choose from. And their extended dessert station now! Love that you see chefs always ready to answer questions or prepare variations.
Sit outside and overlook whatever’s going on at the resort next door that evening. Always good people watching. Closed on Mondays btw!

Come here for the seafood buffet. It’s not that expensive ($ 32), and all the offerings are delicious. They really don’t skimp on the seafood and that is why you come to Clearwater Beach, isn’t it? You would spend that much (or more) ordering just crab legs at any other restaurant in the area.
Valet parking was free the night we were here.