- What's more fun than hanging out at a cool tiki bar on the beach while listening to live music?

Let's sample the vibe at Carolina Beach.

- The Ocean Grill and Tiki Bar is a full service restaurant, oceanfront, in Carolina Beach, North Carolina.

We are attached to an old fishing pier, center pier, and we have a tiki bar out there.

The restaurant literally sits just feet behind the sand dunes.

We have an upstairs dining room with a full view of the ocean and lots of original artwork and band posters by North Carolina artists.

And then downstairs, we have a small bar and a patio.

And then you walk out on the pier, and there's the tiki bar.

We decided to have live music in the very beginning, in the early 2000s, because we thought the end of the tiki bar would be a really unusual and really cool stage to host North Carolina bands.

My background is in film and TV production.

I worked in the set decorating department for many years.

Dave is a musician.

When I first met him, he invited me to his New Year's Eve show, and I was kind of blown away and very surprised.

We love to support North Carolina artists, musicians, painters, printmakers.

It's a very big part of who we are.

I spent a lot of time researching authentic tiki bar drinks and came up with a menu that made sure that we were a legitimate tiki bar, but kind of tweaked things a little bit with a nod to certain locations in Carolina Beach or Kure Beach, and also bands that play out here.

The Mummy is the traditional tiki bar drink that's got passion fruit, falernum, and the Mummy is one of Benji Hughes's songs, and he's one of our favorite North Carolina artists to play on the pier.

We have a great selection of fresh seafood and seafood entrees, sandwiches.

One of the guests' favorite sandwiches is something that Dave made based on one of his favorite sandwiches from his childhood in Kinston, and it's a pimento cheese and bologna sandwich.

Very North Carolina.

(seagulls cawing) (gentle music) ♪ (gentle music) ♪ ♪ Hey, have you ever tried ♪ - Our goal when we became owners at the Ocean Grill was to do something kind of unexpected.

As an oceanfront restaurant, you would assume that we would just be serving fried food and maybe have some beach music out on the pier, and we thought it would be really fun to have these summer series of live music with kind of unexpected acts.

- Abby and Dave have really curated the music here, and so they have really good bands.

You know, we've had great regional acts, but also national acts have come through at the Tiki Bar, including Yo La Tengo.

Cutworms played last summer.

- We've had a lot of great regional bands, like Benji Hughes, The Woggles were great a couple summers ago, The Shoal Diggers, Skylar Goudas.

- The most important thing is the bands have to be kind of fun, and they can appeal to any age group.

Younger people, someone's grandmother who's vacationing, she's still gonna get something out of the music and love it.

There's kids on the pier with their parents, but then there's also a massive beach party on the beach with families and kids running in and out of the water, and they can still hear the music down there.

- There's something really special about walking down the beach in a small coastal town in the South and just being able to hear, like, some of the best indie rock on a random Thursday night in the summer.

I remember when I was really young, seeing a band and the whole pier would just be shaking from all the people dancing.

I think that's when I really fell in love with music, so it's a really special thing that I got to grow up with.

- It's the best venue in the universe.

The sun's setting, you got a pina colada, the waves in the background.

If you hit a bad note, it just blows down the beach, nobody cares.

It's a great, great place.

[upbeat music] [crowd cheering] - The Ocean Grill and Tiki Bar is at 1211 South Lake Park Boulevard at Carolina Beach, and they're open daily.

To find out more, give them a call at 910-707-0049 or go online to OceanGrillTiki.com.