Drive the stretch of Highway 96 between Old Perry Road and Houston Lake Road on any weekday afternoon and you already know the rotation: Fazoli's for a fast plate of pasta, Moe's for a burrito bowl, Marco's Pizza a little further down for the family order nobody wants to cook. What that stretch has never had is a place to sit down on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee and an omelet that isn't handed to you through a drive-thru window.
That changed on August 18, when Eggs Up Grill opened its doors in Bonaire. It's a small addition on paper, one more name in a corridor that already has plenty of them. But it fills a gap that's been sitting there in plain sight for years, and the person who opened it has her own reason for knowing exactly where that gap was.
The Six-To-Two Window Nobody Else Was Working
Look at the hours posted on the businesses already lining Highway 96 and a pattern shows up fast. Fazoli's opens at 11 a.m. Moe's doesn't open until 10:30. Marco's Pizza starts its day at 10:30 as well. Wok N Roll doesn't unlock its doors until noon, and Rock N' Roll Sushi & Hibachi follows the same 11 a.m. start. None of them are built for breakfast, because none of them are trying to be.
The one exception was Chick-fil-A, which opens at 6 a.m. and does brisk breakfast business through the drive-thru and counter. But Chick-fil-A is closed every Sunday, which means for one full day a week, the entire stretch had no breakfast option at all beyond whatever was in your own kitchen.
Eggs Up Grill runs 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., seven days a week, Sunday included. That's the actual news here. It's not just another name on the strip. It's the first sit-down, order-off-a-menu breakfast and brunch spot this specific corridor has had, and it's open on the one day the previous option wasn't.
Who's Behind The Counter
The franchise announcement named the owner as Celia St. Louis, a retired military veteran who currently works as a logistics manager contractor for Robins Air Force Base. She also runs a real estate business alongside the restaurant, which means she's building a second career in Bonaire while staying connected to the base economy that shapes so much of daily life here.
Eggs Up Grill itself isn't a new concept. It started in Pawleys Island, South Carolina, more than 25 years ago and has grown into a chain with more than 110 locations, the kind of daytime-only format built specifically around the breakfast and lunch hours other restaurants treat as an afterthought. Ricky Richardson, the chain's CEO, said in the opening announcement:
"Her leadership experience and passion for people will make this location a great addition to Bonaire."
That's a stock line from a press release, but the biography behind it isn't. A retired veteran who still works logistics for the base choosing to open a breakfast restaurant on the same road she probably drives to get to Robins AFB says something about how tightly this corridor is wired into the people who actually live and work here, not just the ones passing through.
One Short Block, Six Storefronts
The businesses clustered in the 750s and 790s on Highway 96 aren't spread across town. Fazoli's sits at 762, McAlister's Deli at 760, Wok N Roll at 789, and Moe's Southwest Grill and Rock N' Roll Sushi & Hibachi share the same building at 794, in different suites. Chick-fil-A anchors the same short run at 790, at the Highway 96 and Houston Lake Road corner. That's six restaurants inside a handful of addresses, close enough that you could park once and walk to any of them.
Marco's Pizza and Pub 96 sit further down the highway at 405 State Route 96, a separate pocket of the corridor that handles pizza delivery and a late-night pub crowd rather than daytime foot traffic. Between the two clusters, Highway 96 has quietly built out a real dining strip, not just a collection of drive-thrus that happen to share a zip code.
What none of those six had, until earlier this month, was a reason to stop in before 10:30 in the morning. Eggs Up Grill's arrival doesn't compete with any of them for lunch or dinner business. It fills hours the rest of the strip simply wasn't using.
What This Actually Changes
None of this is a dramatic shift. Bonaire isn't getting a new downtown or a food hall. What it's getting is a small, specific fix to a schedule problem that anyone who's lived here for more than a year has probably run into: wanting a real breakfast on a Sunday and having nowhere on this side of town to get one.
It's a small enough thing that it would be easy to miss, which is exactly why it's worth pointing out. The businesses that fill in gaps like this one are usually the ones that stick around, because they're not fighting six other restaurants for the same dinner crowd. They're solving a problem nobody else on the block bothered to solve.
If you're already living along this stretch of Highway 96, that's one more reason to notice how much this corridor has filled in over the past few years. If you're weighing a move to this part of Houston County and want a clearer read on what daily life actually looks like here, from the school zones to the commute to Robins AFB to the pace of a neighborhood, William Walton-Dean works this market every day and can walk you through it. You can also browse the current homes for sale in Bonaire to see what's available right now, or schedule a consultation to talk through what a move to this side of the county would actually look like for you.
