Before Palafox Street became a destination, before packed sidewalks, weekend reservations, and national attention, there was a quiet stretch of downtown where opening a restaurant felt more like a gamble than a vision. That’s where Global Grill took root, long before downtown Pensacola proved it could sustain something bold.
At the center of it all are Frank and Jane Taylor, a husband-and-wife team whose story began long before Global Grill ever opened its doors. They met working at a restaurant on Pensacola Beach in the early 1990s, Jane behind the bar, Frank on the line, both juggling restaurant shifts while pursuing college degrees. Jane was earning her master’s in Child and Adolescent Psychology at UWF; Frank was studying marine biology. Neither imagined that cooking and hospitality would become their life’s work, yet the restaurant world quietly shaped them both.
Their paths to Pensacola were different but rooted in family and circumstance. Jane moved from St. Louis after a brutal winter, arriving on the Gulf Coast at 21 with little more than determination and a willingness to work. Frank, an Army brat who spent part of his youth in Germany, learned discipline and large-scale cooking early, working in a military mess hall and with a butcher, developing skills that would later define his approach in the kitchen.
In 2003, with three young children, including premature identical twin boys, and no guarantee of success, the couple took over a space on Palafox and opened Global Grill. The concept was unfamiliar to many at the time: tapas-style dining in a downtown that largely emptied after business hours. Even banks weren’t convinced. Traditional loans were hard to come by, forcing the couple to rely on family support and sheer belief that Pensacola was ready for something different.
Less than a year later, Hurricane Ivan tested that belief. Flooding wiped out inventory, destroyed walls and flooring, and forced Global Grill to close before it had a chance to find its footing. Tens of thousands of dollars in losses came without insurance coverage for spoiled food, pushing the restaurant, and its owners, to the brink. It would have been easy to walk away. Instead, they reopened.
That decision would prove defining…