Local Flavor in Florida
6 places
Entertainment·Monroe County
Alabama Jack's
Card Sound Road is the old way into the Keys, laid along the route of the first Overseas Highway, and Alabama Jack's sits on it about a mile short of the bridge. Jack Stratham was a Georgia man out of Sumter County, nicknamed Alabama Jack by a construction foreman who had too many Jacks on the job and went by his accent instead. He had riveted on the Empire State Building and laid water mains under New York before he came south, and in 1953 he took a lease on just under an acre of dockside here.
Entertainment·Monroe County
Baby's Coffee
Baby's Coffee is named after a building it left behind. Gary and Olga Teplitsky came down from New York in 1991 to start a coffee roasting company, and opened in a small place at the uptown end of Duval Street in Key West. By the company's own account, a Cuban family had owned that building back in the 1920s and called it Baby's Place, after their youngest son, who grew up to run a cantina in it.
Entertainment·Monroe County
Green Parrot Bar
Antonio Sanchez opened a grocery at the southeast corner of Whitehead and Southard in 1890, and something has been trading in the building ever since, which is the basis for the Green Parrot's claim to be the oldest bar in Key West. It was a grocery for the first fifty years of that.
Entertainment·Monroe County
Mrs. Mac's Kitchen
The building went up in 1947 as Grainger's Gulf Side Inn, one of the few places along this stretch of the Overseas Highway where a traveller could get a meal. Jeff MacFarland opened Mrs. Mac's Kitchen in it in 1976, naming the restaurant for his mother and cooking her recipes, and a good deal of the original roadside shape has survived: a low building at Mile Marker 99.4 with licence plates and beer cans and buoys nailed across the walls and most of the ceiling.
Civic & Local·Monroe County
No Name Pub
No Name Pub opened in 1931 as a general store and bait and tackle shop on Big Pine Key, on the road that led to the No Name Key ferry. The first Overseas Highway had opened three years earlier with a gap in the middle of it: drivers boarded a car ferry at Lower Matecumbe, crossed some forty miles of open water, landed at No Name Key and drove on to Key West, passing this door on the way. An eatery was added in 1936.
Entertainment·Monroe County
Porky's Bayside
Porky's Bayside began around the middle of the last century as Bill Thompson's Villas and Marina, on the bay side of Key Vaca. The sources disagree about exactly when: the restaurant says 1950 and the local paper says the 1960s, and no public record settles it. Either way it arrived while Marathon was turning from a fishing settlement into a sportfishing and tourist town, in the decades after the Overseas Highway opened and the waterfront began filling up with subdivisions.