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. His wife Alice ran the kitchen, and her crab cakes and her lima bean soup were famous the length of this road. The bar they built has stayed open under four separate sets of owners in the years since. Hurricane Betsy knocked the building off its pilings in 1965. Stratham bought a barge, rebuilt on top of it and reopened in March 1966, which is why the place still sits partly out over the water on a hull. Phyllis Sague, a former science teacher, bought it around 1980 and her son Mike runs it now, and the conch fritters they are known for go through something like five hundred pounds of conch a week. Motorcycles fill the gravel most weekends. The restaurant stands on the mainland side of the water, before the toll booth, so it costs nothing to reach from Florida City and nothing to leave again.
Getting there
25.2913, -80.3787
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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