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. A cook named Angie, hired the year before, bought the place from him in 1988 and then ran it for the next thirty-five years, which is how a roadside kitchen came to be the longest continuously running restaurant anywhere in Key Largo. A second and larger location, Mrs. Mac's Kitchen II, opened a few hundred yards down the highway at Mile Marker 99, with a full bar and room for the crowds the original could not seat. Both were sold together in 2023, for three and a half million dollars, to the restaurateur Stephanie Figueroa, who kept the format intact rather than modernise a room people came for precisely because it had not changed. The kitchen claims the best Key lime pie in the Keys, which is a claim more or less every kitchen on this road makes, and this one has been making it longer than most of them have been open.