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. The restaurant has changed names and changed owners several times over since then, but the small marina behind it has gone on working without a break, and its docks still fill up with charter boats every morning of the season. It runs now as an open-air tiki bar and restaurant built around barbecue smoked on site, local seafood landed a few yards away, and a deep-fried Key lime pie. There is a cook-your-catch service on the dock for anyone coming in off a boat with something worth eating. Mile Marker 47.5 puts it at the western tip of Key Vaca, just under a mile short of the point where the Seven Mile Bridge lifts off from Knights Key. That makes it close to the last bayside place to pull in before the highway runs out over open water for the better part of seven miles, with nowhere at all to stop until it comes back down on Little Duck Key.