Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [109]
One other reason we like early breakfast best is that seats are usually available. In the evenings and on weekends, the wait for a table can be maddening. And true to its spirit of taking life easy, Blue Heaven does not take reservations.
The Crack’d Conch
Mile Marker 105, Ocean Side
305–451–0732
Key Largo, FL
LD | $$
Started as a fish camp in the 1930s, The Crack’d Conch remains a seafood shanty without airs, but with a big, brash personality. A white clapboard hut trimmed in violet and green with picnic tables on its front porch, a breezy back patio, and a helter-skelter dining room in which wall décor consists of customers’ business cards and foreign currency, it is the most casual of restaurants, the type of place that makes travel along the Florida Keys toward the Conch Republic such a dreamy experience.
Fried ’gator, steamed shrimp, and house-smoked chicken are all long-time favorites, and the fried shrimp are startlingly light and crisp-crusted. The house specialty is, of course, conch. Nuggets of sweet, tangy mollusk meat, tender but with mouthwatering tooth resistance, are encased in breading and served in a great, tangled heap. On the side, we like oily fried bananas—a soft, hedonistic tropical food that has no comparables in the Northeast where we live. And for dessert, the key lime pie is a cool classic.
In addition to local seafood, The Crack’d Conch offers ambience that attracts a wide range of clientele from nice little white-haired ladies to clusters of leather-clad bikers, plus carloads of families on their way to or from vacation in America’s Caribbean paradise.
El Siboney
900 Catherine St.
305–296–4184
Key West, FL
LD | $$
When you consider El Siboney is just ninety miles from Cuba itself—closer to Havana than to Miami—you understand why its Cuban food tastes so right. This is the best place we know in Key West to taste grilled garlic chicken, a half-bird with a crisp skin and meat so tender that it slides off the bone when you try to cut it. Plantains on the side are slightly crusty and caramelized around their edges. And yuca, a side dish served with roast pork, beans, and rice, is a revelation not quite like any other vegetable. Soft and glistening white hunks, reminiscent of a well-baked potato, but more luscious and substantial, are served in a bath of heavily garlicked oil and garlanded with onion slices.
The Cuban sandwich is a beaut, made on a length of fragile-texture toasted bread that is cut in half at a rakish angle and loaded with ham, roast pork, salami, and cheese, with pickles, lettuce, and tomato. Conch chowder is thick with conch meat, and provides a great opportunity for dunking shreds of the buttered Cuban bread that comes with every meal. The grandest dish in the house is paella Valenciana for two (call ahead; it takes an hour to prepare), a vast fisherman’s stew served with rice, black beans, and plenty of Cuban bread for mopping juices. Dessert choices include key lime pie, flan, and rice pudding, accompanied of course by espresso or café con leche.
El Siboney is a clean, pleasant place with red-striped tables topped with easy-wipe plastic and silverware presented in tidy little paper bags. If you don’t speak Spanish, the waitresses do their best to help you understand the menu. Ours explained that El Siboney was a Cuban Indian, and that the Indian-themed art on the walls is a tribute to him.
Jerry’s Drive-In
2815 E. Cervantes St.
850–433–9910
Pensacola, FL
BLD | $
Jerry’s originally opened for business in 1939, and frankly, it doesn’t look like it’s changed much in the last sixty-plus years. It is a Formica-counter café with a few tables and booths and help-yourself rolls of paper