In the gap between the NFL conference
finals and the up-coming Super Bowl, we attended the 28th annual Key
West Craft Fair. They barricaded a
couple of blocks near the Truman White House in Old Town and let a hundred or
so artisans and craftsmen of all kinds set up tents and sell/display their
wares. We have attended these kinds of
events all over the country and find them to be largely the same. Some of the themes are different because of
the specific locale—i.e., water scenes vs. mountains, palm trees vs. pines,
etc., but, if you’ve been to one, you’ve been to all IMHO. We didn’t find anything we couldn’t live without,
but with unlimited funds and unlimited space, we might have picked up one or
two things. As it was, we made it home empty handed. Since it took little time to get around to
all of the tents, we rode our bikes home the long way and stopped for a pretty
good pizza a Roostica, a Stock Island eatery.
We certainly love to cycle everywhere on KW, but recently the head winds
coming home have been nasty.
Followers
of this blog have figured out that we are staying on Stock Island, a grubby
little chunk of land situated between Key West and Boca Chica (the Naval Air
Station). It has: a power plant, a waste
water disposal facility, a retired Tip (a landfill to y’all not from
Commonwealth countries), the Monroe County Jail, a hospital, golf course, many
marinas hosting both pleasure craft and working boats, the botanical gardens, a
community college boasting the Tennessee Williams Theater, an elementary
school, the SPCA, a bunch of restaurants, lots and lots of run down
trailers/mobile homes, and a couple of expensive RV parks whose tariff exceeds
the quality of their facilities.
We have frequented several of the
restaurants, but have for weeks passed by a little Cuban hole-in-the-wall
called El Mocho (the butt) almost daily and have not darkened its door. This is the kind of place that locals and
workers frequent and where every morning pockets of old men sit around outside
having coffee catching up on life. We
vowed to have breakfast there some day; Monday was that day. Well, we were mildly surprised. While the place was very small--you couldn’t
swing a dead cat around and not hit something--the quality of the food was
excellent and the prices were very reasonable, quite unlike Key West
restaurants as a group. Long-time
customers are treated as familia and
warmly welcomed and greeted with abrazos
when they arrive. It felt more like home
than the northeast coast dominated Florida.
Actually, that’s probably not fair to Key West. There are many Cubanos and Bahamians (and
other islanders, too) working in every kind of service job you can
imagine. They lend their cultural
influences to this place in ways that are both obvious and envious. Who among us hasn’t become addicted to café con leche?
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| El Mocho |
We have spent some time making
observations about cruise ships docking at Key West. We do that in part because you can’t avoid
ship passengers if you go down town and because it is such a hot topic among
the citizens here. There is a proposal
underway to dredge greater access to the ship piers. The effort would be a mile-long and 150 yards
wide, allowing for more than two ships to dock at once. Current estimates indicate that ships
disgorge some 3,000 to 9,000 passengers and crew daily. Most of them don’t wander too far from lower
Duval Street. The primary argument seems
to be around whether or not Key West should focus on quality or quantity of
visitors. The cruise ships offer
quantity, but it is estimated that cruise ship passengers spend $1 for every
$10 spent by other visitors. The
ultimate question for Key West is do they want to be more upscale, like
Nantucket or the Hamptons, or continue to stoke mass tourism that provides a
reliable stream of dollars, but which results in the proliferation of T-shirt
shops and other tourista crappola. Only
Key Westers and their leaders can answer that question, but for us it is
probably already too late, as the masses of humanity are a big enough turnoff
to keep us from returning any time soon, or ever.
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| Carnival Cruise Ship |
We seek entertainment wherever we can
find it, and local theater productions are pretty good places to have an enjoyable
evening. Key West is no exception to
that, as you may recall that earlier in the month we attended a play at the
Waterfront Theater and a drag show at La Te Da.
The local Red Barn Theater, which is housed in the old carriage house
for the island's oldest home, offers a series of plays throughout the year. “The Divine Sister” just opened last week to
sellout crowds (not hard, as the place only seats a hundred or so) and it was
our last opportunity to attend a play in Key West. The play stared Randy Roberts, a well-known
drag queen playing the title role. It
was an outrageous evening of nearly slapstick ribald humor complete with Junior
High School scatological jokes, etc. None-the-less,
it was a pleasurable evening capped off with Key Lime pie and exotic coffees at
the Grand Café across the street.
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| At The Red Barn Theater |
Long before arriving in Key West,
various friends and acquaintances told us not to miss “Latitudes,” a romantic
restaurant run by The Weston Hotel on Sunset Key. “Be sure to take the boat over to Sunset Key
and have lunch at the most romantic place in the Keys,” they told us time and
again. Time, like it often does these
days, almost got away from us, but we managed to sneak it in on our next to
last day. The short boat ride was fun
and the island, sprinkled with excessively over-priced 1%er housing, was
charming and, yes, romantic. The color
of the water around the island cannot be captured easily in photos, so you will
have to take our word for it. “Latitudes”
has a gorgeous setting with tables arranged on the sandy beach, a lovely patio,
and plenty of indoor seating when the weather doesn’t cooperate. On this day the weather was perfect. As expected, the tariff for a meal was on the
steep side even for KW, but we complained not, expecting a stunning lunch. This not a restaurant critique blog, but
given the raves we received about the place before our arrival, we must say
that the food was pedestrian and the service terrible. We often grouse about the apparent lack of
training wait staff and others in the service end of restaurants receive. Even given training there is a worse lack of
supervision. It is countless times that
waiters and other food servers reach across a table in front of a diner so they
won’t have to walk around to serve properly.
Sadly, our staff at “Latitudes” had to be reminded to serve correctly on
more than one occasion with more than one staff member. There were many other sloppy errors made by
staff here, but we won’t dwell on them.
However, we cannot recommend a restaurant that has such poor service.
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| Sunset Key |
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| Key Lime Martini - A First |
On a happier note, we leave tomorrow for
Grassy Key, which we will enjoy for the next month. To cap off our stay here, we had lunch at
Hogfish Bar & Grill again today. We'll repeat breakfast tomorrow morning at El Mocho.
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| Vaya Con Dios Cayo Hueso |
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