This place is as old-school Florida as you'll find. They've been frying mullet on the same cast-iron skillet since 1951. No website. No Yelp page. No franchise deal.
Florida's original food culture wasn't built in a theme park or a resort kitchen. It was built in fish camps, roadside shacks, and family-run diners sitting on the edge of rivers most tourists never find. Places where the menu was written on a chalkboard and the cook knew your grandfather's name.
By the 1990s, corporate chains had swallowed most of them whole. Real estate developers took the rest. The ones that survived did it quietly, stubbornly, on reputation alone.
These aren't just restaurants. They're the last physical proof that a different Florida existed, one built by the people who actually lived here, not the ones who sold it to everyone else.
Haven't been there since I retired in 2014 but Chowder Ted's was my favorite stop when my ship stopped at Blount Island in Jacksonville.
ReplyDeletewhere is that? Would love to eat there. My guess is off the St. Johns?
ReplyDeleteThen there's "Fat Willy's Fish Camp" in Valrico.
ReplyDeleteThere once were old-school, locally owned and operated places like this all over Central Florida.
But most have been run out of business by rising land prices, escalating taxes and chain restaurants.
And don't forget government regulations put in place to grease the skids for the big chains.
That's why we no longer see roadside sheds with home grown produce and real Floridians
cooking up and selling boiled peanuts in a cut down 55 gallon drum.