Key West Food

First off, I must confess I do not care for any kind of sea food.  Therefore I readily admit to not being a good critic of the food inKey West - or any where else for that matter.  

However, I do eat and I did eat  while down there.  My main concern was the omnipresent cigarette smoke in the restaurants.  It was generally present, nauseous, suffocating and repulsive.  Hard to enjoy any other tastes in that toxic environment.  We ate once at Santiago's Bodego and when we left our clothes smelled of cigarette gasses.  I would never go there again.  How was the food?  Honestly couldn’t tell.  I did go into Sloppy Joe’s once to get a Sloppy Joe.  But left because of the cigarette smoke (ash trays were on every table) and the extremely loud and raucous noises coming from the “band?”.   Not my cup of tea - however - the place WAS jammed full of very happy-looking patrons, drinking, eating and smoking as they shouted into each other's ears.

The Cuban Coffee Queen was different - VERY different.  Hard to find until you run right into it and then is the most obvious place in Key West.   Food was OK, not to my way of thinking very good but OK.  I had the Cuban Sandwich and it was not the worst I have had - authentic looking and tasting.  Probably the bread was a little off.  Cigarette smoke here too but since it doesn’t have a dining room - or any other kind of a room - you just sit down on a chair or bench outside the order window. 

Tried Blue Heaven but it had no AC, a 30 minute wait and high prices.  Back to La Trattoria where we ate twice.  No smoke here, and excellent food.  Good service, nice selection.

El Siboney.  Wow.  Cuban food when the motherland is only 90 miles away.  Good.  Very good.  If I ever go down to Key West again I will get a B&B close to El Siboney,

Breakfast at our B&B Angeleos.  Good European type continental breakfast.  Hard cooked egg, cereal, sticky bun, bread, fruit cup, waffle with syrup, and so on.  I put a small amount of cereal in a small bowl and added the fruit cup on top.  Good.  

Key West. Clothing Optional.

Later in the evening I went up to the top of the "Garden of Eden", a clothing-optional bar on Duval Street.  I had always wondered what such a place would look like, whether people would actually have clothes on or not, and since the sign said it was "optional" I reasoned that I could keep mine on.  It was on the top floor of a three story building with a couple of other bars under the Garden of Eden (this being Duval Street in Key West), one bar on the ground floor and another bar above it and they looked pretty normal (for Key West).  So I finally reached the point of ascent into the Revelations of the Garden of Eden.

The ascent was steep, as one might expect, and there was a very sobering sign hanging just before the final entrance.  Then I walked in.  Four people were fully clothed, two men and two women, one a possibly 300 pound lady.  Four guys were naked, well displayed and lounging about in Greek-god-like glory, contemptuously meeting my nod of greeting.  Three women were naked.  One standing at the bar joking with the four clothed people, two others lounging together, talking and laughing.  All in all it was still VERY humid, muggy and miserable.  No one seemed really free or friendly.

Was I tempted to join the undressed masses?  Not really.  I had a video-camera, a still camera, an iTouch and a cell phone on me.  I was not anxious to compete with the Greek gods, and  I reasoned that maybe they were naked because they had lost their clothes.  They might grab mine and go.  And that's the naked truth.  Did I make any pictures?  No.  Not video or still or with cell phone, but I did record the highlights of the occasion for "printing" later.  I didn't "record" the clothed people for obvious reasons, and I didn't do the men because you can see them at any museum of antiquities.

With me clothing is never optional.  Perhaps I could do without all the coverings but never without the pockets.  Besides the camera and camcorder and iTouch and cell phone mentioned above I also carry with me a ball-point pen, a memo pad, business cards, a wallet, my keys, and a small flashlight - sometimes a little change.  Besides there is the issue of my faithful Swiss Army Knife.  Without it I would feel positively naked. 

Key West. Its Heart and Soul.

A tropical paradise. Indeed it is. But really, what IS Key West? What truly distinguishes it from all the other places on the planet?

The weather was perfect while we were there. The unfiltered sun was intensely hot. Temperatures were in the mid eighties, but the humidity made it all miserable. Cigarette smoke and its gases were present almost everywhere on the island. Alcohol consumption was gratuitously extravagant. Noise was constant with randomly spaced ear-shattering blasts of motorcycle engines suddenly revved high with a muffler cutout opened while they waited downtown for the red light to turn. Some cars and trucks were not much quieter. Other cars pounded the pavement with syncopated woofer energy that made your feet tingle. Disturbingly amplified band noise competed with other distortingly amplified band noises as you walked along the audio promenade which would normally be called a street. Views of quaint buildings, trees, shops, bars and all were crammed behind great coils of wires strung from poles and then coiled and jumbled and twisted into great magic-marker-like scrawls seemingly always interposed between the view and the viewer.

Still seeking the heart and soul of Key West I headed into the art galleries - here, I reasoned, will I find the great views of paradise that I am now clearly seeking in the wrong places.

Indeed paradises were depicted in there, but these paradises all seemed to have a European twist to them. Great mansions, horses pulling carriages, there were some sea shores indeed, but these all had mountains rising behind them. Several studio visitors were gathered before three magnificent snowscape paintings - again of some neat, clean, cool European magic paradise. Another gallery had a large display of naked women, most in bas-relief, all representing not quite so much the female form perfected as a metamorphism into spiritual archetypes of glory. Not at all like the sweat-drenched women walking around in baggy shorts and floppingly open short sleeved shirts with hair frazzling out from under their soggy sunhats.

So I sought out the artists themselves. And I found a few of them. Mostly they were surprised at my question. One proudly told me that more alcohol was consumed here per-capita than in Las Vegas. Another told me that there were a LOT of weddings here. Another one told me that the roosters were one of the distinguishing objects d’art here, but admitted you couldn’t hear or see them except in the “old town”, certainly not on Duval Street. (I did see one there - at the Episcopal Church). But compared to the Philippines or Thailand or the Bahamas, the Key West roosters seemed quaint, even though they are supposedly descended from the fighting game cocks once bet upon by Hemingway.


Most of the pictures displaying tropical paradises in these galleries were of palm fronds and great showy flowers, and arrogant roosters, all gaudily dressed up in slightly fluorescent or psychedelic colors. Perhaps that is an artist’s  attempt to paint the noise of motorcycles without mufflers, shots sounds, of the car and trucks, the cigarette smoke, the "professionally wasted" looking men communing with dark bottles at the bars and the blaring band noise.

So there were pictures painted of paradises galore, both near and far, fanciful  and imaginary.  But there were no pictures of Duval Street.  I wondered why?  Although I really knew.  Obviously, if there is a "heart and soul" of Key West, it would not be seen on Duval Street, so I went elsewhere.  But since I had seen no paintings of Duval Street, and I felt it deserved its own recognition, so before  I ventured out into the Old Town I did my own painting of Duval Street to provide a suitable remembrance of it.  My rendition of "Duval Street" is shown above.

Later I spent a considerable amount of time in the "old towns", the cemetery, some good restaurants and some of the show places.  More to come.