What happened with Key West restaurants during the pandemic? New ones kept opening
The pandemic has not been kind to restaurants. Mandatory shutdowns. Struggles to pay bills and retain staff. Restrictions on diners.
Add the roadblocks in the Keys that kept out visitors during the early weeks of the crisis, and the Monroe County hospitality industry has faced rough waters. Despite the challenges, new restaurants in Key West are opening, even as COVID continues.
Here’s a look at what eight new places bring to the table:
Pho King Awesome Sake and Noodle Bar
626 Duval St.
The Pho King Awesome Sake and Noodle Bar opened in November 2020, with two chefs who had worked at Kojin Noodle Bar, which closed in 2020.
The menu features house ramen with pork, Korean barbecue short ribs, oxtail pho and kimchi stew, along with curried lamb, dumplings and a banh mi sandwich.
“We took some items but we added much more than that,” said owner Shukhrat Rakhimov. “They closed the place. The chefs came to me asking for a job.”
Rakhimov said he signed the lease for the space on Duval Street in May 2020, when the Keys were essentially closed to tourists due to the pandemic, with police checkpoints set up at the entrances to Monroe County.
“It was dead,” Rakhimov recalled. “The only thing you could get was a good deal on rent.”
Rakhimov also owns Kennedy Cafe and Shooterz bar, which are both in the New Town section of Key West, and is also behind Ocean Grille and Bar and New York Pasta Garden.
“If you want to succeed you’re going to have to take risks,” he said of the restaurant business. “It’s always a risk even if there is no pandemic.”
Little Whitehouse Subs
218 Whitehead St.
Joy Terwilliger and Micah Woerner opened Little Whitehouse Subs in July 2020.
“The pandemic happened and we said, ‘Let’s try to open a restaurant,; ” Terwilliger said.
They signed a lease in February 2020.
“Everything got shut down March 17,” Terwilliger said. “It did give us time to take our time opening. We were testing sandwiches out. The pandemic helped with that a little bit but it wasn’t ideal by any means.”
Key West, it turns out, was hungry for authentic subs, she said.
“We were busy from minute one,” said the New Jersey-born Terwilliger. “I was blown away by how much the community really wanted a good sub shop.”
The Roadkill features marinated chicken while the Golden Pig is roasted pork with barbecue sauce and the Baller is, of course, a meatball feast.
Humor is included on the menu. Among the offerings is the Karen. “Build your own because she would,” the menu notes.
In the mornings, Terwilliger bakes a dozen or so cupcakes, creating a “cupcake of the day.” They vary from a frosted Fruity Pebbles cupcake with “cereal milk” buttercream frosting to a chocolate and peanut butter number. Carrot cake also makes it in there.
Poké in the Rear
504 Angela St.
Poké in the Rear opened Sept. 3, 2020, at a time when bars were still closed in Florida and several in Key West were scrambling to open kitchens so they could reopen technically as restaurants.
“Initially, it was open because bars were still closed,” said owner Grant Portier.
Portier’s wife, Jenn Stefanacci Portier, is a managing partner at the 22 & Co. bar next-door to Poké, which sits amid several bars including Aqua, whose owner asked Portier if he’d like to open an eatery on the site.
Without a grill or fryer, Portier said he knew at once it would be a poké place.
“I opened up the restaurant five days before they said you didn’t have to have a restaurant to be open,” Portier said. “I got a nice restaurant out of it.”
At first, the 34-seat restaurant with the 56-square-foot kitchen served chips and salsa and “glitter hot dogs” — steamed hot dogs with edible glitter.
The menu soon turned into poké bowls, sous vide pork belly, flatbreads and a huge pretzel stuffed with cheese, olives and other goodies. It’s dubbed the Inga, a famous drag queen who performs at the next-door Aqua. Each month, Poké hosts a Hawaiian luau centered around a roasted suckling pig.
“I didn’t want to open something where people did bags of Frito Lays and White Castles,” Portier said. “I wanted something that would survive the pandemic.”
Scotty’s Front Street Stage
528 Front St.
Scotty’s features live music, a Caribbean-influenced menu and a rooftop bar and deck. Owner Scott Edwards, an Ohio native who came up with the venue idea while on vacation in Key West, and his staff opened the place on Dec. 30, 2020.
Edwards moved to Key West in January 2020 and soon had to face the challenge of creating a business during the pandemic.
“We had a five-year build-out plan,” said Spencer Andrei, who is part of the management team. “We got all of those five years down within the last nine months just because of COVID.”
“The tricky thing about the whole situation is we were at the mercy of a lot of regulatory agencies,” said Andrei, noting that many agencies cut staff during the pandemic. “Getting the liquor license took four times as long as it normally should.”
As for the food, Conch is big on the appetizer menu. Scotty’s has cracked conch, conch ceviche and conch fritters. Popular entrees include Jamaican jerk chicken over a bed of rice and beans, Colombo shrimp and dumplings and Scotty’s own version of the Nashville hot chicken sandwich.
Live music is important to the Scotty’s crew.
“We feature a lot of national acts on the weekends,” Andrei said. “We see this as a pipeline to bring national up-and-coming artists to Key West.”
Souperhappy Noodle and Sake Bar
601 Duval St., Unit No. 4, entrance on Southard Street
Souperhappy Noodle and Sake Bar, from the people behind Misohappy sushi right next-door on Southard Street and Thai Island on Eisenhower Drive, filled a gap left by Kojin, which closed in 2020.
Souperhappy opened in August 2020. The staff had some challenges.
“It’s August, it’s 100 degrees and we’re opening a soup bar, and there’s COVID,” said Art Levin, the general manager.
The idea, though, paid off, Levin said.
“It’s doing really well with the locals.,” he said. “The broths are all scratch-made. It’s the right way.”
Popular dishes include the seafood bowl and the “Hangover Soup,” a beef pho with thin slices of New York strip and Angus steak completely cooked in the piping hot broth.
“It cooks it perfectly,” Levin said. “You could cut it with a chopstick.”
Desserts include a generous helping of fried ice cream.
You can order from either the Souperhappy menu or from Misohappy’s selections.
That may encourage a little renovation Levin said.
“We are probably 95 percent going to open a hole in the wall to pass the dishes,” Levin said.
Pepper Pot Island Cafe
730 Emma St.
Amy and Shane LaBeet opened up the Pepper Pot Island Cafe on Dec. 15, 2020, doing only takeout service for now. Their menu features Caribbean foods like roti, a wrap with curried potatoes and meats or veggies, and dahl bowls, which combine split peas over rice with curry sauces.
“We offer authentic Caribbean food,” said Amy LaBeet. “No one in Key West has roti. Some of the stuff we carry, nobody else has it. I’m from Trinidad, he’s from the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Specials abound. Other dishes they have served are mango barbecue chicken, stew chicken, jerk shrimp with red beans and rice, a geera pork sandwich and corn soup.
The LaBeets, who have lived in Key West for about 17 years, are running the place themselves, capitalizing on the sauces they cooked up about nine years ago in Key West.
“It’s gradually building,” LaBeet said, of the business which is located on a street filled with restaurants in the historic Bahama Village neighborhood. “We’re just working on getting our brand out there. It’s a small town. People will spread the word.”
They’ve had to adjust to the times, such as doing takeout because the restaurant is too small to space out tables.
“We were planning to be open a year before but it just didn’t happen,” LaBeet said. “With the pandemic, it just added a little bit more difficulty.”
Lost and Found Key West
404 Southard St.
Lost and Found Key West opened Jan. 17, offering a menu that features tacos, wings, po’ boys and burgers, said Nick Dent, who owns the place with Ashlee Girard.
“We call ourselves modern comfort food,” Dent said, pointing out the Lonely Cowboy burger, which comes on a pretzel bun with pepperjack cheese, bacon, matchstick potatoes and a spicy barbecue sauce.
The pair also own Old Town Tavern, a Duval Street pub and restaurant that’s been open almost three years.
“We had been thinking about doing another restaurant at some stage,” Dent said. “Obviously it’s been a challenging time. The flip side of that, I suppose, is for the first time in a long time some rents were going down on some better locations that had only gone up for years. There were some opportunities available.”
They’d been eyeing the 404 Southard St. location for some time. Then, it was left empty when Charlie Mac’s closed about a year ago, Dent said.
With so many restaurants opening in Key West, Dent said it was a challenge to hire enough workers and he could use a few extra hands these days.
“I think there are fewer workers,” Dent said. “A lot of people left town during COVID. Key West is kind of a transient town. Right now, the town is extremely busy.”
Marylin’s Restaurant & Pub
320 Grinnell St.
Restaurant owner Rob Patterson said he immediately knew what he was going to call his newest venture upon glancing at an image of Marilyn Monroe one day.
“I said, ‘It’s going to be called Marylin’s,’ ” Patterson said., coming up with a different spelling. “We totally made our own Marylin though. It’s not anything to do with Marilyn Monroe herself. It was just an inspiration I came up with. It’s just glitz and glamour.”
Marylin’s Restaurant and Pub, which opened this month, is dressed up in jewel decor and LED lights and offers live entertainment, two Saturday night cabaret shows for diners and a Sunday “Drag Bingo.”
Patterson hired chef Brendan Orr to create the food lineup that includes a cornflake fried chicken sandwich, which is breaded in corn flakes and comes on a waffle biscuit with maple chili glaze, along with mojo pork spring rolls.
“He has created a fine dining menu at a more affordable price,” Patterson said of Orr. “The presentation that comes out the door — you think you’re in the most expensive restaurant in Key West. Things come out looking very pretty.”
Patterson also owns Key West Fish and Chips, 633 Duval St., which opened June 5, 2020.
“I decided, I’m not stopping here,” Patterson said. “This town needs some new fun stuff.”
The biggest challenge of opening during the pandemic he said is finding enough workers.
“We need people so bad, especially kitchen people,” he said. “Anyone that has back-of-house knowledge is not here. They all had to leave. They couldn’t afford to stay.”
Still, Marylin’s got off to a strong start, Patterson said.
“It’s been an amazing reception, especially by the people in this town.”
This story was originally published March 17, 2021 at 6:36 AM.
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