Jo Ann Bass, matriarch of Miami Beach landmark Joe’s Stone Crab, dies at 94
Jo Ann Weiss Sawitz Bass, the matriarch of the landmark Joe’s Stone Crab, died Saturday in hospice at her Miami Beach home across the street from her family’s restaurant. She was 94.
Bass helped lead Joe’s Stone Crab, the oldest surviving restaurant in Miami Beach, for decades and into her late 80s. Joe’s predates the incorporation of the city in 1915. That happened two years after Joe’s founding. She worked there even before World War II had ended in 1945.
The restaurant has attracted almost every A-lister through the years, including Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Muhammad Ali, Elizabeth Taylor, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and even the actor who played Hoover in a 2011 movie, Leonardo Di Caprio.
Joe’s has remained family owned since it was founded in 1913, by Jo Ann Bass’ grandfather Joe Weiss who had the brilliant idea to establish an eatery on his Washington Avenue front porch serving fish sandwiches and meat dishes.
That savvy turned to genius when Joe starting serving stone crabs there in 1921, turning his namesake restaurant into a century-old global phenomenon. Joe’s Stone Crab is as definable of the Miami Beach essence as the city’s distinctive Art Deco along Ocean Drive, its beaches and the Fontainebleau hotel.
Joe’s son Jesse ran the restaurant for 60 years after the founder’s death in 1930.
But it was Jesse’s daughter, Jo Ann, born near the restaurant in Miami Beach on Oct. 18, 1931, who, alongside her son Stephen Sawitz, has led Joe’s as its co-owner through its 1990s renaissance, renovations and some of its greatest challenges. Those challenges included Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which interrupted deliveries of stone crabs from a Keys fishery and required cleanup around the grounds — after Jesse stepped down before his death at 86 in 1994.
A lifetime at Joe’s
“It’s in my blood,” Bass said of Joe’s in a 2012 interview for the Miami Beach Visual Memoirs project. “I love it. The whole place, it’s my family, it’s my security blanket, it’s a new movie every day in the actions of the customers and the people that work there. It’s Joe’s. It is a wonderful place.”
Joe’s had to be wonderful. It carries a reputation. Jo Ann, the matriarch, with her attention to detail and her customers’ needs, ensured it maintained its appeal to a broad base.
When a ‘Funny Girl’ came to visit
Streisand had played one concert in Miami-Dade as an opening act in March 1963 at Miami Beach’s Eden Roc hotel. She was not yet 21.
That was it until 2016. Then, at 74, Streisand returned to Miami to perform a sold-out show at what’s now the Kaseya Center, the Heat’s arena. One of the first things Streisand told the Miami Herald during an interview to promote the concert was the real reason she was finally returning to Miami.
“You know why?” Streisand teased. “Because they have Joe’s Stone Crabs there. I go where the good food is.”
The “Funny Girl” Oscar-winner was just five miles away via the MacArthur Causeway after leaving the arena stage to get through Joe’s doors. Her promoter had her food ready.
READ MORE: Barbra Streisand on ‘heartbreaking’ election — and the real reason she’s in Miami
How to make Joe’s work
To keep the Streisands, the hungry 9-to-5ers on Friday payday, and the attention-seeking politicians satisfied, Sawitz teamed with his mother to run Joe’s.
“You figure out how to do it. That’s something that you have to live and that’s something you have to do. And I can tell you that mom loved to work, and she loved to play hard. Her playing hard was getting dirty and working the land and planting seeds and cutting the flowers and the vegetables and then taking them and cooking something. She was remarkable, because she was so simple and ordinary, I guess. And that makes her extraordinary,” her son said.
Jo Ann’s first job
Bass was 13 in the mid-1940s when she started her first full-time job, inside the family restaurant during the waning year of World War II. She was there through her graduation from Miami Beach High in 1949. Making salads. Working the dessert station. Managing the books. Meeting customers on the floor. Staying through her marriages to Irwin Sawitz — the father of her two children, son Sawitz and daughter Jodi Hershey — and Miami Beach physician Dr. Robert Bass.
She took one 10-year “sabbatical” to raise her two children but returned to work at Joe’s, and to co-own it with her son, until 2019 when she was around 88, just before the following year’s COVID pandemic.
There were educational detours but no degrees from the University of Miami, where she enrolled after Beach High. She returned to Joe’s at her parent’s request. Later, in her 60s, she took enrichment classes at Barry University in Miami Shores near one of her homes. Bass also had a seasonal home in North Carolina.
But there was always her primary home, and it wasn’t in Miami Shores or North Carolina or even the one she lived in across the street from the restaurant until the end of her life.
“I went straight from my birth at the hospital to the second floor of Joe’s,” Bass said in the Miami Beach memoir. “There was an apartment up there, a two-family apartment. My grandparents lived at one end, my mother and dad lived at the other.”
Bass, despite never completing higher education, was an avid reader, and sharp. Miami native and U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno was one of her friends and member of a shared book club.
Her father’s memories
Bass avoided the pitfalls that befell her father. Jesse Weiss lost money — which should have gone toward building up Joe’s and the surrounding neighborhood — to a gambling habit fed down the block at the old Miami Beach Kennel Club. That was the dog racing track on the southern tip of South Beach from the 1920s to 1980.
Jo Ann Weiss Sawitz Bass was built from tough stock. Her father Jesse Weiss was 75 when he spoke to their mutual friend, WPLG-Channel 10 Miami anchor Ann Bishop, to record his memories.
“I want to be remembered as trying to live my life with as little aggravation for others than I have for myself. Unfortunately, I’m a Hungarian, and I’m hot-headed. ... I think my daughter tells people, ‘Don’t pay attention to that,’ and she’s smart about it. She’s my pride and joy. She’s a great mother, she’s a great gal, she’s got an awful lot of class. She’s not money-hungry, she’s fast to do for others. I’m proud of what others have done keeping Joe’s going, which I consider a monument to myself. The family all do a hell of a job. I’ve had a good life. Now I want to say one more thing. I’m the most fortunate man in the world, for one reason! My daughter Jo Ann. She has my hot Hungarian temper, but like me, she forgets what she got angry about five minutes after she got angry and I love her dearly.”
Honoring a news’ legend’s last wish
Bass carried out her friend Bishop’s dying wish — to have her ashes spread at Joe’s garden.
“I would go visit mom sometimes, and Ann would be there just hanging out. And when Ann passed away one of Ann’s wishes was to have her ashes spread and sprinkled. Mom came up to me and opened her purse with a bag full of white powder,” Sawitz said, chuckling.
“‘Mom! What are you doing with that?’
“She says, ‘What do you mean?’
”I said, ‘Mom, what is that?’ Because it looked like something illegal, right? It was Ann.”
Keeping Joe’s alive
Honoring friends wasn’t Bass’ only challenge. She had to restore Joe’s Stone Crab after Hurricane Andrew battered the grounds and scattered customers. She had to keep customers in the sketchy late-1970s and rough 1980s “Miami Vice” era when they were afraid to venture out to the rundown stretch of South Beach.
She invested in real estate near the restaurant. She privately donated to dozens of charitable causes, including Miami Rescue Mission, Mount Sinai Medical Center, Urban Construction and Craft Academy, the Miami Dade Public Schools Foundation and many more, her son said.
“People would be stunned by the extent of her philanthropy — mostly because she never wanted anyone to know. That’s the type of woman she was.”
“I knew Jo Ann for almost four decades; wish I had known her longer,” said David Lawrence Jr., chair of The Children’s Movement of Florida and the Miami Herald’s former publisher. “A genuine legend with the highest standards of hospitality and humanity. She brought people together at Joe’s, and way beyond. Her greeting was always warm and heartfelt. I loved her; so did everybody else.”
But as with any business that lasts for 113 years and counting, there were hurdles to overcome.
Business challenges
For 12 years, Bass fought charges of sexual discrimination leveled against the landmark restaurant after two women claimed in 1990 that they had been discriminated against when they applied for server positions. Bass insisted the charges were trumped up.
“It would have been a hell of a lot cheaper to just pay the $100,000,” Bass told the Miami Herald in 2003. “It would have been yesterday’s mullet wrapper by now. But it wasn’t true. We don’t discriminate, and we never did. I’ll go to my grave saying that.”
When a pompous male customer refused to be waited on by a female server, Bass quietly approached the table. Her son shares the memory.
“She looks so disarming, and she said, ‘Sir, what can I do for you?’ And he starts to say his preference — he didn’t want to be served by a female server.
“And she said, ‘Oh, that’s fine.’ And she changed servers and told him, ‘Do not ever come back to Joe’s, and I’ll pick up your check. She picked up his check. ‘Do not ever come back to Joe’s.’ She got the last word in.”
Jo Ann Weiss Bass was all of these things — “very tempered, loving, feminine, soft-spoken, strict,” her son said.
But more than anything, she was Mom.
A son remembers
“I can see Mom planting vegetables in a garden. I see her with dirt on her hands and dirty jeans in North Carolina in the garden. I see her picking flowers that she planted, and they’re blooming and she’s making a vase with flowers. I see her with a dish towel upstairs at Joe’s grating Parmesan cheese and her Cuisinart and talking to people,” Sawitz said.
“I see mom preparing a beautiful meal, a gourmet meal for Thanksgiving. I see mom having folded my clothes and made my drawers when I was a boy. I remember her coming to my room the day I had to give my dog away, or the night before, and just holding me hard and saying she was sorry.”
That memory from age 13 makes Sawitz, now 68 and father to a 12-year-old daughter, teary.
“I can see her picking things up off the floor in the main dining room. Working for hours. Baking my favorite cake — coconut cake,” he said.
“She asked me once, ‘What would you like for your birthday?’ And I said, ‘Shepherd’s pie. And there was nothing she couldn’t bake or cook. And then I would have the best shepherd’s pie I ever had. I remember she and I going to Shepherd Market in London and I learned what light cream there is like, mixing that with strawberries and blueberries, especially strawberries in London. I remember that.
“Being an ordinary mom, you know? I can remember her being mad at me. She was strict and very loving, too,” Sawitz recalled just days before her death.
“And the one thing I remember so well is her scratching my hair in my head when I was a kid and a little older. She still does it — even in bed in hospice.”
Survivors and services
Bass’ survivors include her son Stephen Sawitz and daugher Jodi Hershey; granddaughters Julia Sawitz, Jessica Uchuya, Lauren Walton; grandson Blayke Kogan and great-grandaughters Alexandra Uchuya and Iyana Walton.
Services will be 10 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 4, at Temple Beth Sholom, 4144 Chase Ave., Miami Beach. Her family says that donations in Bass’s memory can be made to Urban Construction and Craft Academy, Miami Rescue Mission and Mount Sinai Medical Center.
This story was originally published January 31, 2026 at 5:34 PM.
