Latitudes Restaurant

Look at that water and those skies, a perfect day for a ride across Key West harbor. So we did just that.

Our destination was Latitudes on Sunset Key. My wife had the day off for a business meeting that went well so she wanted lunch in town.

"Lupita's," I said. Too far she said, unwilling to drive all the way to Bertha Street ten minutes away. Such is the effect Key West has on you after a short while. Anything beyond walking distance is far.

"Finnegan's Wake," I riposted thinking of their rather nice strawberry tart and custard for pudding. I figured a sweet end to the meal was on the cards as it had been a good morning for the wife.

"Sunset Key," she decided. "Today we have lots of time and we can spend some of it riding the ferry." The concierge at the Westin put our names on the 12:15 boat and we got in line to ride.

Like I said it was a lovely day to ride and we looked around on the five minute crossing. At the island dock we met an old friend of mine I used to captain with. Betsy likes driving boats for the Westin as she gets paid vacation and has regular year round work, which is hard to find for boat captains; I became a police dispatcher after captaining for a few years. Her kid plays baseball at school, in a town mad for youth baseball. Her life is made in the shade. We compared notes, my wife with her fabulous new job in Adult Education, me plugging away on night shift and Betsy successfully raising a kid in Key West, the hardest of cities.

Yards ago Sunset Key was called Tank Island where the Navy built tanks for fuel on a deserted speck of land in the harbor, never used the tanks and ended up giving the island to the city. The city then sold the waterfront for the Westin (the Hilton as was) and the island as well for eleven million dollars... the deal of the century in a town where modest homes sell for millions. So Tank Island became upscale Sunset Key where millionaires and public figures get to enjoy Key West away from us hoi polloi.

They say Oprah Winfrey and Kevin Costner among others, come here to relax as has the Secretary of State of various administrations along with ordinary one percenters who like tennis and golf carts and privacy. Look but don't enter:

Latitudes is open to the public as is a short stretch of beach which is accessible for a fee. The restaurant is pleasant, the bar is plagued by a television and the staff is attentive to the point of being obsequious. Want to know how wretched rich people are? Hang out in their hang outs for a while and watch the staff act like beaten puppies.

The surroundings are lovely of course and coconut palms sway in the breeze, deprived of nuts, emasculated to ensure the comfort of patrons.

Dinner at this place is ruinously expensive but lunch is relatively reasonable. We had one beer, a soup and two sandwiches for $48 plus tip. The ferry ride is free as is the view and the margarita list is extensive...

The lobster bisque was the best my wife ever had, she said. Sweet, creamy and smooth it was quite the indulgence with a crouton floating in the middle topped with pieces of actual lobster. We shared the bowl and it didn't last long.

The lunch menu offers a several starters and some salads plus grilled meat chicken and fish with rice but the sandwiches are in my opinion the tour de force. They come on suave holders swung along by po faced staff.

My Cubano had lots of meat and a slice of melted Swiss wedged into a roll that was sweet enough to make this a Media Noche, traditionally a smaller sweet, middle of the night snack. It was delicious of course as was the famous Laitudes sweet potato salad.

My wife had trouble eating all of her huge grouper sandwich and limited herself to just the fish on the second half of this monster.

I had a Stella served in the traditional long glass. They have four draft beers and a variety of bottles available.

We skipped dessert but I know from experience their crême brûlée is remarkable, as it comes in a dish with three troughs each filled with a flavored burnt custard.

The day was perfect with intermittent sunshine poking through puffy clouds and the remains of an unseasonably late cold front long awa humidity. Just right for sitting out.

The restaurant wasn't crowded, a reminder if one were needed that winter is over.

The loo is as remarkable as the rest of the place, all cool stone and sanitary woodwork with piped music to ease your bowels as you sit and think. Even the paper towels are embroidered which seems a monumental waste to me for a one use object. One day our one percenters will learn to join with the rest of us in the mantra that less is more.

Hemingway has his place on the wall of the gentleman's convenience of course. Everyone wants a piece of Papa:

What a lovely day.

Lupita's or Finnegan's would have been fine of course, but the views make this place special and they know it.

I find it intrusive when perfect strangers, after I have spoken but two sentences home in on me and ask coyly where I'm from with my Mid Atlantic speech patterns. In Key West every one asks where you are from as a way of making a connection, however I don't frequent bars and no one can relate to where I'm from anyway, so I find the question tedious and intrusive. I cut this nice couple from Louisiana a bit short when she poked her snout into my Anglo-Italian background, "You're not from here," she simpered. I wanted to tell her she was so sharp she might cut herself but I was rather sharp myself. I repented immediately and had to spend te rest of the ride not admiring the view but finding out instead about life in rural Louisiana. I said I liked New Orleans which was the wrong thing to tell these devout small town people so I generally made a dog's dinner of the whole bloody encounter. I wish I could be more like Doug Bennett and just be cheerful with strangers, like this: This Week on the Island . The problem is people just make me nervous and then I bugger everything up trying too hard to relax.

Then the ride was over and we immediately went our mercifully separate ways.

Back to the real world where ordinary people, shop for trinkets and ice cream. Thank you Lord for ordinariness. Latitudes is lovely as a once In a while thing, but renting a cottage there and hanging out in that rarified atmosphere would be too... rich for me.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Mario Sanchez

In New York they titled the exhibit A Fisherman's Dream but here in Key West it's titled Grits and Grunts which has become the folkloric dish of the (first) Great Depression in Key West. Mario Sanchez has become the folk artist of the Southernmost City and his crude, vibrant wooden tablets are in demand world wide.

Sanchez did indeed paint memories of his home town, his pictures show street scenes and residents going about their daily lives. In part it is a record of how life was lived but it is also a record of the quirks and characters of those who lived in Key West particularly in the Depression Years.

The portraits of the past are fascinating and I watched with some interest as the cleaner dude studied the pictures. He was so intent I wondered if he remembered some of these scenes...

The entrance picture was of Ernest Hemingway, in the striped blouse handing out fish to passerby after an excessively successful fishing trip. The wrought iron balcony of his home is in evidence behind the men in the picture.

The stand out features of the exhibit are not only the quantity of the works on show but also the really extraordinary paper cartoons that he drew before he embarked on the wooden bas-Reliefs themselves. And they took up,to four months to complete - each!

Below we have a cigar maker's cottage, with industrious cigar rolling underway...

...and here is how the artist envisioned the scene:

Below we see in the upper part of the frame the unfinished work while below we see a completed picture with all details present and accounted for.

There is a video to accompany the exhibit and it brings to life the artist who died in 2005 at age 96. We see him working in his "Studio Under The Trees," which is how much of daily life is lived in this benign climate: outdoors.

He talks about how colorful Key West was when he was younger, aft his father a reader in the cigar factories, brought his family home from Tampa. The cigar factories owned by Cuban migrants mostly relocated Up North thanks to the cheaper land, a common theme of life in Key West even then.

A reader was a man who stood at a lectern in front of the cigar rollers and read newspapers and novels to keep the troops entertained. I suppose nowadays they would use television. While Sanchez worked in his studio his mother would frequently sit behind him and monitor his progress.

 

The art is these for all to see, full of color lively and detailed. Its the Key West we all want to remember, the intimate small village described in Hemingway's To Have and To Have Not, but it's the Key West we never saw and that has disappeared forever.

One of the things that bugs me about historic art is that if things appear which do not seem consonant with prevceived reality modern viewers tend to ascribe things seen in old,pictures as "artistic license." my wife noticed no wild chickens in any of these pictures. So, how old and established are these irritating modern wild chickens of Key West?

Dogs? Sure. Cats? Lots of them. But chickens? Not one. Is that artistic license or reality as it really was?

This young dude shown below was selling Spanish Limes, which are small round fruit with a tough skin and soft juicy pulp around a very large pit. In the Caribbean they call them christophenes.

The kite flyers are flying kits on the ends f real pieces of string embedded in the picture. Do you like the depth of detail?

Key West has a long tradition of being home to a strong Jewish community. Indeed the state's oldest synagogue still operates in Key West.

Mario Sanchez knew all about it and recorded it for posterity, this community in Key West.

 

Check out the detail on tis snapper:

The back of the fish shows the wood was recycled according to the note in front of the piece and here it is:

All this managed with these modest tools and a chisel:

 

 

 

Here is Killi Gray being pursued by the Old Bill:

And here is the crawfish man:

Sanchez liked to use clouds to carry messages over his paintings. Here is the Hemingway house and here are the clouds: for whom the bell tolls, the sun also rises and in the distance the old man and the sea. Neat huh?

And here is the original Hemingway giving away his surplus catch: