Firefly Restaurant

I suppose when we asked ourselves why we haven't been here before its a combination of things. We liked Colombian Grace that was here before and when it became Firefly early reports were mixed. That happens a lot in any new restaurant and it's unfair. It turns out it was also stupid on our part to not put Firefly on our list of places to eat. 

We  got outside seats over looking Petronia Street, and it was  a perfect evening to eat al fresco overlooking Petronia Street:

My wife had a cider with her dinner and because I wasn't working I had a glass of Mama's Little Yella Pills, (seriously) by Oskar Blues, a name so complicated I'm not sure I'd know how to order it again without a cheat sheet. I had to Google "Yellow Beer Oscar" to find the page wherein they describe their beer as I couldn't for the life of me remember what it was called. It was a not hoppy real lager and quite pleasant. 

The menu is a mixture of familiar and not so familiar and even though "modern Southern" cooking is as tired a cliche as any the food is interesting on paper.

My wife always orders friend green tomatoes, always, and sometimes I end up sharing flavor-free discs of rock hard vegetable coated in some weird plastic breading but in this instance things were quite well done:

The crab beignets sounded too weird to pass up and they came with one of those salad afterthoughts that was actually quite bracing and delicious. The beignets themselves were balls of fried crust containing a soft gooey mixture of something creamy that tasted of crab. Decidedly unusual (for me) and quite delicious. The beer was, as they advertised, slightly cloudy.

Nick (left) and I have been working together for several years now at night. Dustin (studying the menu) is new to Key West but experienced in dispatch and as I am currently overseeing his training and testing my work life is rendered quite easy.He is also a good dinner companion. 

JW told us to taste his mac and cheese and duck wings. In the distance we shared pimento cheese with those tediously fashionable benne wafers, dry flaky things that barely could sustain the pimento cheese without crumbling. I'd have preferred old fashioned water biscuits but what do I know?

When the mac and cheese grabs your attention and the pimento cheese is as good as you've had and duck wings in buffalo sauce is delicious, why wouldn't you come back? For the bacon wrapped meatloaf perhaps that Nick enjoyed with brussel sprouts...He said firmly it was good.

 Dustin was positively enthusiastic about his low country gumbo.

 JW used to work with me but he's moved to another city department with civilized daytime hours and I miss him very much, He has children so 911 dispatch is a hard life. Besides he's pretty cool.

Colombian Grace was a good place but apparently things didn't work out with the landlord or something and we lost an interesting South American cuisine. The interior was much as it is now and I remember it fondly. I am also glad I have a modern iPhone camera for my pictures nowadays. 

And their extraordinary creamy fish chowder covered in molten cheese: 

But you know what? Firefly is just fine, not as a replacement but in it's own right. The food was great, the service was excellent attentive and cheerful and patient but not intrusive and we all want to go back. My other colleague unable to show up (someone has to answer 911) texted me she was madly jealous of our dinner out. 

For myself I'd like a gooey dessert or a cobbler or a crisp in a place like this. Key Lime cake sounded good to me but I got voted down and cheesecake isn't tempting enough after the wild and delicious combinations we had tasted. The view across the street was quaint, characteristic, a little run down and peaceful.

 If you get a chance you need to try this place out. I'm going back.

Southernmost Cabanas

A life in Key West's modest little cottages can sometimes spill out untidily as the homes though pretty are small and not always designed with the practical in mind. 

A lot of visitors like the slightly down-at-heel appearance of this town which still lays claim to a slightly off kilter reputation, a place where vice flourishes and those on the run come to seek cover. It's mot really like that but the story is good and who wants to spoil it?

Well it turns out there are people who think homes built "in the Key West Style" are a good compromise between the gritty reality of life in a  Conch Cottage and the modern desire fo convenience and cleanliness and order.

So outside the fence trash cans and dust and messy street signs litter the way. Inside the fence will rise a fabricated community, a kind of community, of neat clean and well appointed homes of a certain style.

Outside the fence where working Key West struggles to make ends meet.

Inside the fence where intruders bring color until they crow at four in the morning and wrench the visitors from their slumbers.

I found the sign slightly ironic wondering who exactly it is that is trespassing...The land used to be owned by the Catholic Diocease which sold it to pay legal bills incurred by people make claims against the church in the sex scandals of note of years past.LINK

So trailers for the working class are gone and homes for people who need a second home in Key West are here. 

The trend is unstoppable it seems. Rusty and I keep walking.

Then And Now In Black And White

I found some few pictures of old Key West like this one below and I was pondering the nature, not only of Key West in its picturesque decrepitude in another era, but also that of the effect of photography without colors. Once it was the best and most cost effective  way to record the world, but nowadays monochrome is a way to give feeling and depth to the mundane (!).

Perhaps I exaggerate but that's the effect my playing around with the black and white settings has on me:

 Black and white imparts distance in a photograph. Color gives immediacy.

This is the ferry terminal in Key West where the Coast Guard station is today. Freight cars were loaded directly onto ferries equipped with rails. Human passengers crossed the platform to walk onto the ships:

Even earlier we see the fishing fleet in Key West Bight where modern fiberglass toys float and bob. The fleet back then looks remote and austere in black and white, but I have no doubt that iof seen in color it might closely resemble the commercial fleets on Stock Island today, in their rough and tumble glory. 

The old county jail on Fleming Street in this famous picture showing the overcrowding and squalor of the facility. As remote as the clothing pitcured.

And here a cloudy moody Keys sky, the same then as today made interesting by the color washed away.

Yardie Spice Revisited

                                    

It's a bit disturbing I confess. We are creatures of habit so when we plan a ride home from Miami we stop in Homestead at Krome and Flagler and pay JP a visit. Every time we stop by and don't explore choices. It's that good. Or perhaps it's just different, Caribbean food, this time offered with of all things, polenta...

                                         

He always has a good word for his customers ( and spicy hot sauce as needed) while his better half in back churns out Jamaican and Haitian cuisine respecting his and her heritages.

                                          

The food includes empanadas which we like to eat seated at the bar in the window looking out on Krome Avenue. Made with thick pastry-like crusts, deep fried and filled with meat or vegetables. Or small Jed herring-what I knew as kippers growing up in England. The English eat them as breakfast food with eggs but we got our herring in pastry as the weirdest smoked fish empanada that worked remarkably well.

                                           

Yardie Spice is a hopping joint. Curried goat, oxtail, jerked pork, all Caribbean Classic dishes. Accompanied by rice and peas and fried plantains. And a pile of polenta as well.

                                             

Eating at home is good but you do kind of miss out on the Jamaican vibe at Yardie Spice, watching JP charm his customers while feeding their bodies. Many giggles.

                                               

Another successful punctuation to a mainland trip. Rusty, by the way was perfect, in and out of the car.

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Cheap Housing, Tall Housing

There is one intractable problem among the many issues facing Key West that brings up heated debate all by itself. You'd think it would be the inevitable rising of the seas that will drown the lives of the children of the current leadership. City Commissioner Sam Kauffman posts pictures of his adorable family on Facebook enjoying the middle class American Dream with zero interest in the melting ice cap just up the coast. But he did lead a vote on affordable housing. Apres nous, le deluge...

His plan, to serious nods of approval among the commissioners is supposed to be the start of a program to take the affordable housing crisis "seriously," which is odd as every city commission in living memory has made the same promise. This time the city will dedicate all 91 building permit allocations to affordable housing. So there. Except of course they won't if, as the financial wizards tell us in their advertising, past performance is actually any indicator of future actions. In Key West money talks and grand gestures are no match.

Affordable housing is a euphemism for feel good policy making in the least affordable city in Florida. Developers build market rate homes on the graves of affordable trailer parks and apartment complexes. Section Eight housing died under the past thirty years of free market, bootstrap lawmaking and was never replaced, and free market economics conveniently put the playing field on a kilter from which the middle class keeps sliding off. The statistics are out there but facts mean nothing when feelings and beliefs unsupported, govern public policy and trendy catch phrases replace policy discussion. Affordable housing in Key West means multiple jobs, roommates and deteriorating housing stock. It's not easy to maintain homes for rent in a city that breeds resentment at both ends of the rental agreement: renters don't give a damn, and landlords burn out trying to keep places looking nice. Insurance costs rise and take rents sky high with them. Insurance goes up because the statistics make it clear, beliefs notwithstanding, that we face climate Armageddon in these islands and it's only a matter of time.

Yet into the midst of this festering problem the city commission tries to wade from time to time. Elections spur their concentration for a few months and then when it becomes clear the problem is as intractable as ever it gets shuffled away and replaced by something equally mystifying, like how to solve the parking crisis in a tiny city devoted to massive car ownership. My preference for living 23 miles outside Key West is based in common sense, an easy commute and a desire for quiet neighbors. Even though as you can see here Key West is very quaint.

Key West suffers from an intense contradiction that is built into the 21st century city. On the one hand it sells itself as a pirate haven, home to the dropped out rebels and pirates from Up North, people you should fly down to visit in their natural habitat as through they are creatures in a zoo. However these reprobates and inebriated are finding it harder and harder to fake an existence in the other Key West, the one that is hell bent on maximizing profit and sending a message to people with vast wealth that the weather is lovely, the city is quaint and the restaurants are world class. And you just can't combine the pirate message with the well heeled appeal in one small town. It isn't working and the well heeled naturally are winning.

The other bar to affordable housing is the politics of the town. Key West is no longer on the cutting edge of society. If you are gay you can stay home pretty much these days. Or go live in a more affordable and more avant garde city than Key West which is as unaffordable to young gays as much as to young straights. Rent control, a dubious proposition at best, is nowhere in sight, and there is a vocal group in town who shout free market every time affordable housing comes up. It's inevitable as a side product of the gentrification created by a second home economy which is gaining the upper hand. Key West will never even remotely imagine a future with a fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage, anymore than it can imagine a vehicle- free Duval Street. Banning plastic bags? Creating bicycle routes and one way streets? Solar power? Even allowing white roofs was an undertaking.

So now the city commission wants to increase the height limits of new construction as a way to improve the affordable housing situation. I kid you not. That is the answer to the shortage of worker accommodation. When city commissioner Margaret Romero voiced her opinion that this was a maneuver to benefit developers she got slapped down by the manly Jimmy Weekly who labeled her a conspiracy theorist thus damning her to eternal outsider-hood on the commission. Except I fear Romero may be right. Which is odd as she is a former corporate executive and devoted to the free market thing so you'd imagine clear thinking would approve of increasing the skyscraper count on this little sliver of land.

But clear thinking and rational solutions are nowhere in sight. It's time Key West came clean. No one gives a damn about affordable housing. Hotels are building employee housing into their structures, and as unpleasant as indentured servitude sounds there is an unending supply of foreign "students" ready to dig in for a year or two and go home with a supply of dollars to give themselves a leg up in Latvia or Poland or Croatia or somewhere Slavic. They may be wetbacks but they are the modern breed, young, thin, white and blonde so it's okay.

Stock Island will be gentrified soon enough and the trailers filled with Cubans and Haitians will be gone. Commuting from as far as Big Pine will be the norm and life will go on. It will look different but we humans are adaptable and living up the Keys will be seen as the thing and my eccentrically long commute will become the norm. As for rising seas I figure if a city commissioner with small children isn't worried, child-free me has nothing to concern him. The water's warm, the dog is happy and my pension is building. Let the shenanigans continue, island style.

 

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