So here's the conundrum: you like to eat seafood but you don't fish...Well obviously you find a restaurant and order a fried fish sandwich, or if you are feeling less inclined to the starches you order a grilled fish on a caesar salad and then you thank me for reminding you of two of the best local dishes you can find in the Lower Keys. Let's face it, there are tons of excellent eateries and dozens of styles and ethnicities of foods cooked for us but Key West is a former commercial seaport. So we want fish, it stands to reason, especially if you live here.
My wife loves Fishbusterz so I love Fishbusterz, especially as I know we are getting seafood after she makes Fishbusterz noises. Key West Old Town residents have an excellent seafood place on Eaton Street which also offers seating with cooked seafood for consumption on premises. I have heard only good things about them but as I live (and my wife cooks) outside Key West we gravitate to the shops that involve less traffic and parking issues than those downtown. Having said that I feel an urge coming on to explore an Eaton Street fish sandwich...
Fishbusterz offers the proper range of local seafood as you might expect. However their history is quite interesting as they were started as a business to support local boats and offer a market for local fishing. Checking a story I did on this place in 2008 you can see they have evolved over the past decade.
They started out selling cooked food while highlighting their intimate connection to the fishing fleet. It was at a time when the commercial fishing docks on Stock Island were under threat of development and Fishbusterz stepped in to keep the fleet from disintegrating. As it was commercial boats had retreated to the Stock Island docks from Key West Bight, pushed out by massive development.
And so you can still find locally caught seafood for sale...locally.
And if you fancy a conch feast you can buy five pounds of the stuff right here. I am not a huge fan of conch or abalone (on the west coast) as I feel it's one of those foods that gets its flavor from the breading or the lemon juice or whatever coking agent is used. However I am almost alone in that, and this stuff is massively popular.
Limes and lemons are for sale too, essential accouterments for fruits of the sea.
And let us not forget suaces and spices from the Key West Spice Company.
Clothing of one sort or...
Yes and we should all love Stock Island, shouldn't we?
Fishbusterz is on the main drag from Highway One which starts out at the traffic light where the street is called Macdonald and then the road evolves into Maloney -don't ask, it just does- and on the right just past West Marine the low blue building will appear will all its fishy goodness.
I was in town for my weekly class at the college, my wife got a proper lunch break today (the girls were looking for Santa at the airport I believe) and we went off for lunch. "The new place!" my wife announced her choice and so it was. Actually the fish market opened a while ago, even though the eatery part is a bit newer. This is no frills cuisine, with fresh fish on offer up front for take away as it were:
Yesterday they had shrimp and scallops and a few of these guys on offer, fresh off the boat:
It is not a piece of hyperbole to say "fresh off the boat" even though it's used so much by so many restaurants it is a phrase that has become a cliche. Not here; these are the docks:
And here's the boat, ready to tie up and unload your lunch:
And if you want to know which boat your lunch did come off, why, here's a list:
Which if my math is any good spells something like 106,500 pounds of Key West pink shrimp landed yesterday. Which is probably more than most people could eat at one sitting. However if one happened to order a $14 shrimp and lobster Philly sandwich it might come to the outdoor table looking something like this:
An outdoor table you say, in December? Well yes it is rough following in the wake of a particularly cold front that blew through. Though the sun was out in force and afternoon temperatures were up in the mid seventies (25C). The interior of Fishbusterz is all business, and the business is that of landing and preparing fish for market not offering frou frou seating arrangements for diners. This is the real thing, a fish house :
This is the restaurant business no frills style:
And if the dude taking the order looks more like a fisherman than a maitre d' that's more than likely because he is:
Dining with attitude:
I hate the word "authentic" because every time I see it used it's a synonym for "fake" but at Fishbusterz you are eating fish among fishermen and this is their land. The picnic tables are outside on the dock:
And there's a constant stream of burly men in white rubber boots trundling back and forth doing manly seaman like things with hoses and buckets and all things fishy:
Fishbusterz is a bit of a local miracle. A fish house owner got it together to buy this corner of Safe Harbor and provide dockage for fishing boats, an ice house and an outlet for the fish, both wholesale and retail. This is supposed to be a working waterfront that will be here forever, and even though forever is a very long time it seems likely that as long as there are commercial fishermen this small corner will be here for them in a world that has been changing too fast to support their industry. Even if the food was crap that would be reason enough to come and shop at Fishbusterz. However the food is exquisite which is an absurd adjective for a place as rough-and-ready as this, but I know what we will have next time we drop in:
They don't just chase the fish and cook it when caught, they have someone on staff who can paint with a piece of chalk. Pretty amazing really. And the views are pleasing on a hot winter afternoon:
It's been a rough week one way and another, with a colleague committing suicide and a memorial service to deal with tomorrow, but sitting on the dock watching life go on in the Keys, as basic and true as ever, it's a healthy reminder that there is a lot to live for, and taking pleasure in something as simple as a plate of fish, be it ever so cliched, is a fine thing. I wish Keith were around for me to encourage him to go and try Fishbusterz, because it is well worth it.
Really. Sit, eat and contemplate, and may your thoughts be more cheerful than mine at the moment.
Riding round South Roosevelt Boulevard on my lunch break I saw a fishing boat at anchor, all lit up on the flat waters half a mile south of Key West. It's where boats go to get out of strong north winds when cold fronts arrive and a front is upon us this morning. Seeing that boat put me in mind of Safe Harbor, a boat basin off Front Street on the south side of Stock Island. 
I have an acquaintance who used to work as a commercial fisherman, and when the National Marine sanctuary was proposed for the waters of the Florida Keys he fought the Feds strenuously. And then he had an epiphany and he joined the move to protect the waters of the Florida Keys. Today he works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and he educates boaters of all stripes about the rules and regulations in place to keep the reefs alive. But its not just environmental pressures that are killing off commercial fishermen; simple economics are doing them in. Its cheaper to pay Third World wages and fly the fish to our tables than it is to pay Americans to chase fish. And so it goes, the shrinking of the Key West commercial fleet.
Thirty years ago it must have seemed inconceivable to all but the most far seeing observer that the shrimpers crowding Key West Bight would be gone, replaced by pleasure boats. 
Yet today no one would argue that the marinas lining the boardwalk look out of place. They smell a good deal better than the commercial docks, a level of authenticity the city fathers would have a hard time selling to visitors, if the commercial fleet were still docked in the middle of the gentrification that is Key West Bight.
Safe Harbor is still thriving as the hub of commercial fishing at least for the time being. Fishbusterz is the anchor business here, an ice house that offers dockage and a place for shrimpers to sell their catch. And refrigerated trucks stand by to haul away the fish; you won't often see an 18-wheeler with Key West as it's home port:
At night this place makes my heart flip, what with the flat shiny waters, the bright lights reflected and the sound of humming generators. I love waterfronts even if I really don't belong there. Boarding a ship, any ship including ferries and cruise ships feeds the romantic in me in a way that getting on an airliner never has. Taking my middle-of-the-night lunch break by prowling the deserted docks of Safe Harbor is pure pleasure.
I am not cut out to be a commercial fisherman, I don't have the stamina or the strength or the nuts to mix it up with people of their ilk, and they wouldn't know what to do with me acting like a tourist flapping my fingers at their hardscrabble way of life. On the recreational side of Safe Harbor I have no desire to return to boat living. 
But I sure do like looking at the craft lined up, listening to the ropes creak, watching the boat cats delicately prowling the dew covered decks. Across the harbor I remember the basins lined with live aboard boats, run down wrecks many of them, but homes nonetheless. 
They are all gone to make way for development of modern marinas that average pleasure boaters will never be able to afford. The commercial side of Safe Harbor is safe for now, but there's too much money to be made here to feel complacent that things on this side of the basin will stay this way for long. The National Marine Sanctuary spelled the beginning of the end for commercial fishing, for good or ill, as large areas of reef were placed out of bounds to sustain tourism to the detriment of commercial boats. The transformation of Stock Island will eventually push out the inconvenient commercial boats and I don't doubt Fishbusterz will get an offer he can't refuse. And then I will be able to say I remember the good old days, and that I appreciated the tenuous thread that held all this together, the shadows of boats barely visible in the encroaching darkness... 
And its that air of imminent destruction that perhaps gives Safe Harbor a romantic overlay, because whether I remember it or not in 20 years, it will still all be gone most likely and I will just be a bore for reminding people of what used to be.
We got a call from Mrs Sailorman saying they had dropped anchor in Key West on their way north to a consulting job and did we want to do lunch? This is a couple we had a passing aquaintance with when we lived briefly in Ft Myers on our boat. They call when they are in Key West and we have had a couple of lunches with them in the past and this year it seems the tradition was to be maintained. My wife and I don't have much of a world view in common with them but one listens and tries to learn. So there we were at the Shrimp Shack of a sunny winter afternoon ordering grouper sandwiches for us and shrimp and fries for them.
I find these kinds of encounters instructive because I get to hear how the world works form a different point of view, even though the point of view itself frequently leaves my head spinning. Sailorman is one of those people I like to describe as having a bluff exterior masking a bluff interior. He pontificates on subjects with a no holds barred attitude that is refreshing and somewhat confusing as he expects me to share those opinions. The "ladies" were inside placing the orders and we were outside holding down a table in a crowded seating area, and lacking sports for common ground economic bailouts were the opening conversational gambit. There at least we could share some scepticism, as clearly our first modest $700 million "bailout" has done bugger all good for anybody, except the jerks pocketing the bonuses. Though I would cautiously welcome a recovery plan that might hope to do some good, Sailorman thinks government stinks in every way at every level. He is one of those people who believes that government can do nothing right. And the autoworkers...well, of course they want too much money to raise their families. A whole $27 an hour i was quick to point out the famously incorrect $80 figure includes costs that are paid out to former employees in pensions and health care benefits ( damn those benefits!).
And the fact that I work for the government, in my albeit modest capacity gets overlooked in the smirking runt of the conversation that relegates government to a level of incompetence worthy only of disgust. This from a man living off a buy out from AT&T, his steady employer for decades, that gave him a large sum of money to quit which which he bought a home and took to a life of pottering about and sailing. Not exactly government but god knows government-like when one remembers American Telephone and Telegraph's monopoly that enabled him to work and retire on such generous terms. The irony of his fulminations against car workers seeking similar compensation packages was completely lost on him.
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