Yebo Island Grill

Whoever who have thunk that Key West would be fertile ground for South African food? This is a town that won't support an Indian eatery, yet now finds itself offered an eatery that means Yes, we are in told in Zulu. A brief internet search yields a number of businesses in South Africa called Yebo, and other eateries in the US by the same name. And yet here we are on Angela Street by Duval.

The menu at first glance looks normal enough for the third food truck we find in our fair city. Tacos and burritos, wrapped or in a bowl, sandwiches and...take a second look, a few special items.

South African sausage or a Bunny Chow. That's a provocative name in a country where bunnies are pets and not food, at least outside Appalachia. But fear not middle class citizens, a Bunny Chow is merely South African for a bread bowl in this case filled with curried chicken, born apparently from the harsh working conditions during apartheid - the "apartness" that required blacks and browns to eat on the run while waiting on whites while they played.

Helena is a South African of Portuguese parents who emigrated from Lisbon to the land of Bunny Chow and remarkable sausages. She likes what she foes and her husband a contractor is doing what he loves in this truck, and it shows.

I ordered Boerwors which in Afrikaans literally means farmer's sausage and in South Africa is made of various meats and spices particularly coriander which imparts an earthy rich flavor. The curried chicken will be available today so who knows if I will be back for dinner as you read this!

Here we see this Boer delicacy served with a tomato sauce just as the books say it usually is. I have never been to South Africa much though I have wanted to, so I have no idea how authentic this food is, but let me say it is delicious. I love sausage and am glad I had a chance to try out this new and different version.

I was being closely observed as I investigated my South African sausage. I have to say I saved none for the intrusive rooster, nor did I take any back to Cheyenne waiting comfortably in the car. I did notice there were water bowls set out in this spic and span lot so I could have brought my pig in a fur coat.

The sausage was remarkable. It had a crumbly consistency, and a rich flavor that came through the coriander, a mix of pork and beef. The tomato sauce was a delightful addition, fresh and light. No mustard, no ketchup needed. If I were a Boer I'd be back for seconds, authentic or not!

I am not much of a follower of fads, another reason I like living in Key West, but this food truck fashion is really something remarkable. I can only speak for myself but I am taking more pleasure from this kind of casual dining than I do from the stage set that is proper dining at a table with people waiting on me. Duval and Angela is a good place to come for food now.

These three food trucks are bringing us food that is totally out of left field, unusual, casual and not expensive by modern standards. The five dollar lunch has given way in this century to the ten buck lunch. All three of these places are very worth while:

Key West Diary: Garbo's Grill

Key West Diary: White Street Station

And then let's not forget the original ethnic cuisine, Cuban sandwiches sold all round town, burritos at Badboy Burrito on Simonton Street, New England seafood just round the corner from Yebo at DJ's Clam Shack and sandwiches developed in Seattle at Paseo on Eaton Street. Lots of interesting choices and no need to make a reservation.

Key West Diary: Paseo, Seattle in Key West

Key West Diary: Bad Boy Burrito

Key West Diary: Midnight Ride To Sandy's

Key West Diary: Cuban Coffee Queen

 

Key West on Dwellable

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White Street Station

When we travel we get to see television in motel rooms and my wife the cook loves to watch the Food Channel, which is how it has dawned on me that this food truck thing is popular around the country and now it seems to be showing up everywhere including Key West! I've previously tried Garbo's Grill and it was fine. Now it was time to try out the second of three food trucks that have sprouted in the Southernmost City.

Key West has plenty of food stands after a fashion. Typical casual eateries look more like Sandy's which have a huge tourist following, as well as among locals, looking for cheap filling Cuban food.

The food truck phenomenon tries to take the hungry customer into a slightly different direction, that of relatively inexpensive food but finger food that combines ingredients that used to be considered exotic, or common foods combined in exotic style.

An egg sandwich on challah with smoked salmon, a Reuben with chicken bok choy and gruyère, a macaroni and cheese sandwich? I suppose these might be normal wherever you live but not here and prior to White Street Station I had no way of tasting a Vietnamese sandwich. I loved them when I lived near San Jose, California where there is a huge post-1975 Vietnamese emigre community. I ordered one from White Street Station where it is offered with pork and pâté and called Báhn Mì which in Vietnamese actually means "bread."

You can see the attraction of the food truck concept for the operators, with its low overhead and absence of table service. This place has moved into the spot formerly occupied by a seafood retail operation next to the chevron station on Truman and White Streets.

There's room to park and if you choose to you can use their cute tables under the umbrellas:

Walking Cheyenne I had passed by earlier and snagged a menu so I called ahead and ordered a Mac and Cheese and a Vietnamese sandwich to share with my wife on her lunch break from teaching. I am a pretty straightforward menu reader. I order what's on the menu as it's written. I deeply dislike "build your own" food and going to Subway makes me anxious as I hate having to decide what goes with what. Ironically I frequently end up in line behind fussy people who think their life's work is to test the patience of food service workers. Case in point:

Imagine my surprise when the owner of this place appeared behind me as my food was in the final stages of preparation. Michael pointed out he's been on Margaret Street for 17 years and I guess he watches the Food Channel too (!) because he figured a food truck would be the way to do something different and offer a less expensive way to eat. Nothing more than ten dollars on the menu, he pointed out and I like that because you can have a food adventure without spending a lot. And let's face it our economy is going backwards for ninety percent of us so I expect cheaper eats will be good for a lot of my neighbors.

My wife was helping out at the school classroom at the Community College on Stock Island so I took the food across town and we sat in the courtyard under the colorful awnings.

The Báhn Mì with quinoa salad:

The Mac and Cheese with spare rib meat:

For twenty bucks it was a good deal. Hot sauce would have made the Macaroni sandwich better, because by its nature the creamy cheese pasta is a mild flavor, but as you might imagine it was quite filling! The Vietnamese sandwich was much more flavorful, though the baguette had suffered a bit during the journey across town. Like Garbo's this is a food truck with a menu well worth exploring and the newer still Yebo food truck on Angela at Duval also intrigues me. A South African menu? Yebo Island Grill - Key West, FL | Yelp

It was an excellent lunch, and hanging out at the college was very pleasant with a cool north breeze blowing off the Gulf of Mexico.

By the way there is a perfectly serviceable cafeteria at the college. Want to have a different picnic where locals eat? Might be time to be adventurous yourself on your next visit to Key West.

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More Changes

I miss  Yebo. I miss bunny chow and hot South African sausages and the couple who owned it and made a dream come true. And incidentally they also helped pioneer food trucks in Key West, a city determined to resist any innovation with every collective breath.  Nowadays the food truck is a banal pizza machine.and I hope the operators know what a struggle it was to get this location in the first place.            

But in this town time passes rapidly and people and businesses come and go, usually they come with much fanfare like Rum Barrel owned and built by a guy involved in sports medicine or some such.and now its all gone. The attention span is now focused according to the sign on the door on developing an empire around the Green Parrot and the neighboring barbecue restaurant. I suppose some other wide eyed hopeful will try here and may last another eleven years as did the Rum Barrel.

This convenience store location has puzzled me so it hasn't surprised me to see periodic changes in ownership, or at least in signage. However the note on the door says that Ana's a Cuban grocery much loved by visitors at the far end of Simonton Street is opening up a second location here. More empire building and who knows maybe that's what this place needs to thrive, a well known name. 

But let's face it, convenience stores are on every street corner in this city. I watch people walking around town clutching plastic bottles of water as though this town is a desert with hardly an oasis to slake your sudden tropical thirst. Gallery 511 selling "fine "art made it to about three years I think. 

Which leads me to wonder how you pay downtown rents selling pretzels. I am told Auntie Anne's is  a popular chain and as they close at midnight I guess the drinking crowd might be persuaded to get some solid food late but it seems like a lot of pretzels need to get sold. 

There is much lamentation that Duval Street is all chain stores but chain stores seem to stand the best chance of fronting the enormous costs the complexity of hiring and thus survive to become established. That was the lament of the old Fast Buck's who closed and found his only viable tenant was a chain drug store. Is that bad? I don't know but it seems inevitable.

The Side Bar is a new place to drink attached to Aqua the gay nightclub around the corner from Angela Street. This used to be Rexall Electric a solidly Conch business in the practical world of supplying electricians. Now it's a place to drink after watching men dressed as women sing on stage. Well, at least it's not a chain.

Flora and Flipp's closed in 2009 and the place has been empty since. Apparently 811 Fleming Street is ready to come back to life as a small neighborhood store as soon as the city agrees to let them sell beer and wine. They have a lot to live up to if anyone remembers Nancy Larsen who used to run the place (with a dog bowl of water outside).

The store is modest by all accounts and has been lovingly described as "shabby chic" by tourists who amble in for a soda, candy bar or suntan lotion, Larsen said. The building itself has been around since at least 1899, according to city maps from that year. The old-fashioned counter looks decades old, and the rows of shelves behind the register likely date to when the building housed a pharmacy in the 1940s.

"We had a very good time," Larsen said of her tenure at the store. "Everyone knows a store like this is not a big moneymaker, but we've enjoyed it very much and we've lived comfortably."

Flora & Flipp is kind of like the "Cheers" of convenience stores -- Larsen seems to know everyone's name.

It's clear after spending some time in the store that her regular customers adore her. She asks with genuine care about their children, inquires how work's going and keeps dog treats under the counter for their four-legged friends.

"It's almost like I've been adopted -- like I'm a surrogate mother," she said.

From the Citizen reporting the closure.
The new place should soon be open, they say:

I was surprised to see Eaton Bikes and the adjacent house now appears to be for sale for one point seven million bucks.From the Bascom Grooms website:

Convenience stores, bike shops, art galleries and bars, they come they go, the city abides.

Key West Fish And Chips

Businesses come and go in Key West. I was walking Rusty down here early one day and saw the sign advising all he world there are fish and chips to be had here. Last time I came by it was a pizza truck...I think...

 It is a food truck parked where they are always parked here, whatever food they may be selling. I was encouraged to see the owner of the original food truck back on the spot and serving customers.

In March 2014 I came across a South African Food Truck operated here by a  South African business woman by the name of Helena. She and her husband were food truck pioneers and like all pioneers they were less than warmly received by a community that clings to its traditions and brick and mortar restaurants. 

They struggled with the bureaucracy but Yebo as it was called had to close. My favorite lunch, the strangely named Bunny Chow left the island.

 But the redoubtable entrepreneur is back offering what no one else does, as well as foodstuffs that others do sell:

 I took a few pictures while I waited for my fish to fry.

 And then I loaded it in my cart and took the two lunches to go back to my wife's office.

 Light fresh and piled high with real fries. We both agreed we'll be back.

I've wanted fish and chips for a while and I'm glad I found them.

A Winter Of Discontent

This guy was a dead ringer for the headmaster of my first boarding school, a man with a short temper and a long walking stick which hurt quite a bit when applied vigorously to the buttocks of small boys. His alter ego did no such thing and tranquilly read his newspaper. Which is surprising as things have been not so tranquil in the Southernmost City.

No one seems terribly excited by the arrival of a large new national pharmacy chain where Key West's eccentric Fast Buck Freddie's used to do business. It's across the street from another such store by Walgreens at the Strand Cinema building. Plus it's bracketed by two more CVS stores, one on Truman five blocks south and one five blocks north at 12 Duval soon to be replaced by a CVS "mega store" on Duval at Front Street. It seems reasonable enough to me to wonder why anyone would want to make a visit all the way here to shop at five and dimes that litter street corners in suburban developments across the country.

Yet this is the future and not one civic leader in Key West has any kind of alternative vision to offer. Plans were bruited a few years ago to try a pedestrian zone on a couple of blocks of this part of Duval but the merchants outside the zone feared it would be so wildly popular they would lose customers. So instead of expanding the concept our civic leaders killed the whole idea.

City planners have been fighting a rearguard action against the new food craze sweeping the nation and the Food Channel, but their drive to shut down food trucks don't seem to have done much so far. Of course its not at all clear at the moment what interesting inexpensive food they have managed to keep out of the city but the White Street Station and Yebo's renamed Cayo have both survived attempts to shut them down. Now there is a new hybrid offering on Southard Street between Duval Street and the Green Parrot Bar. Fritas Cuban Burgers claims to have brought genuine modern Cuban street food to Key West in this shady spot, but the food truck is actually the kitchen and the food service is carried out in the solid structure next door. Whatever the nature of the "truck" which apparently this isn't, the food is getting rave reviews online.

Somehow the city has managed to organize a new city hall after years of debate and aggravated name calling. Old City Hall on Green Street is the ornate palazzo where the commission meets, while the work of the city staff is carried out in distant new town at Habana Plaza, the temporary city hall which was created after Hurricane Wilma in 2005 drenched the actual city hall on Angela Street. That structure and all its mold has finally been demolished and the firefighters associated with it have moved into a fine new building which is supposed to end up surrounded by a parking lot to serve the mid section of Duval Street, a black away.

New City Hall will end up on White Street at the former Glynn Archer School which is either a 20 million dollar boondoggle or an inspired and inspiring location (I belong in the latter camp). I like Glynn Archer as I have mentioned previously because not only is the building imposing as  a municipal headquarters should  be, but also because it is centrally located, the property has tons of room for parking and easy  access from all quarters. On the other hand it will cost soemthing close to twenty million.  

The state of mind that was the Conch Republic seems to have vanished off the street, the blue building that housed the "Office of the Secretary General" is now a yellow consignment store. The web presence is still there but I don't know what that means.

Another of those fleeting landmarks in this city of evanescent traditions has also been replaced by banality. Don't get me wrong: palm reading is nto my thing but "unique gifts" and henna tattoos is a horrible way to replace the dead palm reader. He was, perhaps not unique, but he was a tad bit different. 

I enjoyed Clark Gable Slept Here a 70 minute farce mocking the pretensions and facades of Hollywood; nothing revolutionary just a few good laughs and a momentary naked penis flaunted on stage. I am glad for the theater we have on offer in Key West each winter. The best thing I see on Duval actually.

I saw this tourist sign below and I forbore from asking the harried ticket saleswoman whether the house or the tickets were discounted. I don't think she was in the mood for a  discussion about the proper placement of modifiers in a billboard. Cheyenne was bored by my amusement. Good dog.

Cold it has been around here but how glorious itis when the sun comes out and the sky is blue. 

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