food in fl picture post
This is part one of the Florida food picture post. I have decided to cut it at High Springs, which was the point in the state where i turned right and started heading south down the main "wang", leaving the panhandle and "ball sac" behind. That's where the interminable suburbs began, and where i started finding it much harder to get a decent meal.
It's not just me who noticed the difference. When i was in Pensacola expressing my excitement about having finally made it to Florida, i was informed "this isn't really Florida, this is still The South". It seems that for people in the panhandle, at least, they perhaps identify more with being Southern than Floridian. Having moved on to the very bland, white, carpetbagging suburbs of central and southwest Florida, i kinda get it. Up in the northern part of the state, i got the sense the food was a mash-up of beach bum, swampbilly and military tastes. That turns out to be pretty good.
The first meal i had in Florida was a vege burger at the Flora-Bama, right on the border with Alabama. It immediately welcomed me into a more health- and environment-conscious part of the US by having a vegan option on the standard menu. The burger was just a plain, simple burger, but the fact that i even had the option was thrilling to me after months of traveling through parts of the country where vegans are ridiculed, if they're even considered at all. The fries were seasoned. The veges on the burger (not pictured in that opening shot) were fresh. Good eating.
My second non-Ursack meal in Florida was from a taco stand near the Pensacola airport. The place looked like it was going to be excellent, but for some reason the tacos didn't give me that warm, fuzzy feeling that they usually do. I think they were a bit too salty for me, like the salt had been emphasized more than the other spices and heat. The tamale was fine.
Pensacola has a bagel shop that sells all manner of very expensive toasted sandwiches to hipsters who clearly have never been lectured by a New York or Montréal (or worse - both) bubbe about what makes a good bagel. To paraphrase my ex bubbe-in-law, if you toast the bagel you failed. The whole point is that it is supposed to be pleasantly crispy on the outside and soft and fluffy (or possibly chewy depending on which side of the New York/Montréal debate you fall) on the inside. Fortunately, this bagel shop also sold individual bagels with a spread for a couple bucks each. They didn't have vegan cream cheese, but they had hummus and peanut butter, so i had one of each. You guys. These bagels were so good. I originally planned to eat the hummus for a mid-morning snack and save the peanut butter for later, but they were so good i scoffed them both, sitting on a park bench in Pensacola. The weather was pretty cold, even in the sun, so it didn't take much to imagine i was in NYC.
I'm not sure why i am including the next picture, but i uploaded it so here you are. It's the salsa and chips and margarita that often appear at "authentic" (read: not) Mexican restaurants in the US. This was in the wealthy, white suburb of Gulf Breeze, just between Pensacola and Pensacola Beach. You can tell by the fancy table surface that this is no back alley taquería.
And out came the tacos, which actually surprised me. They were vege tacos, made with grilled potatoes, bell pepper and onions, with some refried beans and guacamole to add weight. The house-made habanero salsa picante was spicy and richly flavored. This was an excellent plate of tacos! It was made all the sweeter by knowing a pig didn't have to die for them.
In the next military town i passed through - Fort Walton Beach - i found a surprise Hawaiian joint. They just sold quick snack food. I'm not sure how "authentic" it is because i've never had Hawaiian food before, but it did give me an island feeling. I got kalua pig, which is a sort of roast pork, and a spam musubi, which is that sushi-looking thing. Also a lychee juice, which was yummy. The pork was shredded, in the way that pulled pork is, but it was much more subtly flavored than most American pulled porks. It had a sort of salty, briny flavor to it, almost like seafood. And the sauce was a very mild teriyaki-type thing. Much like with Japanese food, it's almost like you had to go hunting to try find the flavor, but when you found it, you go "ah ha!" and leave with a smile. I generally prefer my dishes to be far more in your face and spicy, but even when there isn't a massive flavor bomb on the plate, if subtle is done right then it satisfies me. This was subtle done right.
Oh, joy, another vegan meal to share. This was a breakfast sandwich from a coffee shop in Grayton Beach, hippie corner of the Florida Gulf Coast. I love that they went totally to 11 on the hippie scale, giving wholegrain muffins and fresh fruit salad with a bunch of different fruits in it. This was simple, healthy and delicious, the kind of food i would've eaten when visiting my mom's house.
Going back into the less healthy end of things... A panadería in Panama City. I got two of these Mexican pastries. The one on the left was the usual knobby, flaky, heavy bread that you often find at Mexican bakeries. The one on the right was an interesting thing - it was a sponge cake in the middle, with a flaky pastry wrapped around it. Good eating.
Continuing on the Mexican theme, in the town of Mexico Beach there was a taco truck. It was one of the few "stores" in town, which was destroyed by a hurricane a couple years ago and is still rebuilding. Almost all of the laborers were Hispanic. Probably most of the people buying the holiday homes are non-Hispanic and white. But for now, the taco truck is there for the laborers. There was an English menu on the front which just had "beef" and "chicken" listed, but i overheard a guy in front of me order carnitas in Spanish, so they clearly had a secret menu too. I ordered a torta carnitas. Tortas are a sort of sandwich made with a warm, fluffy hunk of bread that is a bit more filling than your typical tortilla. I was hungry, and this hit the spot. Filled with carnitas, lettuce, black beans and queso fresca (cheese).
Cycling along the forgotten coast, i found a Venezuelan café in Apalachicola. This place had such an awesome menu, i wish i could've stayed for lunch too. There were all kinds of arepas and other interesting dishes that i've never had before. But this was my mid-morning snack stop, so i settled for two pastries and a coffee. (The coffee was absolutely excellent.) The pastry on the right was a guava pastry that tasted pretty much exactly what it looked like. Very sweet, wouldn't bother with it again. But the one on the left was a really interesting thing. It was something like a cinnamon roll, but inside was a salty feta-like cheese and i think some nuts. The flavor was an interesting mix of sweet and salty, and it was fantastic.
Since i already posted my beachfront fruity drink photo on the pretty panhandle picture post, here's a fruity drink from the bar near the marina in Carrabelle. I'll never get tired of drinking silly fruity drinks at bars with a wooden deck and warm seaside weather.
Also at the bar by the marina, they had a fish sandwich. This was a fish called grouper, which i don't think i've consciously eaten before. The sandwich was excellent. It was on Texas toast (which is just very thick bread), lettuce tomato onion, no hot sauce or anything. But the bread was fresh, the fish was perfectly cooked, there was just enough butter to make the toast oily and moist and not tear-up-the-top-of-your-mouth crispy... It was excellent. One weird thing here, it was served with "chips", by which i assumed i was going to get French fries, but it was literally just a bag of chips. This seems to be a southern thing. There are loads of places that offer "chips" as a side, and then they don't even give you home-fried potato chips, they just give you a bag of chips you could've gotten from any gas station in the world. Sometimes they even give you Cheetos or something that doesn't seem to match at all. It's very odd.
Alas, here we have one of my most disappointing meals in this set. I cycled to a town called St Marks, which is a weekend trip destination for people from Tallahassee, and a stop-off point on one of the cross-state/cross-country dedicated cycle trails. The town fucking sucked. And so did the food. It was in a swamp. I got avocado toast, which is usually a safe bet for a solid vegan feed. But one of the toasts had bacon on it, and the other one had tomato basil mozzarella and fucking balsamic on it, like a goddamn Italian salad. Get this Italian garbage off my fucking avocado. What the fuck. The only acceptable toppings for avocado toast are lime, cilantro and possibly tomato if you want to get crazy. I'd even accept Vegemite or Marmite, but you better say that up-front. The cherry on the top was the "fruit cup" i ordered on the side that consisted of brown apples and dry mandarin slices. Fucking worst.
Thank God the swamp turned itself around, because when i was cycling out of St Marks i came to a T-junction in the middle of the swamp, and some guy was on the side of the road with a smoker making BBQ. This was the most country-ass shit i ever ate, and it was amazing. I got a pulled pork sandwich for five bucks. The picture does not do it justice. This pork was so good. It wasn't the flossy, stringy kind of canned tuna consistency that pulled pork usually is in the US. It had pink bits and white bits, it had crispy bits and soft bits, it had fatty bits and chunky bits. There were so many textures and flavors. The seasoning was very subtle, like the kalua pig i had in Fort Walton Beach, and i just added a little sweet habanero and brown sauce for kick. No napkins, no worries. I scooped up the rest in my fingers like you damn well should when you're eating BBQ in a folding chair on the side of the road in the swamp. Excellent.
The next day i found a great coffee shop in a town called Mayo. At least, i think that's where i took this photo. They had a fairly standard set of toasted sandwiches, but the hook was they did their own bread and tried to source all the ingredients locally. I got a so-called "Hawaiian" sandwich, which probably isn't Hawaiian, but is more likely a spin-off of the Cuban sandwich, which is a Florida staple that i still haven't tried yet. It was cream cheese, ham, pineapple, pickle and mustard on medianoche bread, which is a type of Cuban bread... Except they were out of medianoche so i got fresh baked white instead. It sounds like a really bizarre mix of ingredients, but somehow it worked. And this coffee. Holy shit. It was probably the best coffee i've had on the whole trip. Local roast. I ended up ordering a second one, Cuban-style, espresso with a spoon of brown sugar in it. Awesome.
Over in Branford, just down the road, i went to a local restaurant to get a second lunch or mini snack to keep me going. I got the local version of fish'n'chips. I could choose the potatoes how i wanted so i asked for their grilled garlic home fries. The fish was cut into strips just thin enough to give a good fish/breading mix, and those fries were fantastic. This was the small size, and it was generous. Very good.
I got the small fish so that i had room for dessert. I got a slice of cake called pumpkin earthquake cake. I think it's called an earthquake because they smash everything and the kitchen sink into it. It was a sort of pumpkin cake, but there was chocolate and pecan and coconut and other random stuff in there. Very sweet, but interesting.
When i got to High Springs i found a trendy diner that served a bunch of vegan stuff on the standard menu. It's pretty basic, but i was happy to be able to order a Beyond burger and actual in-house potato chips. The burger came with grilled onions, bell peppers and vegan cheese. It was pretty good. Not the best burger i ever ate, but it felt good to eat vegan again.
I saw another thing on the menu that i had never had before, so i thought i'd give it a shot. This next photo is cauli hot wings, or shrimp poppers, or some kind of cauliflower version of an American bar favorite that i never eat so i can't really compare. It fucking sucked. I'll tell you what it tasted like. It tasted like American Chinese food. You know how literally every dish in American Chinese food is a piece of meat dipped in thick batter and deep-fried with sugary syrup poured on top of it? Yeah, this was that. Except worse, because when you deep fry a cauliflower, it gets mushy. So crispy outside, mushy inside, disgustingly sweet sauce on top, and not even a hope of a spice, despite it being advertized as spicy.
I should've taken heed that High Springs was the turning point where the food options were about to get very fucking basic. But i'll save that for the next post.
In all, that northern part of Florida had some of the most diverse food i've eaten on this journey. The mix of southern cuisine with the migrant and military faves made for a great blend. I feel like a lot of places i stopped at still appreciated doing something local and unique, even when the result wasn't great (like that fucking avocado toast). Although the taco situation has been less exciting than in Texas, the diversity really makes up for it. I think Florida has dethroned Texas as my favorite food on this journey, for now. Will it dethrone California as the culinary capital of the US? Probably not, but i still have the Everglades, Miami and the Keys to come, so who knows?
It's not just me who noticed the difference. When i was in Pensacola expressing my excitement about having finally made it to Florida, i was informed "this isn't really Florida, this is still The South". It seems that for people in the panhandle, at least, they perhaps identify more with being Southern than Floridian. Having moved on to the very bland, white, carpetbagging suburbs of central and southwest Florida, i kinda get it. Up in the northern part of the state, i got the sense the food was a mash-up of beach bum, swampbilly and military tastes. That turns out to be pretty good.
The first meal i had in Florida was a vege burger at the Flora-Bama, right on the border with Alabama. It immediately welcomed me into a more health- and environment-conscious part of the US by having a vegan option on the standard menu. The burger was just a plain, simple burger, but the fact that i even had the option was thrilling to me after months of traveling through parts of the country where vegans are ridiculed, if they're even considered at all. The fries were seasoned. The veges on the burger (not pictured in that opening shot) were fresh. Good eating.
My second non-Ursack meal in Florida was from a taco stand near the Pensacola airport. The place looked like it was going to be excellent, but for some reason the tacos didn't give me that warm, fuzzy feeling that they usually do. I think they were a bit too salty for me, like the salt had been emphasized more than the other spices and heat. The tamale was fine.
Pensacola has a bagel shop that sells all manner of very expensive toasted sandwiches to hipsters who clearly have never been lectured by a New York or Montréal (or worse - both) bubbe about what makes a good bagel. To paraphrase my ex bubbe-in-law, if you toast the bagel you failed. The whole point is that it is supposed to be pleasantly crispy on the outside and soft and fluffy (or possibly chewy depending on which side of the New York/Montréal debate you fall) on the inside. Fortunately, this bagel shop also sold individual bagels with a spread for a couple bucks each. They didn't have vegan cream cheese, but they had hummus and peanut butter, so i had one of each. You guys. These bagels were so good. I originally planned to eat the hummus for a mid-morning snack and save the peanut butter for later, but they were so good i scoffed them both, sitting on a park bench in Pensacola. The weather was pretty cold, even in the sun, so it didn't take much to imagine i was in NYC.
I'm not sure why i am including the next picture, but i uploaded it so here you are. It's the salsa and chips and margarita that often appear at "authentic" (read: not) Mexican restaurants in the US. This was in the wealthy, white suburb of Gulf Breeze, just between Pensacola and Pensacola Beach. You can tell by the fancy table surface that this is no back alley taquería.
And out came the tacos, which actually surprised me. They were vege tacos, made with grilled potatoes, bell pepper and onions, with some refried beans and guacamole to add weight. The house-made habanero salsa picante was spicy and richly flavored. This was an excellent plate of tacos! It was made all the sweeter by knowing a pig didn't have to die for them.
In the next military town i passed through - Fort Walton Beach - i found a surprise Hawaiian joint. They just sold quick snack food. I'm not sure how "authentic" it is because i've never had Hawaiian food before, but it did give me an island feeling. I got kalua pig, which is a sort of roast pork, and a spam musubi, which is that sushi-looking thing. Also a lychee juice, which was yummy. The pork was shredded, in the way that pulled pork is, but it was much more subtly flavored than most American pulled porks. It had a sort of salty, briny flavor to it, almost like seafood. And the sauce was a very mild teriyaki-type thing. Much like with Japanese food, it's almost like you had to go hunting to try find the flavor, but when you found it, you go "ah ha!" and leave with a smile. I generally prefer my dishes to be far more in your face and spicy, but even when there isn't a massive flavor bomb on the plate, if subtle is done right then it satisfies me. This was subtle done right.
Oh, joy, another vegan meal to share. This was a breakfast sandwich from a coffee shop in Grayton Beach, hippie corner of the Florida Gulf Coast. I love that they went totally to 11 on the hippie scale, giving wholegrain muffins and fresh fruit salad with a bunch of different fruits in it. This was simple, healthy and delicious, the kind of food i would've eaten when visiting my mom's house.
Going back into the less healthy end of things... A panadería in Panama City. I got two of these Mexican pastries. The one on the left was the usual knobby, flaky, heavy bread that you often find at Mexican bakeries. The one on the right was an interesting thing - it was a sponge cake in the middle, with a flaky pastry wrapped around it. Good eating.
Continuing on the Mexican theme, in the town of Mexico Beach there was a taco truck. It was one of the few "stores" in town, which was destroyed by a hurricane a couple years ago and is still rebuilding. Almost all of the laborers were Hispanic. Probably most of the people buying the holiday homes are non-Hispanic and white. But for now, the taco truck is there for the laborers. There was an English menu on the front which just had "beef" and "chicken" listed, but i overheard a guy in front of me order carnitas in Spanish, so they clearly had a secret menu too. I ordered a torta carnitas. Tortas are a sort of sandwich made with a warm, fluffy hunk of bread that is a bit more filling than your typical tortilla. I was hungry, and this hit the spot. Filled with carnitas, lettuce, black beans and queso fresca (cheese).
Cycling along the forgotten coast, i found a Venezuelan café in Apalachicola. This place had such an awesome menu, i wish i could've stayed for lunch too. There were all kinds of arepas and other interesting dishes that i've never had before. But this was my mid-morning snack stop, so i settled for two pastries and a coffee. (The coffee was absolutely excellent.) The pastry on the right was a guava pastry that tasted pretty much exactly what it looked like. Very sweet, wouldn't bother with it again. But the one on the left was a really interesting thing. It was something like a cinnamon roll, but inside was a salty feta-like cheese and i think some nuts. The flavor was an interesting mix of sweet and salty, and it was fantastic.
Since i already posted my beachfront fruity drink photo on the pretty panhandle picture post, here's a fruity drink from the bar near the marina in Carrabelle. I'll never get tired of drinking silly fruity drinks at bars with a wooden deck and warm seaside weather.
Also at the bar by the marina, they had a fish sandwich. This was a fish called grouper, which i don't think i've consciously eaten before. The sandwich was excellent. It was on Texas toast (which is just very thick bread), lettuce tomato onion, no hot sauce or anything. But the bread was fresh, the fish was perfectly cooked, there was just enough butter to make the toast oily and moist and not tear-up-the-top-of-your-mouth crispy... It was excellent. One weird thing here, it was served with "chips", by which i assumed i was going to get French fries, but it was literally just a bag of chips. This seems to be a southern thing. There are loads of places that offer "chips" as a side, and then they don't even give you home-fried potato chips, they just give you a bag of chips you could've gotten from any gas station in the world. Sometimes they even give you Cheetos or something that doesn't seem to match at all. It's very odd.
Alas, here we have one of my most disappointing meals in this set. I cycled to a town called St Marks, which is a weekend trip destination for people from Tallahassee, and a stop-off point on one of the cross-state/cross-country dedicated cycle trails. The town fucking sucked. And so did the food. It was in a swamp. I got avocado toast, which is usually a safe bet for a solid vegan feed. But one of the toasts had bacon on it, and the other one had tomato basil mozzarella and fucking balsamic on it, like a goddamn Italian salad. Get this Italian garbage off my fucking avocado. What the fuck. The only acceptable toppings for avocado toast are lime, cilantro and possibly tomato if you want to get crazy. I'd even accept Vegemite or Marmite, but you better say that up-front. The cherry on the top was the "fruit cup" i ordered on the side that consisted of brown apples and dry mandarin slices. Fucking worst.
Thank God the swamp turned itself around, because when i was cycling out of St Marks i came to a T-junction in the middle of the swamp, and some guy was on the side of the road with a smoker making BBQ. This was the most country-ass shit i ever ate, and it was amazing. I got a pulled pork sandwich for five bucks. The picture does not do it justice. This pork was so good. It wasn't the flossy, stringy kind of canned tuna consistency that pulled pork usually is in the US. It had pink bits and white bits, it had crispy bits and soft bits, it had fatty bits and chunky bits. There were so many textures and flavors. The seasoning was very subtle, like the kalua pig i had in Fort Walton Beach, and i just added a little sweet habanero and brown sauce for kick. No napkins, no worries. I scooped up the rest in my fingers like you damn well should when you're eating BBQ in a folding chair on the side of the road in the swamp. Excellent.
The next day i found a great coffee shop in a town called Mayo. At least, i think that's where i took this photo. They had a fairly standard set of toasted sandwiches, but the hook was they did their own bread and tried to source all the ingredients locally. I got a so-called "Hawaiian" sandwich, which probably isn't Hawaiian, but is more likely a spin-off of the Cuban sandwich, which is a Florida staple that i still haven't tried yet. It was cream cheese, ham, pineapple, pickle and mustard on medianoche bread, which is a type of Cuban bread... Except they were out of medianoche so i got fresh baked white instead. It sounds like a really bizarre mix of ingredients, but somehow it worked. And this coffee. Holy shit. It was probably the best coffee i've had on the whole trip. Local roast. I ended up ordering a second one, Cuban-style, espresso with a spoon of brown sugar in it. Awesome.
Over in Branford, just down the road, i went to a local restaurant to get a second lunch or mini snack to keep me going. I got the local version of fish'n'chips. I could choose the potatoes how i wanted so i asked for their grilled garlic home fries. The fish was cut into strips just thin enough to give a good fish/breading mix, and those fries were fantastic. This was the small size, and it was generous. Very good.
I got the small fish so that i had room for dessert. I got a slice of cake called pumpkin earthquake cake. I think it's called an earthquake because they smash everything and the kitchen sink into it. It was a sort of pumpkin cake, but there was chocolate and pecan and coconut and other random stuff in there. Very sweet, but interesting.
When i got to High Springs i found a trendy diner that served a bunch of vegan stuff on the standard menu. It's pretty basic, but i was happy to be able to order a Beyond burger and actual in-house potato chips. The burger came with grilled onions, bell peppers and vegan cheese. It was pretty good. Not the best burger i ever ate, but it felt good to eat vegan again.
I saw another thing on the menu that i had never had before, so i thought i'd give it a shot. This next photo is cauli hot wings, or shrimp poppers, or some kind of cauliflower version of an American bar favorite that i never eat so i can't really compare. It fucking sucked. I'll tell you what it tasted like. It tasted like American Chinese food. You know how literally every dish in American Chinese food is a piece of meat dipped in thick batter and deep-fried with sugary syrup poured on top of it? Yeah, this was that. Except worse, because when you deep fry a cauliflower, it gets mushy. So crispy outside, mushy inside, disgustingly sweet sauce on top, and not even a hope of a spice, despite it being advertized as spicy.
I should've taken heed that High Springs was the turning point where the food options were about to get very fucking basic. But i'll save that for the next post.
In all, that northern part of Florida had some of the most diverse food i've eaten on this journey. The mix of southern cuisine with the migrant and military faves made for a great blend. I feel like a lot of places i stopped at still appreciated doing something local and unique, even when the result wasn't great (like that fucking avocado toast). Although the taco situation has been less exciting than in Texas, the diversity really makes up for it. I think Florida has dethroned Texas as my favorite food on this journey, for now. Will it dethrone California as the culinary capital of the US? Probably not, but i still have the Everglades, Miami and the Keys to come, so who knows?