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Key West Seafood Restaurants
Key West seafood restaurants are dime a dozen. The most popular question I get is.. What’s a good Key West seafood restaurant? Well, the answer is not all that easy. Let’s look at how to answer that question with the variables that come into consideration when I answer those questions. Maybe it will help you decide which will be best for you.
Local Key West Seafood
What seafood is local to Key West? What seafood actually comes out of our waters and gets served at seafood restaurants? Just because the place says “local seafood”, doesn’t necessarily mean that it is. Let me explain. When I was dining at a nice local Key West bar and grill located on the harbor. Looking over the menu my husband actually asked our server if the Chilean sea bass was locally caught. She offered a great answer and said. “Let Me check”. She came back with an answer that left me wondering. She said “Yes it was brought in just yesterday – caught locally”.
Many of the Key West reastaurants do actually serve fresh caught local seafood but also rely heavily on flown in and sometime even frozen seafood from other places. Shrimp for example. Many of the places that serve shrimp here in Key West get their shrimp from wholesalers that fly it in from India where shrimp farming is a huge export and affordable. Now, don’t get me wrong these shrimp taste great but obviously are not locally caught Key West Pinks as we call them.
The species of fish we have and get served here locally are the absolutely delicious mutton Snapper, yellowtail snapper, golden tile fish, grey tile fish, sword fish, wahoo, blackfin tunas, red, black, and scamp groupers, Mahi Mahi (dolphin fish) and mangrove snappers. Chances are, I you see these fish species on the menu, they were caught locally and are super fresh.
We do not locally harvest Oysters of any kind. Nor do we have clams or the crab they use for crab cake. If you see fresh conch on the menu – Surprise – they are not from here either. Squid for calamari and octopus is also not a locally harvested species.