In the restaurant business, a select few survive and thrive

Restaurant years are funny things.

Like animal years, they tend to pile up quickly. Two years can feel like 20. Five can feel like a lifetime.

“In dog years we’re 230-something,” said Matt Asen, who opened The Timbers Restaurant on Sanibel in 1978, “in restaurant years that’s like a million.”

According to therestaurantbrokers.com, the average restaurant’s life span is five years with up to 90 percent of independently owned restaurants closing in year one. If that’s the case, then Southwest Florida’s restaurant veterans, places such as the 60-year-old Farmers Market and 50-year-old Cracker Box, represent the .01 percent; age-old, family-run eateries that credit consistency and simple, delicious food for their longevity.

These are places with storied pasts, businesses that have survived booms and busts, construction projects that crippled their counterparts and competition from all angles.

“We work really hard every day to make sure no one walks out of this restaurant unhappy,” said Bill Barnwell, whose family bought the then-28-year-old Farmers Market Restaurant in 1980.

“Fort Myers wasn’t much back then. We had a big round table here and 9, 10 farmers sitting around it, eating their breakfast and discussing their work in the mornings. That’s what we were.”

The Farmers Market, which has had three owners since it opened in 1952, is the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Fort Myers.

The Fish House Dining Room opened in Naples that same year when Bob and Pat Combs turned their wholesale fishing operation into a makeshift eatery. Current owner Kelly Ellis and his family bought the restaurant in 1967, changing the name to Kelly’s Fish House in honor of Ellis’ mother Kelly McGill.

“This was primarily a shrimp house when it first started,” Ellis said. “The story Pat told me is they’d come down and grade the shrimp out, and she’d fix lunch for the help. Then the boat captains started stopping in to eat and others followed.”

Ten years after Kelly’s and the Farmers Market opened, the tiny Cracker Box, which was then little more than a counter and a kitchen, joined them in south Fort Myers to feed construction workers building the Sanibel Causeway.

The Iona-area food stop was the lone building in an expansive field back then. As horses roamed out back, bridge workers staying at the nearby Fountain Motel would stop in to eat breakfast or lunch on their way to Punta Rassa, the area now home to the Sanibel Harbour Resort where local cattlemen once led their cows on to ships bound for slaughterhouses in Tampa.

“She was known for her biscuits,” Cracker Box owner Jody Jones said of the restaurant’s creator, a woman she only knows as Mrs. Collier. “She almost called it the Biscuit Box. The bridge builders, they’d eat here and she’d do their laundry.”
Jones’ parents, Jim and Judy Welker, bought the place in 1975 after her father started playing piano at a place called the Golden Sands where McT’s Shrimp House now is on Sanibel.

The five Welker children grew up on the island, attending middle and high school at Cypress Lake in Fort Myers. On her way home from classes, Jones’ schoolbus would pass the restaurant. If her or her siblings had to wait tables that night, the bus driver, who Jones said ate lunch at the Cracker Box daily, would drop the kids at the restaurant’s door.

“Everyone was your mom back then,” Jones laughed. “We’d protest, ‘We have homework to do! We have to get home!,’ but we never won. It was always, ‘No your mom needs a dishwasher. Get off the bus.’”

As a teenaged Jones cleaned shrimp and scrubbed pots, Lamar Gable and a dozen Naples-area businessmen were meeting 40 miles south at St. George & the Dragon, a dark and clubby restaurant that Marylin Ginos opened in 1969.

Gable and his friends have been gathering for almost-daily lunches at St. George since its inception. They quickly earned their own table, where they still meet most afternoons for lunches that range from quick, eat-and-run affairs to lengthy, multicourse feasts fit for the TV hit “Mad Men.”

“Marylin has always spoiled us over the years. If we go to football games, she’ll pack us food,” said Gable, retired chairman of the Barron Collier Companies.

“We go there because we love her and it’s as simple as that. It’s a good network and a dreadful rumor mill. We’ve solved the world’s problems every day, and here we are turmoil all around still.”

At St. George & the Dragon’s peak in the late 1970s, Ginos had 87 employees, a number that is closer to 35 these days.

Of the 30-plus-year-old restaurants still around, the vast majority of them opened in the late 1970s and early 1980s. From 1970 to 1980 Lee County’s population doubled to more than 200,000. Collier’s population surged 126 percent to almost 86,000.

Sal and Maria LaMotta started LaMotta’s Italian Restaurant in south Fort Myers in 1979. The restaurant was then surrounded by tomato and potato fields and it was one of the only places to eat for people on the way to Fort Myers Beach.

“It was a hopping area before they started expanding Lee County,” said Carmelo LaMotta, Sal and Maria’s son who now runs the restaurant with his wife.

“We’ve seen this area grow and change. We’ve seen restaurants come and go. We’ve seen generations come and go, all from right here.”

The Iona-area food stop was the lone building in an expansive field back then. As horses roamed out back, bridge workers staying at the nearby Fountain Motel would stop in to eat breakfast or lunch on their way to Punta Rassa, the area now home to the Sanibel Harbour Resort where local cattlemen once led their cows on to ships bound for slaughterhouses in Tampa.

“She was known for her biscuits,” Cracker Box owner Jody Jones said of the restaurant’s creator, a woman she only knows as Mrs. Collier. “She almost called it the Biscuit Box. The bridge builders, they’d eat here and she’d do their laundry.”
Jones’ parents, Jim and Judy Welker, bought the place in 1975 after her father started playing piano at a place called the Golden Sands where McT’s Shrimp House now is on Sanibel.

The five Welker children grew up on the island, attending middle and high school at Cypress Lake in Fort Myers. On her way home from classes, Jones’ schoolbus would pass the restaurant. If her or her siblings had to wait tables that night, the bus driver, who Jones said ate lunch at the Cracker Box daily, would drop the kids at the restaurant’s door.

“Everyone was your mom back then,” Jones laughed. “We’d protest, ‘We have homework to do! We have to get home!,’ but we never won. It was always, ‘No your mom needs a dishwasher. Get off the bus.’”

As a teenaged Jones cleaned shrimp and scrubbed pots, Lamar Gable and a dozen Naples-area businessmen were meeting 40 miles south at St. George & the Dragon, a dark and clubby restaurant that Marylin Ginos opened in 1969.

Gable and his friends have been gathering for almost-daily lunches at St. George since its inception. They quickly earned their own table, where they still meet most afternoons for lunches that range from quick, eat-and-run affairs to lengthy, multicourse feasts fit for the TV hit “Mad Men.”

“Marylin has always spoiled us over the years. If we go to football games, she’ll pack us food,” said Gable, retired chairman of the Barron Collier Companies.
“We go there because we love her and it’s as simple as that. It’s a good network and a dreadful rumor mill. We’ve solved the world’s problems every day, and here we are turmoil all around still.”

At St. George & the Dragon’s peak in the late 1970s, Ginos had 87 employees, a number that is closer to 35 these days.

Of the 30-plus-year-old restaurants still around, the vast majority of them opened in the late 1970s and early 1980s. From 1970 to 1980 Lee County’s population doubled to more than 200,000. Collier’s population surged 126 percent to almost 86,000.

Sal and Maria LaMotta started LaMotta’s Italian Restaurant in south Fort Myers in 1979. The restaurant was then surrounded by tomato and potato fields and it was one of the only places to eat for people on the way to Fort Myers Beach.

“It was a hopping area before they started expanding Lee County,” said Carmelo LaMotta, Sal and Maria’s son who now runs the restaurant with his wife.

“We’ve seen this area grow and change. We’ve seen restaurants come and go. We’ve seen generations come and go, all from right here.”