Key West for first-time visitors

Best restaurants

Key West eats the way an island at the end of a highway eats: late, salty, and without much interest in what the mainland thinks a restaurant should look like. The kitchens worth your hour are scattered across a two-mile grid, from the cruise-ship end of Duval to the quiet blocks near the cemetery to the strip-mall stretch of North Roosevelt that most guides refuse to send you to. What follows is twelve rooms chosen for what they cook, not for the postcard behind them: a Mexican counter on Bertha Street, a neighborhood pizzeria on White Street, a fish house that seats forty, a Cuban breakfast room inside a Duval hotel, a barbecue pit facing the Gulf. Skip the T-shirt-shop bistros chasing the day-trippers; the locals eat in the addresses below. Hours are given in 24-hour time the way the kitchens post them, because a 21:00 close means the door is locked at 21:00, not 21:45.