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Keys to the Sanctuary
A dining scene with history is a lot like a well-worn cast iron skillet. It absorbs the collected wisdom and memories of its successes and imparts the flavors of those past feasts into each subsequent dish.
We all need a hole-in-the-wall, something to bridge the gap between the pocketbook democracy of Main Street and the oceanfront drags—where everyone with enough money to pay their tab is equal. No one will be denied entry to a true hole-in-the-wall, but you have to be part of the club that knows about it in the first place.
That is the price of entry into the sanctuary.
The night wind has been blowing cold Canadian air across the bay since before the sun went down, and when full darkness descended, those still standing outside could feel a smattering of icy drops. I’m navigating through the dark warren of streets behind the Siesta Key Marina, looking for a dry cubbyhole to warm my bones and give me shelter from the drafty shores of the key.
Clayton’s Siesta Grille emerges from the darkness like an ember billowing to life in a cold pile of ashes. Flames dance from the top of iron torches on the patio, guttering in the wind before reigniting and lunging frantically at the darkness like a dog on a chain. The scene inside feels very chummy, almost insular. Men in Beall’s sportswear look up from their drinks at the wine bar just long enough to register my face as unfamiliar before returning to their laughter and conversation.
“My goal from day one has been to open a family restaurant with a cozy little bar and be known as a great eatery that people come back to for the next 20 years,” says owner and restaurant namesake Clayton Thompson. To hear him tell it, Clayton’s Siesta Grille is as much an exercise in community building as bruschetta construction. The restaurant is a gathering place for entrepreneurs and retirees, philanthropists and Kiwanis members. Speaking with Thompson a few weeks later, it is a little difficult to keep him on the topic of food. But mention his regulars, coworkers or
family and the man can’t stop talking.
“If you give people good food that’s affordable, and
love them, they’ll support you,” he says. “People hug you here.” In all my Sarasotan peregrinations, I have never been to a restaurant that has daily regulars like Clayton’s does.
The food ably captures that friendly vibe. A Stuffed Portobello Muffaleta puts the fatty warmth of salami and Mortadella with briny olives and roasted peppers. It comes looking more like a salad than a stuffed mushroom, but once I begin to taste, such distinctions seem increasingly arbitrary. Even in warmer weather, this would be worth a trip.
A bowl of chowder and a few tastes of my wife’s lobster bisque place my palate squarely seaside. The seafood chowder is dense enough to eat with a fork, at that perfect point of saturation where the cream of dissolving potatoes blends indistinguishably with the cream base. The lobster bisque reaches an apex of smoky richness, Clayton later tells me, by burning the shells in the pot during prep. I order saffron-rich, butter and wine-soaked Mussels Saganaki to complete the meal and sink into a satisfied reverie.
I look around. Wrapping me even further in the experience, designer and artist Ron Genta has saturated the restaurant’s aesthetic sensibility in the metaphorical flannel and corduroy of American pop iconography. Op-art sigils with Felix the Cat, Captain America’s shield and the smiling, Brylcreemed cartoon men of ‘50s ad copy exhort you to“finish your wine.”
As I finish mine, and watch the wind whipping across the marina from behind sliding glass, a thought occurs to me.
Back in halcyon 1997, I remember a film by the name of I Know What You Did Last Summer that followed a group of teens through a sleepy, drizzly fishing village while a hook-wielding maniac dispensed with them one by one.
What stayed with me from that movie wasn’t the suspense, and it certainly wasn’t the characters. It was images of light-soaked diners, high school auditoriums and warm homes, seen through the chill and fog of a coastal setting, always from the outside. Tonight at Clayton’s, I feel like I’m on the inside of those homes and diners, where all the light and love live when it gets too cold for them to play outdoors. I’m officially hooked. Where else, I wonder, can I become an insider?
Two weeks later, I’m serving slices of Francesco’s Hawaiian pizza, while in the next room the DVD for season 5 of The Wire admonishes anyone within earshot to “keep the devil down in the hole”—over and over and over. This is what my mother told me life would be like. Names, foods, cultural memes—they lurk just outside your conscious apprehension until one fine month when they decide to keep calling day after day.
All the shops and restaurants on the corner of Beneva and Webber, where Francesco’s has set up shop, are hole-in-the-walls. Hidden behind a bank on one corner, a gas station on the other, Goodwill across the street and buffered from the street by rows of blacktop parking spots, it isn’t the kind of restaurant you’re likely just to stumble over. That makes places such as Francesco’s feel like a personal secret, and that’s why I’m dining there tonight. Once inside, it’s like coming home to the old neighborhood.
So much of Francesco’s is embodied in its pizzas. Specialty pies such as a Chicken Parm Pizza, or the Hot Mama with banana pepper, capicolla, sausage and capers, indicate the kind of care and attention you’d get from family, rather than the kind you get from a CIA-trained saucier. It’s all about the little extras: a little extra time, a few extra ingredients, a little extra skill and a little extra love. That style is tailor-suited to the family Italian dining Francesco’s offers: Veal Francese, chubby Manicottis, carefully constructed Eggplant Rollatini. Putting up what’s left of the pie, I feel like one of la famiglia. Who wouldn’t want that? But since visiting Clayton’s, I’ve developed a tolerance for hole-in-the-wall exclusivity. Francesco’s is my own neighborhood joint, after all. If I really want to cap things off right, I’ll have to go somewhere I don’t quite fit in.
La Sabrosita is, on its face, similar to the other taqueria/tiendas around town. The differences are all subtlety: fresh, moist-not-soggy corn tortillas, carefully seasoned meat browned to perfect tenderness, refried beans as rich as pudding on a perfectly crisp tostada. Unfortunately, no one could tell me just how they put that perfect cornstarch breading on the chiles rellenos or who supplies the emerald cilantro. Unless you speak Spanish, three out of four times you will
order by pointing.
La Sabrosita opened three years ago, to serve Sarasota’s burgeoning Mexican, Latin and South American populations and to provide 17th Street Sarasotans with real, authentic Mexican food. That is, soft shell tacos flecked with cilantro and onions and doused in salsa verde that still tastes of parsley and garlic. 9 made from chiles the size of a sock. Enchiladas whose cheese doesn’t legally need to parse out the difference between
“melted” and “melty.” I wanted in on that club.
“The idea was just to sell fresh, authentic Mexican tacos,” La Sabrosita owner Jorge Arevalo tells me. It takes a good two weeks to track him down, at La Canasta market, which is so off the beaten track it almost doesn’t qualify as a hole-in-the-wall itself. He tells me that his customers come to La Sabrosita (and La Canasta) looking for the flavors that they knew in their homelands. In this way, I think it’s safe to say that La Sabrosita belongs to those immigrants the same way Francesco’s belongs to Sarasota Springs and Clayton’s to its loyalists. Not in any proprietary, much less exclusionary, sense. It is spiritually theirs—theirs because it is a place made for them to feel at home.
That sense of inclusion cuts a broader path, as I realized while waiting for a chile relleno to-go. I’m seated, watching indoor soccer on a television with a woman busy enjoying a plate of what looks like spaghetti and meat sauce. I later discover it is Talarin Saltado, a beef and spaghetti fusion popular in Peru. She looks up from her meal, at me watching the television.
“That’s Spain,” she says, gesturing to the television. “Espagne.” Without warning, she gets up, walks behind the counter and makes a small plate of the pasta, which she gives to me. It tastes like spaghetti. I tell her thanks while grinning widely and wildly gesticulating my appreciation (it’s good spaghetti!). But more than that, I don’t just feel like I’ve been fed. In the midst of strangeness, foreign sports and languages, spicy candy and giant caramel sodas, I have been invited in. n
—By Brian Hughes, Photography by Mark Sickles
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