History
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Joseph Weiss, the "Joe" of Joe's Stone Crab came to Miami in 1913, when his doctor told him that the only help for his asthma would be a change of climate. Joe borrowed fifty dollars on his life insurance policy, left his wife and son in New York, and came to Florida. When he arrived Miami, he took the ferry boat that went to Miami Beach. When he reached Miami Beach, he could finally breathe. Joe stayed and started running a lunch stand at Smith's Bathing Casino. He soon sent for his wife his son . In 1918, Joe and his wife, Jennie , bought a bungalow near the casino, on Biscayne Street. They moved into the back, set up seven or eight tables on the front porch, cooked in the kitchen, and called it Joe's Restaurant. Jennie waited on tables, Joe cooked, and everything started to grow from there. When it got crowded, they'd spill over into the dinning room. They served snapper, pompano, mackerel, and some meat dishes. "We used to open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in those days," Jesse, Joe’s son remembered. “ We were the only restaurant on the beach. For about eight years there was no competition. My father made a hell of a fish sandwich."
By the time, Joe's was off and running, they catered to the “in” crowd, the society crowd. However, stone crabs were yet to come. In fact, no one knew that this local crustacean was even edible. In 1921, James Allison, Fisher's partner in the Speedway, built an aquarium at the foot of the bay and Fifth Street. Allison invited a Harvard ichthyologist down to do research. One day the researcher said to Joe, "have you ever used these stone crabs, those crabs from the water?" Joe’s was serving all kinds of fish, but not stone crabs. "Nobody will eat them," Joe said. When the ichthyologist came down for lunch, he brought a burlap sack, full of live stone crabs. Joe threw the stone crabs in boiling water and that was the beginning of the success of the stone crab at Joe’s. The bay was full of them! Joe’s started serving them cracked with hash brown potatoes, cole slaw, and mayonnaise and they were an instant success. Joe’s charged seventy-five cents for four or five crabs, twenty-five cents for potatoes and twenty-five cents an order for cole slaw. And this is the way they have been serving them since 1921.
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