Yesterday we drove down to Coconut Grove for the King Mango Strut and, arriving early, had lunch at Le Buchon du Grove. The restaurant has excellent food (yesterday they were handing out complimentary mimosas) and a cozy atmosphere created in part by a trove of Gallic memorabilia. My favorite item is a huge poster of a pastis advertisement from Marseille. Also, tables are very close together.
We got talking to the couple seated next to us (though to anyone passing by we looked to be at the same table) who were down for the weekend from central Florida, where the man grows clams. In fact, he has one of the only clam farms on the Atlantic side of Florida, in the Indian River. Some of his seeds, he said, he sells to Cedar Key. Though originally from New Jersey, he came to Florida as a young man to study aquaculture, as he’d always been interested in fish.
I asked if he’d had an aquarium as a kid, which prompted him to tell the origin story. One summer’s day his father took him and some of his friends to Palisades Park. At one of the booths, he threw a ping-pong ball into a goldfish bowl, which earned him the bowl along with the fish. And the rest was history.
