Joes Stone Crab in Miami Filmed May 13 2021

Joes Stone Crab in Miami Filmed May 13 2021
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THE BEGINNING
In 1913, Joe Weiss opened up a small lunch counter on Miami Beach. This was before Miami Beach was even a city. Folks stopped in to chat and for a top-notch fish sandwich and fries. This, of course, was only the beginning, and what happened next is a story worth telling.
JOE OF JOE'S
Joseph Weiss-the "Joe" of Joe's Stone Crab-came to Miami in 1913, when his doctors told him that the only help for his asthma would be a change of climate. Joe and his wife, Jennie, both Hungarian-born, were living in New York, where their son Jesse was born in 1907. Joe was a waiter, and Jennie cooked in small restaurants. Some seventy years later, Jesse recalled the move: "My dad borrowed fifty dollars on his life insurance policy, left my mother and me in New York, and came to Florida...He stayed in Miami one night, and he couldn't breathe. So he took the ferry boat that used to go to Miami Beach. Oddly enough, he could breathe there." So, he stayed and started running a lunch stand at Smith's bathing casino. That was the beginning of the restaurant that was the seed for Joe’s. According to JoAnn, Joe’s granddaughter, "You'd come over and rent lockers to change your clothes to use the ocean or use the pool. The women used to have the long bathing suits with the stockings...that was 1913. He sent for my mother and myself-she had this brat on her hands. We came down by train; I was six years old when we arrived. Collins Avenue was not really a street-it was sort of a trail with ruts in it. In 1918, Joe and 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. They served snapper, pompano, mackerel, and some meat dishes.
"We used to open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in those days," Jesse remembered, "because we were the only restaurant on the beach. For about eight years there was no competition. And my father made a hell of a fish sandwich."
WHO'S WHO
Anyone well known who came to Miami Beach, from anywhere in the world, would stop in at Joe's. A list of Jesse's acquaintances, several of whom became lifelong close friends, forms a veritable Who's Who of the twentieth century. Will Rogers. "Will Rogers was Will Rogers," Jesse remembered. "As homespun as anybody could be-I liked him a lot.") Amelia Earhart. ("She was down to earth. You knew where you stood with her, there was no pretense.") The Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Gloria Swanson, America's closest thing to royalty. (Jesse: "I thought she was this little doll. She used to come in here with Joseph Kennedy, who was her great love, but I didn't know it then! Hell, I was worried about my own sex life.") J. Edgar Hoover. ("I was closer to J. Edgar Hoover than I was to anyone else. I used to call him Gatling Gun Joe.") Walter Winchell and Damon Runyon, who both helped fan the flames of the Joe's Stone Crab legend.
JOE'S TODAY
For more than 100 years, no visit to Miami has been complete without stopping in at Joe's Stone Crab. From the beginning, it has always been the love of food, family, and friends that has brought in customers and kept them coming. Again and again, Joe's owners and employees credit the restaurant's success to its family solidarity.
They're referring not only to the Weiss family, of which Jo Ann is the third generation, her children, Stephen and Jodi, the fourth, Stephen’s daughter, Julia and Jodi's children, Jessica, Lauren, and Blake, the fifth, but also to the extended family of Joe's employees, many of whom have been with Joe's for as long as fifty years.
Some have even seen their children enter and stay with Joe's. You really can't understand the great feeling of love and kindness that the family of Joe's has for all of the employees, unless you are one of the lucky ones who work there. All the employees have a kind of a common bond of success here, where everybody works together. It's the family touch that's made Joe's as successful as it is.