For Stuffed Pig co-owners Mike Cinque and Karen Dennis, a broken A/C in their restaurant isn’t the massive setback it used to be in 1984. But after 40 years keeping the doors open at one of Marathon’s longest-standing eateries, they’ve earned that right.
On-site festivities on Friday, April 5 are set to commemorate the four decades of support for ‘The Pig,’ as locals call it. Or, in Cinque’s words, “40 years of dribs and drabs” after Dennis’ lunch truck “Mobile Munchies” found a permanent home with the purchase of the restaurant’s current property in 1984.
“I used to go from job site to job site, but then traffic got so bad, so I would park at lunch time for two hours at Russ’s Tires,” Dennis said. Her top menu item? Sausage and biscuits.
A 1975 transplant from upstate New York, Dennis met Cinque, then a hitchhiker from New Jersey who settled on Grassy Key in 1972 after losing his Key Largo-based job with the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority, at the site of the current Key Colony Inn in 1981. Three years later, the pair were in business together.
“I said to her, ‘If you want to run a restaurant, I’ll buy the building,’” Cinque told the Weekly. “I put up the original couple grand that we needed, but she’s taken care of it ever since.”
What began as a continuation of Dennis’ lunch truck eventually tested the waters of breakfast service with donuts – an admittedly ill-fated venture at first.
“We’d make 120 donuts, and maybe sell 20,” she laughed. “So then I started adding bacon and eggs on Saturdays and Sundays.”
By the mid-’90s, the pair said, the Stuffed Pig had become the breakfast mainstay it’s known as today, serving up boxed lunches for fishermen and functioning as the daily 7 a.m. breakfast pit stop for workers who punched the clock at 8. Dennis said she still remembers bringing her son Christopher in at 3 a.m., putting him in a bed in a back room of the restaurant, and preparing to open at 4 or 5.
“It was a one-woman show for 10 years,” Cinque said. Though he said the restaurant has turned from locals’ breakfasts being its bread and butter – pun intended – tourists and residents alike still enjoy a budget-friendly menu. Case in point: The heaping platter known as the “Pig’s Breakfast,” originally introduced for $3.95, is still just $15 after four decades. There’s a reason the restaurant has claimed “Best Breakfast” in the Best of Marathon awards in nine of its 13 years.
When food service for the day is done, The Pig holds plenty of memories for Marathon families who celebrated political campaign kickoffs, fundraisers and birthday parties – some across multiple generations.
“We’ve got kids graduating now whose parents probably had their graduation parties here,” said Cinque.
The restaurant’s footprint and amenities have grown steadily through the decades, from the addition of its walk-in cooler to its outdoor seating, workstation and, most recently, an outdoor bar. One such expansion in September 1996 arguably birthed the now-incorporated city of Marathon.
“I put out some concrete tables and chairs, and I got red-tagged on them by the county,” Cinque said. “They said I increased the use of an established business without acquiring a conditional use permit.”
An eventual court victory as Cinque stared down $100-a-day fines soon turned into a $350 check delivered to Keys Sign Services owner Dick Schultz in exchange for four banners reading “Welcome to the Future City of Marathon.” They hung above the Pig, Marathon Lumber, Keys Sign Services and former Marathon Mayor Dick Ramsay’s Surfside Auto Repair – which, of course, triggered another string of red tags, Cinque said.
Nevertheless, the banners kick-started a political campaign, with early meetings frequently taking place at the Stuffed Pig, that would culminate in 2,700 Marathon residents voting 67% in favor of the nascent city on Nov. 2, 1999. And in 2007, Cinque would win his first election as a city councilman with nearly 29% of the total vote – at the time the highest percentage achieved by a single candidate in Marathon’s at-large elections.
Though they regrettably ended just a year before this writer moved to town, longtime locals will remember the Pig’s legacy of charity – and hilarity – as it hosted “National Pig Days,” complete with live pig racing as its centerpiece, to raise nearly $50,000 per year benefiting Grace Jones Community Center and Kreative Kids Christian Academy.
Staged behind the restaurant and on the property of what is now the Marathon Library, the annual carnival provided a well-rounded spectacle with bounce houses, a petting zoo, games and a famed bucking pig on loan each year from Islamorada’s Hog Heaven Sports Bar.
“You’ve got businesses complaining that they don’t have employees. Well, they’ve got kids, and they need a place they can trust to take care of the kids, so day care is very important,” Cinque said. “This is where we figured the money would do some good and wouldn’t get wasted. Little things like that are what make a community work.”
Dennis and Cinque said they take pride in the restaurant’s incremental expansions from its small beginnings in 1984. But even though the bustling eatery is a well-oiled operation today, it hasn’t forgotten its roots – just keep an eye out for the door of Dennis’ old food truck, nestled at the back of the outdoor seating area.
“Life’s been good,” Cinque said. “But we earned it.”
