Dock to dinner – Key Largo Fisheries Backyard Café a delightful experience

Dock to dinner – Key Largo Fisheries Backyard Café a delightful experience - A close up of food - Key Largo Fisheries Backyard Cafe
A fresh squeeze of lemon juice adds the perfect flavor to the conch salad.

A quality product at a reasonable price that’s coming fresh off the dock.

That’s what patrons will experience when they come to relax and enjoy the food at Key Largo Fisheries Backyard Café at MM 99.5.

Jack Hill and his family started Jack Hill Bait and Seafood in 1972, as a place for Jack to sell his bait and seafood catches. In 1976, it became Key Largo Fisheries and has evolved into a retail market and restaurant.

The restaurant, Key Largo Fisheries Backyard Café, opened in 2011 as the Hill family expanded to include fresh, high-quality seafood products for the public’s enjoyment. 

Start with conch fritters or Dottie’s Infamous Lobster Bites for appetizers. The establishment also offers an array of salads and seaside soups to enjoy.

Then move on to Dottie’s Conch Salad, Seaside Caesar Lobster Wrap, smoked fish dip or lobster sliders. For dessert, patrons can enjoy a variety of cakes to satisfy their sweet tooth.

Tom Hill, co-owner of Key Largo Fisheries with his brother Rick, said his mother, Dottie, would cook lobster bites and conch fritters under a pop-up tent on Saturdays as customers arrived to get fresh seafood. While the store would be busy selling fish, she’d be selling some of her own homemade goods.

“She just had a good time doing that,” he said. “She had a lot of fun and she saw a lot of people.”

Hill said the kitchen got started making salads for a company that sold to Costco. Hill said he started adding kitchen equipment.

“When that contract with the customer ran out, and we had equipment there, we just started cooking and doing the Saturday routine. Then we started making lunch for ourselves and then other people came along and said, ‘That’s really good.’”

For Hill, one of the things he enjoys most is seeing the smiles on the people who enjoy what they’re eating.

“These cooks do a really good job with the food,” Hill said. “We get a lot of compliments. It’s a unique destination that’s more than a storefront.”

Key Largo Fisheries services restaurants and bait stores from Key West to Fort Lauderdale, and products coming off the docks are shipped nationally and internationally to places in Europe and Asia.

The whole process evolved naturally, Hill said.

“We were already cooking lobsters for overseas so it made sense to offer that at a good price to our other guests,” he said.

Key Largo Fisheries Backyard Café has received a number of TripAdvisor awards for its food and service. Carrie Pino, marketing director and restaurant manager, said it’s a testament to a number of things.

“We try to work really hard on our customer service as well making sure our food is pretty much the same every time you order it,” she said.

Key Largo Fisheries Backyard Café, located at 1313 Ocean Bay Dr., is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. For more information, visit www.keylargofisheries.com.

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Dottie and Jack Hill started Jack Hill Bait and Seafood in 1972, and it evolved in 1976 to the Key Largo Fisheries that we all know and love today. 

Jim McCarthy is one of the many Western New Yorkers who escaped the snow and frigid temperatures for warm living by the water. A former crime & court reporter and city editor for two Western New York newspapers, Jim has been honing his craft since he graduated from St. Bonaventure University in 2014. In his 4-plus years in the Keys, Jim has enjoyed connecting with the community. “One of my college professors would always preach to be curious,” he said. “Behind every person is a story that’s unique to them, and one worth telling. As writers, we are the ones who paint the pictures in the readers minds of the emotions, the struggles and the triumphs.” Jim is past president of the Key Largo Sunset Rotary Club, which is composed of energetic members who serve the community’s youth and older populations. Jim is a sports fanatic who loves to watch football, hockey, mixed martial arts and golf. He also enjoys time with family and his new baby boy, Lucas, who arrived Oct. 4, 2022.