A couple weeks back, I sat across the Tavern from a father and his boy.  The boy was still in soccer clothes, a rash of dirt, and blood, and grass began halfway down his shin where his socks loosely lay and ran up to the break of his shorts.

That was me once, sitting with my own father.  The walls are paneled with the same wood. The same oil paintings – faded, romantic, and bold; scenes of weathered fishermen sailing daunting seas – still hang in their appointed place.

Though a couple new items have made the menu, the core remains: fresh fish, most of it pulled in by the Captain’s (Bill Bowers) friends. Mr. Bowers opened the Tavern almost fifty years ago, transforming an old post office decades before urban renovation and restoration became a fad.

An old friend of mine (“old” as in “longtime”, and “old” as in “old”) described the Tavern to me as “the last decent place left out here.” While that’s a little exaggerated, and while it wasn’t clear whether “out here” meant Pinecrest, or Dade County, or the United States of America, I know what he means: only a handful of spots in the city exist that have proved themselves for years as consistently serving good food, at good prices, in a venue in which you can hear your wife.

Naturally, the desirability of that last point greatly depends on the wife.