Pub Crawl Down Memory Lane

Naples and Collier County are the host of a world-class dining scene, as attested by authorities including TripAdvisor, the James Beard organization, Open Table, and Southern Living. Upscale eateries abound.

But it was not always thus. A new temporary exhibit at the Collier County Museum Government Center, the county museum headquarters location, serves up an historical “pub crawl” back to earlier days of local restaurants, both fine dining and not so fine.

“From Piccadilly Pub to the Pewter Mug: A Local’s Dining Experience” will be on display at the museum through August 30, having debuted on July 8.

“We try sometimes to do exhibits for our visitors in the winter, and in the summer, things that would be of interest to residents,” said Museum Director Amanda Townsend. “This is an in-house exhibit – most of these pieces we have here in our archives.”

For those, including this reporter, who have been longtime Collier residents, the exhibit amounts to a stroll down memory lane and remembrance of meals past. Here is a plaque and photos from St. George and the Dragon, the iconic restaurant on Fifth Avenue. With a décor leaning heavily on British and specifically Royal Navy themes, the eatery was so dark inside that, when we emerged from lunch there, heading back to my office next door, the Florida sunlight was blinding, as though you had had your pupils dilated during a visit to the eye doctor.

A display of restaurant matchbooks, which were given out copiously in the days when people would routinely light up their cigarettes while dining, includes one asking the question, “Where the hell did I get these?” The answer was The Dock at Crayton Cove, for decades Naples’ premier casual waterfront eatery, and at one time, a client of my ad agency. Try as we would, we could never seem to eat and drink our way through the trade that was part of our compensation. Another matchbook immortalizes Muldoon’s, the Irish pub just north of Fifth Avenue that sponsored my adult soccer team, and where we drank many pitchers of draft beer after practice.

While I experienced these gems of old Naples cuisine from the customer side, family members worked briefly in the industry. One brother was a waiter at the Piccadilly Pub during a college summer vacation, another as a high school kid worked his way up from pot scrubber and dishwasher all the way to dessert prep at the original Fifth Avenue location of Chef’s Garden, and my sister (improbably) parked cars for a time at Pate’s Marker Four, now the Chart House, in Crayton Cove. If you’ve been around the area for a few years, some of the displays in the museum’s temporary “pop-up” exhibit will almost certainly bring back memories of your own.

The pink and green-decorated Chef’s Garden, relocated to Third St. South, was perhaps the gem of classic Naples eateries, and one of the few still around today, although now known as Ridgway. Upstairs, now called Tony’s Off Third, was formerly Truffles, home of the most delicious bakery cakes known at the time.

Still active, restaurateur Tony Ridgway is something of a local legend in the Naples culinary world, and author of memoir/cookbook “Kitchen Privileges.” His dining empire also encompasses Bayside Seafood Grill and Bar and Sukie’s Wine Shop. Ridgway – the man, not the restaurant – will participate in a panel discussion on the early Naples dining scene at the museum on August 12, moderated by Townsend, who like me, had her wedding cake baked at Truffles.

At the other end of the dining spectrum, the listing for Lillie William’s Greentop Social Place contains a fascinating historical tidbit. As the display shows, the 1963 Yellow Pages listed it under “Restaurants – Colored,” but the next year, that subcategory was discontinued. The Greentop Social Place was in what was then McDonald’s Quarters, the unofficial Black neighborhood in Naples, right next to the Naples Daily News offices, then on Central Avenue. As a young photographer there in the late 1970s, I would occasionally stop in after a late evening shift.

The museum’s exhibit does not limit itself to just Naples. There are coasters from the Little Bar and photos from Stan’s Idle Hour in Goodland, and a photo and original drink mug from the Rosie O’Shea, once a staple of the waters between Naples and Marco Island. Everglades City and even Immokalee establishments are included, with a feature on the Rod and Gun Club in E-City focusing on Claus “Snooky “Senghaas, the Cordon Bleu-trained German chef who had been the personal chef to General Ludendorf in the First World War.

There is much more to the museum than just the dining exhibit. If you have been to the Marco Island Historical Museum, another of the Collier County Museum’s five outlets, but never to the headquarters location, it is worth checking out, and an opportunity to take a summer road trip and still stay in air-conditioned comfort. The collection includes a locomotive used to haul logs out of the Fakahatchee Strand and a World War II Sherman tank. The tank, said Townsend, “is decommissioned – it runs but it doesn’t shoot.”

Speaking of World War II, the restaurant exhibit is the last temporary display in the space before the local military museum currently housed at the Naples Airport moves to a more permanent home at the county’s headquarters museum. Opening for the military displays is tentatively set for this autumn.