When you come to stay in Key West, you settle into more than a place to sleep — you pull up a chair at a table that has been set for more than a hundred years. Long before the sunset terraces and waterfront verandas, the island’s character was formed in its kitchens, at its counters, and around the tables where neighbors gathered after a long day on the docks. The Key West Museum of Art & History at the Custom House tells that story through its food-history exhibit, and no name anchors it more completely than Pepe’s Café.
Founded in 1909 by Cuban immigrant José “Pepe” Hernández, Pepe’s Café is one of the oldest continuously operating restaurants in Key West and a cornerstone of the island’s food history. It first opened on Duval Street, where it served simple, affordable meals to the cigar workers, dockhands, and laborers who shaped the early twentieth-century city. During those years, Pepe’s also counted U.S. President Harry S. Truman among its regular patrons while he stayed in Key West — a quiet measure of the café’s place in the island’s social and political life.
As the city evolved, Pepe’s relocated to its longtime home on Caroline Street, near the waterfront, where it continued to thrive as a gathering place — food and conversation shared in an open-air setting. Its straightforward cooking reflected the island’s layered influences, Cuban, Bahamian, and American, long before “Keys cuisine” became a defined style. The menu still leans into that heritage today: classic breakfast and lunch fare, seafood staples, and simple, well-prepared dishes served without pretense, much as they were more than a century ago. Fresh oysters, chili, and French toast remain among the most requested.
That continuity is the point. In a town where so much changes with the season, a table that has been set the same way for more than a hundred years tells you something true about Key West — that its character was never about excess, but about authenticity, gathering, and a sense of place that endures. For anyone who comes to stay, that is part of what the island offers: not just a room with a view, but a community with deep and well-fed roots to settle into for a while.
Visit the food-history exhibit at the Custom House, then walk a few blocks to Caroline Street and taste it for yourself. The best way to understand a place is, after all, to sit down at its table.
Visit the food-history exhibit at the Custom House