It's Still Old Florida, but...

When Terri Rementeria returned to the United States after 20 years in Spain, she brought with her an appreciation of European culinary traditions, including cooking with only the freshest ingredients. It isn’t surprising that she opened a restaurant three years ago, but what might be surprising is her choice of location for Camellia Street Grill, which features ingredients straight from its garden, fish right off the boat, sautéed frog legs and Mediterranean collards.

Rementeria settled in Everglades City, which has a colorful history filled more with rugged pioneers, commercial fishermen, and drug smugglers and other scofflaws than with those of an environmentally and socially conscious bent.

Like others, she was drawn to Everglades City in part for its rural simplicity, and she’s one of a handful of entrepreneurs whose business is bolstering a green sensibility and sophistication in the Old Florida town on the western edge of Everglades National Park.

From Bust to Boom
The economics of Everglades City have often defied patterns. During Prohibition, fishermen acted as rumrunners. In the 1970s and early 1980s, they were also drug runners. In fact, many families in the town grew wealthy until the FBI shut down Everglades City in 1983, seizing 14 fishing boats, two airplanes and a half-million pounds of marijuana, and marching most of the adult men off to jail. That huge sting won unenviable national attention and precipitated a change of direction in the town’s temperament—and economy.

"The town got a bad reputation in the 1980s, and that was a shame, because those were God-fearing people, simple people, good people," says fishing guide Tony Brock. "But it was more money [to run drugs] than they’d ever seen, and they just couldn’t resist it."