Joe's Stone Crab, also known as Joe's Stone Crabs, is an American restaurant in Miami Beach, Florida

Miami Beach, Florida

Miami Beach is a coastal resort city in Miami-Dade County, Florida, United States, incorporated on March 26, 1915. The municipality is located on a barrier island between the Atlantic Ocean and Biscayne Bay, the latter which separates the Beach from Miami city proper...

. The restaurant was opened in 1918, by Joe Weiss, who began his Miami Beach career by cooking at Smith's Casino beginning in 1913.

Even though stone crabs

Florida stone crab

The Florida stone crab, Menippe mercenaria, is a crab found in the western North Atlantic, from Connecticut to Belize, including Texas, the Gulf of Mexico, Cuba and the Bahamas that is widely caught for food.-Description:...

 are their most famous dish now, fish was served, rather than crabs, after the restaurant's opening. When an ichthyologist asked Weiss why he didn't serve stone crabs, he answered that no one would want to eat them. He turned out to be wrong, as they found out soon after first cooking them.

Joe's Stone Crab is often visited by politicians, actors, and athletes. It was featured in the 1985 film The Mean Season

The Mean Season

The Mean Season is a 1985 American thriller directed by Phillip Borsos. The film stars Kurt Russell, Mariel Hemingway, Richard Jordan, Richard Masur, Joe Pantoliano, and Andy García. The screenplay was written by Leon Piedmont, based on the novel In the Heat of the Summer by John Katzenbach...

before its mid-1980s remodeling. The restaurant is reputedly referenced in Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming

Ian Lancaster Fleming was a British author, journalist and Naval Intelligence Officer.Fleming is best known for creating the fictional British spy James Bond and for a series of twelve novels and nine short stories about the character, one of the biggest-selling series of fictional books of...

's novel "Goldfinger

Goldfinger

Goldfinger is the seventh novel in Ian Fleming's James Bond series, first published in the UK by Jonathan Cape on 23 March 1959. Goldfinger originally bore the title The Richest Man in the World and was written in January and February 1958...

" as "Bill's at the Beach" in which James Bond

James Bond

James Bond, code name 007, is a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short story collections. There have been a six other authors who wrote authorised Bond novels or novelizations after Fleming's death in 1964: Kingsley Amis,...

 ate the best meal he had ever eaten in his life.

History

In 1913, "Hungarian-born Joe Weiss" arrived in Miami Beach from New York hoping to relieve his asthma. Five years later, he opened up the "original Joe's Restaurant" in the front room of the bungalow he shared with his wife Jennie on Biscayne Street. In 1921, an icthyologist noticed the large number of stone crabs in the area and brought them to Joe to find out if they were edible. And as Patricia Schultz says, "And so an institution was born." Famous guests have included Al Capone, Frank Sinatra and Howard Cosell.
In 1999, Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises

Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises

Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises is a group of approximately 70 restaurants founded by Rich Melman and Jerry A. Orzoff in Chicago, IL in 1971.-History:The first restaurant was R.J...

became involved and opened branches in AZ and Chicago. ,