Real Florida: Cross Creek revival

[Times photos: Ron Thompson] Blues singer Willie Green has found a home at the Yearling. Green sings and plays the blues as he moves about the restaurant and bar. The new owner of the restaurant, Robert Blauer, often saw him on the street in Ocala. “I had some tough times, but God has led me here,” Green says.

By JEFF KLINKENBERG, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 8, 2002

When the Yearling restaurant closed its doors 10 years ago, a piece of Florida's past was swallowed up. Now the hush puppies are in the fryer and the frogs' legs are on the table again. Miz Rawlings would smile.

CROSS CREEK -- I like standing next to the creek connecting Orange Lake and Lake Lochloosa at dusk, before the fireflies come out and the barred owls start hooting.

It's quiet on Cross Creek, except for the rustle of the oaks and the splash a bass makes chasing minnows. But stand long enough and you hear other things. A sandhill crane honks in the distance. Closer, a limpkin cries. Then the true opera begins. The frogs start quietly and build to a fevered pitch. The bullfrog shakes the earth with its basso profundo as little tree frogs delicately chirp. The pig frogs come in, singing in those sad oboe voices that touch your heart.

I am a terrible man. I love nature and I adore frogs, but every once in while I develop a terrific craving for a great big plate of frogs' legs. Whenever I visit Cross Creek, when I drive over the bridge and stare into that black water, I dream of eating muscular-legged, deep-fried frogs, which I know have a hard enough life as it is, what with alligators, moccasins and great blue herons already hunting them.

The Yearling Restaurant, a North Florida institution for four decades, closed in 1992. Like many other folks with telltale greasy chins, I mourned. Whenever I drove past the dilapidated building on State Road 325 and thought of the delicious frogs' legs the restaurant no longer would be serving, I mourned even harder.

Recently, when I heard the Yearling had reopened, I didn't know whether to laugh, cry or say grace. But you could have knocked me over with a spatula.

The restaurant was one of the state’s finest at one time, winning awards in the 1970s. But then the lines got shorter. Not so for the newly reopened restaurant, where 315 people came for supper on a recent Saturday. The restaurant seats 60.

'Miz Rawlings'

Robert Blauer is one of those long-haired country boys who wears a cowboy hat even indoors. He is tall and has large dark eyes that take in the world through spectacles. He talks slowly and calls just about everyone "sir" or "ma'am." He was born in Jacksonville in 1954, a year after Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings passed away. She was the most famous resident of Cross Creek, the community she memorialized in her book of the same name. Her novel The Yearling won a Pulitzer Prize in 1939.

Books by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings grace the restaurant, including its namesake book above the real fireplace in the dining room. “Miz Rawlings” lived nearby.

Miz Rawlings, as everybody around here called her, prided herself on her cooking as much as her writing. The Yearling wasn't her restaurant, but it could have been. Many of her recipes, taken from her book Cross Creek Cookery, came to life in the old place.

Robert Blauer was a child when he first ate at the Yearling. It was a little expensive for country families, but they made a point to visit the Yearling for special occasions. Lots of people did; at one time, it was the place to go if you lived anywhere from Gainesville to Ocala.

The Yearling specialized in food rural Floridians had hunted, prepared and eaten for centuries. It wasn't a place you frequented for a quick bite. Cross Creek is about 20 miles from Gainesville and the same distance from Ocala. It's a dozen miles from the interstate on lonely two-lane roads without street lamps. It's a destination, a place where you expect to sit a spell, chew the fat and afterward clean your choppers with a toothpick.

The Yearling was good at country vittles. In the 1970s it won a passel of Golden Spoon Awards, given to the state's best restaurants by Florida Trend magazine. But by the late 1980s the restaurant started looking a little ragged. Some folks claimed the food wasn't as good as in the old days. Or maybe Floridians were just more health-conscious. The lines got shorter and shorter and then disappeared.

Like the most loyal customers, Blauer felt the restaurant's loss. He also wondered if its failure presented a business opportunity. He is a dabbler, one of those guys who realizes you can catch a bigger stringer of fish with more than one line in the water. He sold cars and operated a business transporting Medicaid patients to their doctors. He sold antique books -- he will be selling Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings first editions at this weekend's Antiquarian Book Show at the Coliseum in St. Petersburg. His passion always has been buying and selling antiques -- even old restaurants.

"I'm interested in anything that has to do with Florida," he says, drawing cherry smoke through his ever-present pipe.

Robert Blauer bought and restored the Yearling restaurant. He recognizes the reputation he is trying to live up to: “If they go home saying their food wasn’t as good as in the old days, then we’ll be goners. It’s a very tough business.”

He grew up steeped in the work of Miz Rawlings. His father sold her books, and his brother even republished a few of her out-of-print ones. Blauer always enjoyed visiting the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings State Historic Site down the road, and of course he couldn't help but drive past the old Yearling Restaurant and shush his growling stomach.

Six years ago he saw the "For Sale" sign out front and made an offer. It was refused. A few months passed and the sign remained. He made the same offer, and this time owners Herb and Pat Newman accepted.

"I thought I was going to open it pretty quick," he says in that slow way of his. "But the restaurant was pretty old, and it took a lot of work. It fought us the whole way. You'd go to hang a picture, and you couldn't find a nail. You'd find the nail, but you'd lost the hammer."

He put a lot of money into the place. How much? "In the country, we're private about that kind of information," he says politely but with a blush.

He opened his restaurant in January. It looks rustic and beautiful. Previous owners had covered walls with paper and tile; he removed them to find old wood. Previous owners had built a fake fireplace. He constructed a real one.

The ambience is old Florida: your basic hunting lodge or fish camp. If you're offended by stuffed bass, ducks and alligators, you will be happier elsewhere.

"I bought the restaurant for the reputation," Blauer says. "I always thought if I could just open the place people would probably come out of nostalgia. But I've been shocked by how many. I didn't expect that so soon."

On a recent Saturday, 315 people showed up for supper. Blauer can seat only 60 at a time. Long waits commenced. Grumbling customers sat at the creek and drank whiskey and whetted their appetites by listening to the frogs.

The restaurant is open Wednesday through Sunday for supper. On weekends, it also serves lunch. The menu is vintage Yearling fare. A few healthy entrees grace the menu, but diners with high cholesterol who frown at fried food might choose instead one of those big-city restaurants that serve sprouts on their salads.

"I don't think we have anything New Age," Blauer says, blushing again. "I hope not."

The Emeril of Cross Creek

"Time to make hush puppies."

Junior Jenkins is talking as quietly as can be. You have never read about him in any cookbook or seen him on one of those TV cooking shows. And if Emeril ever invited him, he'd probably say no, no sir. Ain't interested.

Junior Jenkins, 51, was a cook for the Yearling’s previous owners. The day it reopened, he marched in and demanded an apron. In the kitchen he wastes no words or motions.

He is a quiet man. Ask him a question and you can almost hear his brain working, as if his conscience is asking, "What makes me an authority?"

That's why January 28, the day the Yearling opened, was so interesting. The modest man walked through the front door, cleared his throat and made a startling demand.

"Give me an apron. I'm here to cook."

Robert Blauer didn't know what to think -- until he learned that Junior Jenkins cooked at the Yearling during the period it was winning restaurant awards by the fistful.

He grew up with country food, with soul food, whatever you want to call it. At 51, he is as leathery as one of those gopher tortoises poor Floridians used to call "Hoover chickens" during the Depression. His grandparents were Will and Martha Mickens, who worked for decades for Miz Rawlings, who wrote them up in Cross Creek. Martha Mickens, in some ways, was Miz Rawlings' manager and conscience.

"Martha will have a finger in my pie beyond the grave," Rawlings wrote. Both women are in the grave, but Junior is still around, perhaps the finger Miz Rawlings was writing about. Grandma lives through him and family recipes.

In the kitchen he wastes no words or motions. He gets out his hush puppy mix -- cornmeal and baking powder, salt and chopped onion, eggs and water -- and without a word starts hurling spoonfuls into oil so hot it spits at him in protest.

He retreats for more mix and throws it into the oil. On a good Saturday night, he expects to fry up about a thousand hush puppies in addition to catfish and cooter turtles and whatnot, watched by chef Robert Linebaugh when the chef is not already occupied by a pot of seafood chowder.

"It's Marjorie's recipe," Linebaugh says of the bubbling concoction. A newcomer to the creek, he'll be calling her Miz Rawlings before too long.

The birds and the blues

Diners sit in the rustic, stained pine interior of the Yearling restaurant near Gainesville. Named after Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ Pulitzer Prize-winning book, the restaurant reopened Jan. 28 after being closed since 1992.

"I hold the theory that the serving of good food is the one certain way of pleasing everybody," wrote Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings in Cross Creek.

Blauer agrees. He also admits he's scared. He owned a couple of Ocala restaurants years ago, and both failed. "We're getting people to come in here right now and that's important," he says. "But if they go home saying their food wasn't as good as in the old days, then we'll be goners. It's a very tough business. I live in Ocala. Ocala has 400 restaurants. It's a different world now."

At Cross Creek, it's a different world too, a world older and quieter and slower than towns even the size of Ocala. The cabbage palms rustle, the moths bombard the restaurant's outdoor lights, and the whippoorwills sing.

So does Willie Green. He used to live in Ocala, where Blauer often saw him on the street. Green had no home, but he had a talent, singing the blues. Blauer has given him a place to stay at Cross Creek. When the restaurant is open, he drops by with his guitar and harmonica and performs for customers.

"I'm 65, but I know I look older," he says. "I had some tough times, but God has led me here." His huge hands cover the strings as he picks out an old Jimmy Reed Tune. Then he sings an original, Baby, You Mine. Cross Creek was always a melting pot of cultures, from African-American to classic Cracker. Blauer intends soon to invite his favorite bluegrass band, the one with that skillful fiddler.

"Miz Rawlings was an amazing cook and entertainer," Blauer says. "But she can't do it anymore. I'd like to think it's up to us."

The low, still waters of Cross Creek resound with the croaking of frogs and the beating of wings when water birds take flight. It was here that Rawlings wrote The Yearling, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1939.

Napkin by Levi's

I am no food critic. In fact, some people would say I'm not critical enough. They say I wolf my food. I like the filet mignon at Bern's and also the chicken-fried steaks at those diners I frequent along the two-lane roads of rural Florida. I would rather eat grits than eggs Benedict. Sometimes I prop my elbows on the table and forget to take my hat off indoors.

Some folks will plain hate the Yearling. You know who you are. For others, it will be just what their cardiologists didn't order. But they will eat with joy and diet tomorrow.

I relax at an old wood table overlooked by a painting of Jody, the boy who grew up so hard in the novel The Yearling. My backside is warmed by the blazing oak logs in the fireplace.

A waitress with big hair calls me "Honey" and delivers a heaping plate. The frogs' legs have been dipped in egg batter and deep fried in sizzling peanut oil. They are piled high next to hush puppies and alligator nuggets and the soft-shell turtle the folks around here call cooter.

The kisses of Esmeralda could taste no sweeter.

I don't use a fork. I can always wipe my hands on my jeans later.

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