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Dining & Spirits
A Modernized Menu at Old Gasparilla Inn
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After almost 100 years, the Gasparilla Inn on Boca Grande has not lost its gentility. Its colors are daffodil yellow and crisp white trimmed with forest green, a prim village of summer/winter cottages surrounding a clapboard Greek Revival temple of dining, golf and sport fishing.
 Blue crab cake with mustard butter sauce and a celery leaf tomato salad with capers |
In the social season, gentlemen switch from Bermudas and crewnecks to jackets for dinner, and the halls are lined with botanical prints, floral couches, orchids and portraits of water birds.
The menu can still be familiar fare — roast beef, dinner rolls and shrimp cocktail — for those who still dine in a New Yorker cartoon; the braver will bite for hog snapper.
For even here, where old Florida (and old Kennebunkport and old Mackinac) are preserved, tastes of the discreetly rich and famous are changing — and dare we say it, modernizing. Contemporary chefs can remake a menu daily, but at old-line restaurants, they have to move gingerly and slowly to replace maitre d’-driven dining with cooking that uses local ingredients, global flavor and bright presentation. After all, the rich and famous know what carpaccio is (and the new guard has come to love foie gras).
 Gasparilla Inn chef James Dyer |
Indulgent and largely traditional, yet fresher produce and smarter plates thanks to the first new culinary team the inn has seen in a quarter of a century. Chef James Dyer came from the Williamsburg Inn and his colleagues hail from the Greenbriar, landmarks that have moved far forward from their fustier days.
