When The Yearling restaurant reopened in 2001 after being shuttered for ten years, Tampa Bay Times columnist Jeff Klinkenberg wrote that he didn’t know whether to “laugh, cry, or say grace.” His halleluiah state of mind came from knowing he could get his chops on a rare Southern favorite – frogs’ legs. The Tampa Bay Times writer follows a long line of Florida writers in search of authentic experience in a state that former Miami Herald journalist and author Al Burt wrote is trying to “retain its identity in the face of rapid change.” And what better place to define authenticity than the central Florida restaurant named for the 1939 Pulitzer Prize winning book, “The Yearling,” penned half a mile down the road at author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ farmhouse.
To get to the Cross Creek restaurant from any direction, you’ll take two-lane roads through piney woods, rolling horse pastures with four-board fences, acres of row crops and farm stands with homemade signs that say “Orange Marmalade,” “Pickled Okra,” and “Jesus Loves You.”
Faded signs, sun-bleached wood shingling, and a rusted generator from the pre-electricity days make up the façade of the restaurant. But inside is gleaming polished wood on both walls and ceiling, lit by table lamps. It’s dark, but in a way that feels cool after the scorched outside temperature, kind of like stepping off the path into a deep forest. There’s a buck mounted on the wall over the log fireplace, along with a trophy bass and an old muzzle-loader. There are rooms added on to rooms added on to rooms, with full bookshelves, local paintings and photographs, and Rawlings’ books and movie posters.
At a recent Friday lunch, all the customers were out-of-towners who came to gawk at the Florida memorabilia and try some dishes you can’t get many places anymore. One couple had driven up from Orlando on their day off. She had been a librarian in small Florida towns where the shelves were full of rare, first-edition or out-of-print books. She walked from room-to-room looking over the packed bookshelves, shaking her head. Did she see any valuable books? “A few,” she winked conspiratorially.
Waitress Stacey Richards says The Yearling gets lots of locals, too, but they tend to come on Friday and Saturday nights, and Sunday after church. Richards moved to the area after years in Ft. Lauderdale, which had gotten so crowded she decided she needed a change. “It’s so different,” she said, sitting down at the table to chat. “People have lived here their whole lives. Some have barely left the area. Sometimes it’s boring (living here), because there’s nowhere to go, but the people are just so nice.”
Cheese grits and collard greens were on the menu Friday, along with your choice of venison, quail, or duck. Other local dishes are alligator, red fish, cooter (turtle), pecan (pronounced pee-can) pie and sweet tea. The frog legs are big; they sprawl over the whole plate and look like a big ‘un just landed right there splat in the middle of things. Go ahead, try it: it tastes just like chicken. There was also Key Lime or Sour Orange pie. Sour Orange trees were Florida’s original root stock, onto which sweet orange was eventually grafted, putting Florida orange juice on the map.
Richards makes her rounds of the tables. “I’ll check back in a bit,” she says.
“We’ll be in a coma,” one of them replies.
The Yearling is open for “lunch and supper,” Thursday through Sunday.
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