9 Florida Restaurants That Have Been Open Since Before Disney

Walt Disney World opened its gates on October 1, 1971.

One Orlando sandwich shop, a short drive from where Walt Disney World would open three years later, had only three years on the clock by then.

Other Florida restaurants already had decades on it, one of them by more than six decades.

These are the Florida restaurants that predate Disney, and every single one is still open today.

1. Columbia Restaurant

Columbia Restaurant opened in Tampa’s Ybor City in 1905, when the neighborhood still smelled like fresh-rolled cigars.

Cuban immigrant Casimiro Hernandez Sr. started it as a small corner cafe.

It grew fast.

That gave Columbia a 66-year head start on Walt Disney World.

Five generations of the same family still run it today.

The restaurant now spans an entire city block, with 15 dining rooms and seating for 1,700 people.

It’s still Florida’s oldest continuously operating restaurant, and you can order the same 1905 Cuban sandwich recipe tonight.

2. Pepe’s Cafe

Pepe’s Cafe has poured coffee in Key West since 1909, four years after Columbia opened and more than six decades before Disney.

The place moved twice before settling on Caroline Street in the 1950s, where it still sits.

President Harry Truman used to stop in for coffee during his working vacations in Key West.

Locals say Ernest Hemingway drank here too.

Pepe’s is the oldest restaurant in the Florida Keys.

Order the steak.

It became a steakhouse decades after opening as a plain lunch counter.

3. Joe’s Stone Crab

Miami Beach still had sand roads when Joe Weiss opened the lunch counter that became Joe’s Stone Crab in 1913.

He’d moved south for his health, on doctor’s orders.

A marine biologist later talked him into boiling the stone crab claws everyone else threw back.

One dish did it.

Joe’s now serves those claws every fall through spring, the same way it has for more than a century.

A fourth-generation descendant of founder Joe Weiss still runs it.

Fifty-eight years before Disney opened, Miami Beach diners were already lining up for lunch.

4. Cabbage Key Inn & Restaurant

Novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart’s family built the island house that became Cabbage Key Inn & Restaurant.

It sits on a speck of land in Pine Island Sound.

New owners converted it into a dining room in 1944.

Disney wouldn’t open for another twenty-seven years.

There’s still no bridge.

Guests reach it the same way they did in 1944, by boat only.

The restaurant serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner 365 days a year.

Its walls are covered in thousands of dollar bills, each stapled up by a past diner.

Some say the cheeseburger here inspired Jimmy Buffett’s song.

Nobody can prove it.

The burger sells regardless.

5. Green Turtle Inn

Green Turtle Inn opened on the Overseas Highway in Islamorada on October 25, 1947, replacing an even older roadside stop called the Rustic Inn.

The name came from turtle steaks, once the specialty.

Sea turtles are protected now.

The kitchen switched to farm-raised turtle for its chowder instead, keeping the old dish legal and on the menu.

Bob and Mindy Rich have owned it since 2004.

It survived the 1935 Labor Day hurricane before it was even called the Green Turtle Inn.

Twenty-four years before Disney, this place already had a following.

6. Ted Peters Famous Smoked Fish

In 1951, Ted Peters Famous Smoked Fish opened at its South Pasadena spot, after founder Ted Peters started smoking fish outside so drivers could see and smell it from the road.

Walt Disney World was still two decades away.

The smoker still sits outside today.

Cash only.

No credit cards, not even now.

The menu hasn’t grown past smoked fish sandwiches, smoked fish dinners, and a German potato salad recipe from the founder’s mother.

That’s the whole point.

7. Farmer’s Market Restaurant

Farmer’s Market Restaurant opened in Fort Myers in 1952, inside a building that once housed the city’s actual produce market.

A tuft of the original floral wallpaper still peeks out from one corner.

Sisters Joann Mow and Mary McCoy have greeted regulars at the front of the house for more than 50 years.

Nothing fancy here.

It’s fried chicken, collard greens, and cornbread, the same Southern plates Lee County has ordered for generations.

It’s still the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Lee County, nineteen years older than Disney.

8. Bern's Steak House

Bern and Gert Laxer took over a Tampa bar called the Beer Haven in 1956 and opened Bern's Steak House in its place.

Bern grew his own vegetables and aged his own beef before that was a selling point anywhere else.

That's fifteen years before Disney.

The wine cellar is the spectacle now, with room for 150,000 bottles and vintages from the Depression era that nobody else stocks.

David Laxer, Bern's son, still runs the place.

9. Beefy King

Beefy King opened on North Bumby Avenue in Orlando in 1968, a short drive from where Walt Disney World would open three years later.

Founder Tom Viegle got the idea from a roast beef spot he visited in New York City.

He sold the business within a year to Freeman and Margaret Smith.

Their family runs it now.

Three generations, one location.

The steamed roast beef sandwich hasn't changed since 1968, and neither has the recipe for the Beefy Spuds on the side.

Of everything on this list, Beefy King cut it closest to Disney's opening date, just three years.

The tightest gap by far.