The Southernmost Part of Heaven

Posted on June 29, 2018

Richard Hatch ’82 arrived in Key West looking for his next adventure. He found it in a place called Blue Heaven.

After a stint in the Peace Corps in Gabon, Africa, and traveling the U.S., Hatch had settled back in the Triangle. But in late 1986, at the invitation of a friend, he bought a small boat, hitched it to the back of his ’69 Cutlass S convertible and set out — with the top down the whole way — for the southernmost point in the continental United States.

Hatch spent his first years in Key West as a trolley driver and a newspaper reporter. He and his partner, Suanne Kitchar, were living on a boat in the marina and had just had their first son when they met the owner of a building already christened Blue Heaven.

It had been built in the heart of old Key West in 1886 and had hosted boxing matches refereed by Ernest Hemingway in the 1930s; a popular song at that time was My Blue Heaven — the place’s possible namesake. But when Hatch found it, the place was so run down in a neighborhood so seedy that the owner offered it to them rent-free to bring it back to life.

Kitchar, a portrait artist, and Hatch launched its rehabilitation with a lunch counter business. They opened in September 1992, setting up four hand-painted picnic tables, with a menu of black beans and rice with fish or jerk chicken, grilled cheese sandwiches, shrimp melts, tofu burgers, beer and wine.

“Everyone told us we were crazy, and no one would lend us any money” to get started, Hatch said. He and Kitchar had no formal culinary experience; they relied on family recipes and their own experimentation.

With business slow at first — $100 in gross sales was considered a good day — Hatch took on the jobs of order-taker, cook, dishwasher, janitor and accountant. Each morning, he would cycle from the marina to Blue Heaven, picking flowers along the way to set out on the tables. One of their first customers was Jimmy Buffett, who later wrote a song titled Blue Heaven Rendezvous (“Those crazy days and crazy ways / We never want to un-do / We’ll be together now and forever / At the blue heaven rendezvous”). Other celebrity guests included road-tripping broadcaster Charles Kuralt ’55, who was in the same UNC literary fraternity as Hatch — St. Anthony Hall.

A turning point came a year and a half after opening, when Hatch recruited his brother, Dan, a former sous chef at The Carolina Inn and a culinary school graduate, to run the kitchen.

“That’s when we started doing dinner, and Danny made it fancy,” Hatch said. “We bake our own bread, we squeeze every orange, lemon and lime.”

A travel article in The New York Times in 2015 listed Blue Heaven as a must-stop for Key West visitors, and at 10 a.m. on a weekday in late March, the restaurant had a 1.5-hour wait.

The BLT benedict — bacon, lobster and tomato — is one of the most popular breakfast items; so are Richard’s Very Good Pancakes, a made-from-scratch recipe from his mother. Among the most-talked-about dinner entrees is the yellowtail snapper with a citrus beurre blanc sauce and homemade angel hair pasta. Hatch, a wine aficionado, curated an award-winning wine list with more than 300 bottles. And no matter what time of day, a slice of Key lime pie with sky-high meringue is available.

Tourists sometimes ask if the restaurant is a movie set, given the water tower on site (complete with a rope swing), a tree-playhouse-turned-bar area, the large Spanish lime and gumbo trees and the roosters wandering around. Live music plays each morning and evening, featuring original songs by local artists.

A quarter century after Blue Heaven’s beans-and-rice rebirth, Dan Hatch now runs sister restaurant Salute! on the Beach. The brothers own a third property, which they use as a test kitchen.

“We keep doing a little better every year,” Richard Hatch said.

— Anna Katherine Clemmons

 

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Chef Dan Hatch’s Key Lime Pie

Filling

2 cans sweetened condensed milk

1 cup lime juice

8 egg yolks

Crust

4 cups graham cracker crumbs

¾ cup sugar

¼ pound butter, melted

Meringue

8 egg whites

½ teaspoon cream of tartar

⅓ cup white caster sugar

▶  Mix the graham cracker crumbs, sugar  and butter. Line a pie tin with the graham cracker mix. Bake 8 minutes at 350 F until golden brown.

▶  Whisk the condensed milk with the lime juice and egg yolks in a stainless steel bowl.

▶  Pour into the baked pie shell. Set aside and make the meringue.

▶  For meringue, beat the egg whites to a soft peak, then add cream of tartar and continue to whisk, adding the sugar, until the meringue has stiff peaks.

▶  Place meringue decoratively onto the uncooked custard and bake at 350 F for 15 to 29 minutes until the meringue is  golden.

Notes: Make sure the bowl and whisk used to beat the egg whites are very clean; otherwise, the egg whites will not form a stiff peak.

Use a convection oven.

Check that custard also is cooked when the meringue is cooked, using a cake tester or toothpick.

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