A Salty Tale: Cedar Key, FL
The Story of Tony’s Chowder House
A Salty Tale: Cedar Key, FL
Cedar Key sits three miles out into the Gulf of Mexico at the end of State Road 24, a two-lane road that cuts west from Gainesville through salt marsh and scrub until the pavement simply stops at the water. The town has fewer than 800 full-time residents, no traffic lights, no chain restaurants, no cruise ships, and no particular interest in acquiring any of those things. It is, as anyone who has been there will tell you unprompted, a piece of Old Florida that somehow survived the 20th century intact — a working waterfront of clapboard houses on stilts, weathered fishing docks, golf carts in lieu of cars, and the specific unhurried grace of a place that decided long ago not to become anything other than itself.
That grace was not the plan. It was what was left.
The City that was Supposed to be Tampa
Cedar Key has been making its living from the water since before the Civil War. In the 1860s it was Florida’s second-largest city — the Gulf terminus of the state’s first cross-peninsula railroad, a port built on cedar timber and the pencil mill Eberhard Faber planted on nearby Atsena Otie Key in the 1850s. Ships, lumber, and the raw material for half the pencils in America moved through a town most Floridians today have never heard of.
Then, in September 1896, a Category 3 hurricane leveled the original settlement and killed roughly a hundred people. The town moved to Way Key and never fully recovered. Tampa took the trade. The railroad found other terminals. What remained was a fishing village — and in retrospect, that may be what saved it from the developers who eventually found the rest of Florida’s Gulf Coast. For the next century, generations of families made their living pulling mullet, oysters, and whatever else the Gulf offered out of the dark, tannin-stained estuaries surrounding the keys.
The Ballot Measure
In 1994, Florida voters approved a constitutional ban on large-scale gill net fishing. Cedar Key’s economy collapsed almost overnight.
What happened next is one of the more remarkable reinvention stories in Florida seafood history. With state assistance, local fishermen relearned their trade from the water up, transitioning to clam aquaculture — farm-raising the hard clams that thrive in Cedar Key’s particular combination of spring-fed freshwater and warm Gulf saltwater, conditions that turn out to produce an exceptionally clean, sweet, briny bivalve. Today clam farming adds an estimated $45 million a year to the area’s economy and supports over 500 jobs per the Cedar Key Aquaculture Association. Cedar Key now produces the vast majority of Florida’s farm-raised clams, harvested live each morning and shipped the same day to restaurants across the country. The clam that arrives in a Las Vegas kitchen tomorrow morning was likely in a Cedar Key estuary this afternoon.
If you’ve eaten a Florida clam, you’ve eaten Cedar Key.
The Chowder
It was into this particular town, in June of 2005, that Chef Eric opened Tony’s Seafood Restaurant — a 54-seat eatery in the historic downtown, serving fresh Gulf seafood to locals and the growing number of visitors who had discovered Cedar Key was worth the drive. One month after opening, he introduced a clam chowder developed in Tony’s tiny kitchen while working on a slate of other dishes. The recipe drew on twelve years spent living in New England in the 1980s, sampling chowders up and down the Northeast coast — every bowl a data point, every kitchen a lesson. What he built in Cedar Key used the clams being pulled from the water right outside his door and a formula he has declined to share with anyone, including Bon Appétit, which made a formal request in 2007 and was politely turned down.
Word spread the way word spreads in small towns and then beyond them. Diners began asking for take-home quarts. A St. Petersburg Times food writer called it the best bowl of clam chowder he had ever tasted, adding that even a few grains of pepper would be “defacing a masterpiece.” In late 2008, the Great Chowder Cook-Off in Newport, Rhode Island — the annual championship held at the Newport Yachting Center, one of the most prestigious food competitions in the country — formally invited Tony’s to compete.
On June 6, 2009, Tony’s Cedar Key Clam Chowder won the 28th Annual Great Chowder Cook-Off. They returned the following year and won again. On June 4, 2011, with a third title at stake and Hall of Fame retirement on the line, not even a Grand Champion Chowder from New Jersey could deny them. Three years running, in a landslide each time, and the recipe was retired to the Hall of Fame.
A Florida fishing village that had been flattened by a hurricane, orphaned by a railroad, and gutted by a ballot measure had rebuilt itself around a clam — and then gone to Rhode Island and beaten New England at its own dish.
Cedar Key’s story didn’t stop being hard. Hurricanes kept coming; the original Tony’s location on the island did not survive them. [Confirm and date this — Idalia 2023? Helene 2024? — and say plainly what closed and when.]
The Mount Dora outpost of that legacy opened in February 2019, brought to Donnelly Street by Chef Eric, Chef Sam, and Bill Martin in a 1925-era building that spent its first century as a house and now spends its days as a twelve-table tribute to the chowder house tradition — a format popular in the Northeast from the 1950s through the 1980s, now largely vanished there, preserved here in Central Florida with nautical odds and ends on the walls, a century-old Mona Lisa print, photographs of old New England chowder houses, and the smell that earned this place its reputation before Mount Dora had ever heard of it.
The chowder in your bowl is still made with Cedar Key clams. Thick, briny, loaded with clams and potatoes, finished with a depth of flavor and a quiet heat that consistently stops people from New England cold — because they were not expecting to find this in Florida, and they are right to be surprised.
So the next time you’re on Donnelly Street and someone says it’s just a chowder place: it isn’t. It’s the last standing piece of a city that was supposed to be Tampa, served by the bowl.
Tony’s Chowder House is at 622 N. Donnelly St, Mount Dora. It’s small; there may be a wait. For the full Mount Dora day — Renninger’s, Tony’s, and the bookshop with the cat — see Dayventure: Treasure Hunting, Chowder, and a Bookshop Cat in Mount Dora.
The Mount Dora outpost of that legacy opened in February 2019, brought to Donnelly Street by Chef Eric, Chef Sam, and Bill Martin in a 1925-era building that spent its first century as a residential house and now spends its days as a twelve-table tribute to the chowder house tradition — a format popular in the northeast United States from the 1950s through the 1980s, now largely vanished there, preserved here in Central Florida with nautical odds and ends on the walls, a century-old Mona Lisa print, photographs of old New England chowder houses, and the smell that earned this place its reputation before Mount Dora had ever heard of it.
The chowder in your bowl is made with Cedar Key clams. Thick, briny, loaded with clams and potatoes, finished with a depth of flavor and a quiet heat that consistently stops people from New England cold — because they were not expecting to find this in Florida, and they are right to be surprised. Order a bowl. If you want to be cautious, order a cup first. You will end up with a bowl.
Beyond the chowder, the menu runs through the Gulf with confidence: blackened shrimp and fish that regulars mention in the same breath as the chowder, crab cakes worth ordering, a lobster roll that earns its place, hush puppies, coleslaw, and sides that confirm the kitchen is thinking about the whole meal and not just its famous centerpiece. Beer and wine are available. The outdoor seating, when the weather cooperates — and in Central Florida, much of the year it does — puts you right on Donnelly Street in the middle of everything this town does well.
Tony’s is small. At peak lunch hours on a Saturday there may be a wait. This is not a problem — walk across the street to Donnelly Park, find a bench under the oaks, and let the day proceed at its own pace. You are not in a hurry. That is the entire premise of this Dayventure.
One last note: Tony’s sells its chowder by the can at the front counter. Staff who learn it’s your first visit have been known to send one home with you as a gift. The clam chowder has a two-year shelf life unopened, which means there is no wrong time to have some. Take them up on it.
The Shop on the Way Out: Barrel of Books and Games
📍 403 N. Donnelly St, Mount Dora, FL 32757 🕘 Mon–Thu 10am–6pm · Fri–Sat 10am–8pm · Sun 12pm–6pm 📞 (352) 735-1950 | barrelofbooksandgames.com
Walk three blocks south from Tony’s and you’ll find Barrel of Books and Games, which looks from the outside like a pleasant bookshop and reveals itself from the inside to be considerably more than that. The exterior is painted with books — an appropriate signal — and the interior is bigger than the storefront suggests, which is the most consistent thing reviewers say about it and which continues to surprise people who have been told in advance.
Owner Chrissy Stile has built something here that feels genuinely rare: an independent bookshop that stocks both new and used titles without the used section feeling like an afterthought, a dedicated room of collectible books for the people who know what they’re looking for, a solid collection of board games and puzzles and toys for the people who don’t come in planning to buy a game and leave having bought a game, and a comfortable reading area where you can sit with something from the shelf and decide if it’s yours before you commit. The pricing on used books is reasonable in the way that good used bookshops always are — honest, a little generous, the kind that makes you wonder how they stay in business and then hope they do forever.
And then there is Paige. Paige is the store cat, a detail mentioned in enough reviews that it has clearly become part of the establishment’s identity and part of what people come back for. If you find Paige and Paige approves of you, consider that a good omen for whatever you’re about to read next.
This is the last stop of the Dayventure for good reason. A bookshop is the right place to end a day that started with digging through other people’s history at Renninger’s, because the logic is the same: you are looking for something, you may not know exactly what it is until you find it, and the looking is more than half the pleasure. Buy something. Let Paige weigh in. Then point the car back south on US-441 and let the live oaks and the rolling Lake County hills ease you back toward the highway.
That’s a Dayventure.
Plan Your Visit
- Renninger’s Antique Center & Flea Market: 20651 US Hwy 441, Mount Dora, FL | renningers.net | Antique Center: Fri–Sun. Flea Market: Sat–Sun. Free admission, free parking.
- Tony’s Chowder House: 622 N. Donnelly St, Mount Dora, FL | (352) 729-2834 | tonyschowder.com | Mon–Sun 11am–3pm, Sat until 6pm. Small restaurant — expect a wait on busy weekends.
- Barrel of Books and Games: 403 N. Donnelly St, Mount Dora, FL | (352) 735-1950 | barrelofbooksandgames.com | Open daily. Say hello to Paige.
- Donnelly Park: Central downtown, shaded, free, and open. Great for the wait before Tony’s.
- Gilbert Park: Lakefront, playground, picnic areas. Best for families with kids.
- Grantham Point / Lighthouse Park: Five-minute walk south of downtown via Alexander Street. Free, open daily, worth the detour.
Hours are current as of March 2026. Always confirm before visiting, as schedules change seasonally.
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