Admission: I loved — love — Continental restaurants, too. Yes, I know most are bad, but my earliest memory of pure delight in a dining room was of devouring escargots at Chez Jean-Michel in Bethesda, Md., while my parents sat agape. I was 6 and had never experienced fresh garlic or real butter. Many years and escargots later, my wife and I had our first date at a ridiculous Continental restaurant in a Falls Church, Va., strip mall. As we watched a paunchy, sweaty waiter flambé Steak Diane tableside, we kissed. I love the Continental glop principle, which states that any piece of meat is better if it swims in cream or butter. I love the way Worcestershire sauce is in everything; for enterprising chefs of 50 years ago, it was the rare umami enhancer in the kitchen. I love the old scotch cocktails and want a Rusty Nail. Does Miguel’s still stock Drambuie? “We always stock Drambuie,” says Dan Garcia.
The adjective “Continental” was first applied to cooking in Georgian England to describe the foods introduced by transnational royal marriages. German-born Queen Charlotte introduced many of her native dishes (cured ham, sausages) to the English diet. In America, grand old hotel dining rooms from the turn of the 20th century used the term to signify European refinement. Yet it wasn’t until the post-WWII period that restaurateurs, primarily European emigrés, began using the term to soften the foreignness of their cuisine and integrate the trendy dishes of the era into their menus — dishes like the namesake salad created by Italian-born restaurateur Caesar Cardini in Tijuana, or the Bananas Foster the Brennan family first whipped up in New Orleans. Their restaurants were German and Continental or French and Continental: The descriptor, now capitalized, had earned its status as a proper noun. These owner-operators steered the ship from the front of the house, where they greeted guests. The notion of a chef-owned restaurant would’ve been preposterous to their notion of hospitality — the tail wagging the dog. This was Miguel.
The Garcia boys grew up in the restaurant. Miguel Jr., the eldest, didn’t follow in the family business and instead became a fireman, rising through the ranks of the Sarasota County Fire Department. Gabriel, the youngest, went to cooking school and eventually took over the kitchen. Dan, the middle son, was our host standing behind the bar.
Dan remembers going outside to play, opening the back door of the restaurant to the wilds of cabbage palm, mangrove, beach sunflower, and dune grass. “There was a field of trees where the parking lot is now. Mom would come out and scream for us to come back in.” The clogged streets of today were empty. “You’d come out here in the summertime, and there was no traffic. You could walk down the middle of Midnight Pass Road and not see a single car.”
That road, which extends down the narrow southern end of the key, once abutted an inlet called Midnight Pass, which separated Siesta Key from Casey Key. Ocean water poured through the pass into Little Sarasota Bay, the body between the key and the mainland, and created a fishermen’s paradise. In 1984, just a few months after the opening of Miguel’s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers bulldozed the pass shut, part of the extension of the Intracoastal Waterway along Florida’s Gulf shoreline. Mainland homes and pleasure craft got protection from the elements as the sea life in the bay was slowly decimated.
Most evenings, Dan and his brothers did their homework in the office tucked behind the kitchen. Every now and again they were invited out into the dining room to say hi to regular customers. Their dad would be bartending and working the room, and their mom would be at the front door, entertaining guests who had to wait for a table. If there was seating available, the kids were treated to dinner off the menu. Dan always got duck and rice.
Miguel knew how to build a staff, assemble a team, and create esprit de corps. One of his first hires was Mike Hammond, an experienced Continental chef who patiently showed everyone on staff how to make Caesar dressing, starting with not one but two garlic cloves, slivered, then mashed into a wooden bowl the size of a baptismal font. George Kordell, a Vietnam vet who had health problems because of Agent Orange exposure, had no fine dining experience but knew carpentry and helped Miguel build the bar, small but essential, a focal point in the restaurant and the source of its merriment. When he went to work as a waiter, his wife would often babysit the Garcia kids. He turned out to be a great showman, a master of flambé, and invented Miguel’s signature Strawberries Acapulco, flamed with Sambuca and rum and finished with a healthy grinding of pepper from a 4-foot-long wooden mill. (This mill, long broken, stands affixed to the wall in memoriam, as does a plaque for George Kordell.)