Porto San Giuseppe

Yesterday, I realized that I am on the last end of my annual Florida vacation. I really love it down here, as I love the surroundings, the area, the pace of life (although sometimes a bit overly slow)and especially the weather. I've never been here during the summer or during a hurricane season, but I'm certain that all things considered, this is a fine place to be.

In the morning, we ventured to Apalachicola's downtown area, where there is a myriad of different places to shop, eat, and see, as the city was founded as a harbor in the early 1800's, and the market place reflects a lot of that old charm. We visited a flower shop by mistake, as it was a former sea sponge warehouse that housed an antique store, that now housed a flower shop. In entering the store, it said that it was a flower shop and gift store. From what we saw however, it was a very, VERY basic flower shop. Wherever the gifts were, they were probably on backorder, for as far as I could tell, there were no "gifty" type things anywhere to be found. As we walked into the store, the owner was very chipper and polite in asking us if we could be helped. When we said we were looking for the antique shop, however, we were quickly shooed out of the store with a flurry of directions. Apparently that woman's been asked the same question more than once.

I am not one for antiques at all. I suspect that it has everything to do with how antique shops smell. They just smell old, musty, and dank. Normally this kind of a shop wouldn't be one that I would seek out. However, this particular shop sells some of the best hand-made soap (made from goat's milk) that I have ever used in my entire life.

Being redirected to "the Hayes House" back in town, we ventured to where this antique store was relocated, and browsed through all of the wares they had to offer.
Upon buying a dozen bars of soap, we headed for our next stop, "The Owl Cafe" Cooking Shop, and proceeded to get some really cool kitchen stuff, a seafood cookbook, some shrimp de-veiners, and spices.

We decided to head back to the beach house, where we'd be able to sit in the sun for a few hours before having to decide what we were going to have for supper.

My mom suggested our dinner destination, "Joe Mama's Wood Oven Pizza" in central Port St. Joe, Florida. When we first arrived, there weren't a lot of cars out front in the street, and in looking from the front of the restaurant (which had dark tinted glass), it didn't look like it was open.

After further review, we did see lights on in the restaurant, and decided to give it a try. We were greeted by a very friendly young woman that understood our confusion when we said we couldn't tell if the restaurant was open or not as it was so dark. We were seated, and our server came over, took our drink order and let us decide on the type of pizza we would like to try.

The great thing we noticed was that almost every table in the restaurant was full of diners, and that it truly did have the wood burning stove in the kitchen, similar to the wood ovens my mom and I experienced when we were in Rome, Florence, and Torino. We were both excited to anticipate having REAL Italian pizza. My mom ordered the pizza margherita, which had garlic, tomato, basil, and mozzarella. I opted for the Quatro, which had fresh mozzarella, basil, cured ham, and tomato.

In a matter of minutes, out came the pizzas from our server, and sure enough, they were identical to the pizzas we had in Italy. After the first taste, we knew one thing: this pizzeria is a complete WINNER. Wood stoves have a different way of cooking, and give pizza crusts (or for that matter, the whole pizza) a more rustic, earthy taste and texture, and the crust was amazing!

It truly was an experience reminiscent of past travels to Italy, and was a great way to end the evening. Next time, I hope to try the pizza with the arugula..it looked really interesting!