Cookbook | My Key West Kitchen

Chef Norman Van Aken, Cookbook, My Key West Kitchen, Florida, FL, Recipes, Chef’s Recommendations, Chef Justin Van Aken, Cooking

Chef Norman Van Aken is known as the founding father of New World Cuisine -- a mixture of Latin, Caribbean, Asian, African and American flavors. He’s an inductee into the James Beard Foundation's Who's Who of Food & Beverage in America and winner of Best Chef: Southeast. He’s the Director of Restaurants at the Miami Culinary Institute. He wrote his most recent cookbook, My Key West Kitchen, with his son Justin.

We asked him for his thoughts on the book and about Key West.

Cookbook | My Key West Kitchen

April 2, 2013

The thing about Key West is that most of knew that we were in love with the place. It wasn’t just a place to live and work in. It was our personal and collective Shangri-La.

Long before Jimmy Buffett wrote “Margaritaville,” we had already pledged allegiance to the magical little scrap of land at the end of the rainbow. We were stoned on it, bewitched, bothered and bewildered on it. We just felt lucky to be in the warm arms of her and when you walked the old, small, human-sized streets, lanes and alleys, you felt protected by some ancient maternal force.

For some of us America had betrayed our vision of fairness and sanity. The Vietnam War was over by the time most of us arrived but its memory, the dark machinations of political skullduggery, the wrongful ongoing racial divides, the endless quest for materialism were all dissolved in the tropical timelessness of old Key West. Something deep in our souls told us this was a place where you could find peace and quiet and camaraderie of like-minded, peace-loving people. On top of that it was stamped with an indelible raffish charm, an ineluctable joie de vivre. As one song put it, “Partly hippie, partly kicker too!”

It was a place where last names were irrelevant. You could remake yourself in Key West and no one would mind as long as you helped keep the good times rolling. We didn’t have money. We lived day to day and week to week but we were intent to do it with quality drinking establishments and places to dig the crazy matrix of foods not practiced in most of America saving, perhaps, New Orleans.

We were a “Confederation of the Charmed,” a “Republic of Renegades.” We were under a spell.

And Key West was the wand.

- Chef Norman Van Aken