Food for the Eyes and the Stomach

Date: June 6, 2016

Location: Robbie’s

Blog Post By: Bryce Jurkouich

Food for The Eyes and the Stomach

Promo poster from restaurant

               For our last day we went to lunch at a fairly large restaurant called Robbie’s.  Robbie’s claim to fame is that it offers you the ability to feed tarpon for the low, low, price of 3 dollars per bucket of fish pieces.  So of course the entire class had to try it.  After Professor Z acquired for us 3 buckets of chum we headed over to the dock for this adventure.  When we got to the dock we see these huge tarpon the biggest of which are easily 4 feet tall, but there were also some pelicans nearby who were trying to steal the fish from the tarpon.  It was a battle between bird and fish for who could get to the dead fish chum first.  More often than not the fish won, because the people were cheering for them more, but sometimes the birds would get sneaky and snag a dead fish from the Tarpon.  When the class attempted to feed the tarpon the fish wanted us to put them in the water, but many people had arms that were too short to reach the water.  Subsequently the fish would simply float under the chum waiting intensely.  However once the fish was dropped into the water they would come to life gulping it up in a matter of milliseconds after it hit the water.  This would elicit screams from the more squeamish people in the group (myself included, those things move fast!).  It was extra exciting when the pelicans came closer, because we didn’t want them to steal the food from the tarpon.  Luckily T. A. Stephon was on the scene scaring the pelicans away with many waves of his sandals. 

Tarpon in the wild

If feeding four foot long fish with smaller more dead fish wasn’t enough of a sensory overload the restaurant itself was literally coated in single dollar bills.  The dollars each had someone’s name on it and the place that person was from.  The furthest away place that we saw was someone left a dollar who was from London.  And then also contributing to the whole sensory overload was the many vendors that sold novelty items outside of the restaurant.

For more information on the restaurant go here

For more information on tarpon go here