- June 17, 2022
Florida Cracker Kitchen offers a taproom, dining room and an area for selling store-branded merchandise.
Florida Cracker Kitchen is at 14329 Beach Blvd. It converted a former tire store into a 4,000-square-foot restaurant.
Florida Cracker Kitchen seats 150 and has 40 employees. The restaurant serves breakfast and lunch while the taproom is open as late as midnight.
The restaurant’s look is modeled after its Brooksville location that opened in 2012.
The merchandise area
Florida Cracker Kitchen, with a menu including Sopchoppy Panhandled Omelettes and Apalachicola Po’ Boys, opens its Jacksonville location at 7 a.m. Friday, said owner Blair Hensley.
Blair and his brother, Ethan, partnered with ServStar Management Group of Jacksonville Beach to open the restaurant and tap room at 14329 Beach Blvd.
“We want to bring Jacksonville great food and Southern hospitality that we were raised with in our family in Brooksville and share it through your experience at The Florida Cracker,” Blair Hensley said in a statement.
The 150-seat restaurant will open in a former tire store converted into a 4,000-square-foot restaurant modeled after its Brooksville version, which opened in 2012.
Blair Hensley said the kitchen dining room will seat 85 and the taproom will accommodate 65.
Florida Cracker Kitchen comprises a kitchen and dining area, a taproom, patio seating for both the kitchen and taproom, and space for the sale of Florida Cracker Trading Co. merchandise.
He said there are 40 employees.
Hensley said dining room hours are 7 a.m.-2:30 p.m. for breakfast and lunch, taproom hours start at 8 a.m. and close from 10 p.m. to midnight, and the merchandise store will operate 9 a.m.-6 p.m. The restaurant is closed Mondays.
The location is at northwest Beach Boulevard and San Pablo Road.
The menu shared Wednesday for the Brooksville and Jacksonville locations includes breakfast and lunch items.
Breakfast includes the “World Famous 10,000 Island Shrimp and Grits,” Ybor Breakfast Burritos and traditional and specialty items.
The highest-priced breakfast dish is the $12.99 oyster frittata. Most entrees range up from $5.99, with sides from 75 cents to $6.99 for “Side of Gator.”
Lunch includes Okeechobee Gumbo, Punta Rassa Burgers, Pine Island Bay Fry Baskets and St. Augustine Crackin’ Cool Salads.
Most expensive is the $12.99 Gator Basket with wild caught gator tail and the restaurant’s signature breading.
The bulk of the lunch menu starts at $7.99.
A Florida Cracker, the menu explains, is a state pioneer, mainly a farmer or cattle rancher, who searched the swamps to round up cows with the aid of cattle dogs and with whips that cracked.
