Bo's Fish Wagon Key West

801 Caroline St Key West, FL 33040   

If you’re looking for where the Key West locals eat and you’re ready to get away from the crowds on Duval, find your way over to Bo’s Fish Wagon on Caroline Street.  

From the outside, the place looks like a real piece of work. This tasty Key West restaurant is hidden behind overgrown bushes, an old rusted out pick-up truck and maybe a bathtub or two. The wagon itself is just that, a wagon that apparently has been hauled around Key West from one location to another and has now come to rest on Caroline Street.  

One look at the place and you know the food has to be great. There is no other option! 

The menu is slim. There’s a burger, chicken sandwich, a fish sandwich, and shrimp. Sides include cole slaw and fries. Most everything comes deep fried, but you can get it grilled for a couple more bucks. The walk-up counter waitress wore a Coca-Cola apron and explained that she loves coke products, but they only sell Pepsi. The place opens sometime shortly after 11 AM and they always close before 8:59 PM.

We ordered our burger, fries and fish sandwich and settled onto two bar stools at a warped plywood covered bar top facing Caroline Street. As I looked around I realized the only thing in the entire place that was new were the unused condiments in the Bud Light 6-pack carton turned into a makeshift condiment holder. For napkins people were passing around rolls of paper towels.  The walls are covered with whatever got stapled to them and most of it is so faded that you can only imagine what once might have been. If this were in a big city, somebody would have paid a fortune to theme this restaurant. 

Some nights they have live entertainment (try to get a schedule, we dare you). The first time we walked by it was so busy that we decided to come back another day.

So how was the food? Excellent; right up there with the best fish sandwiches’ ever. You know how you get that fishy taste that sticks with you? It comes from cooking in oil that has been used too long. No fishy taste here! The fish (grouper) was light, flaky, perfectly battered and very tasty. Instead of typical tarter sauce, Bo’s uses a lime-mayonnaise that adds a nice tropical flavor. The burger was made from fresh meat and the fries were hand cut from fresh potatoes. As we were leaving we noticed that one of the cooks was actually chopping up heads of lettuce to use on the sandwiches. What restaurant has even seen a whole head of lettuce in years?  

What more could we ask for? Quite frankly, nothing. Bo’s is exactly what we wanted, a little slice of old Key West.