In 1950 Thomas M. “Timmy” Wiles opened a little dockside restaurant on Captiva Island, the northern partner of Sanibel Island, that he christened Timmy’s Nook. Back in those days no causeway joined the two islands with the Florida mainland, so all comers came, in one way or another, by boat, as Teddy Roosevelt did in the early 1900s when he traveled to Captiva to trophy fish, or by plane, as Charles Lindbergh did when he regularly used the beach in front of the ’Tween Waters Inn as an airstrip.
Even though his doctor had ordered him to cut back on physical work, Wiles built Timmy’s Nook himself — from the ground up. Having previously been in the concrete-block business, he knew what he was doing. He laid the restaurant’s foundation, poured the concrete floor, and called an old machine back into service to make the concrete blocks for the rest of the building.
At first Timmy’s Nook was just a short-order sandwich place, but Wiles, who’d found himself serving lots of local fishermen, soon built a bigger menu that featured straight-off-the-boat seafood and all the appropriate accompaniments. This, it turned out, was the winning formula. Everything was good, really good: the homemade conch chowder, the stone-crab claws, the deep-fried barracuda fillets, the shrimp scampi, and the real-deal Key lime pie, to name just some of the standbys. And some things were so good — especially the crunchy grouper sandwiches and blueberry sour cream pie — that folks on Captiva still speak of them in wistful and even reverential terms.
Captiva began to change a lot with the opening of the Sanibel Causeway in 1963, but “The Nook” — as the locals had come to call it — stayed pretty much the same. The fried seafood platters were as good as could be gotten anywhere along Florida’s Gulf Coast, and plenty of customers still arrived by boat, tying up just southwest of Marker 38 to get a bite to eat before going on their way.
A guidebook of the era described Timmy’s Nook as “a small green hut and marina” with “the requisite tarpon on the wall.” It was, to be sure, an unpretentious eatery, with cool breezes from the Gulf of Mexico as the only form of air-conditioning and a black-chalkboard menu that could change as often as the fish came in. And there was that sign, visible to all who entered: “The difficult age has come and lit / Too tired to work . . . too poor to quit . . .”
When Wiles died in 1970, his wife, Beulah, who’d some years earlier retired from her long-held position as Captiva’s postmistress, ran the restaurant until three of their seven daughters — Barbara, Dona, and Linda — took over. In 1976 came a renovation and enlargement of Timmy’s Nook, though its unpretentious ambience was left undisturbed. Outside there were weatherworn picnic tables covered with red-checkered vinyl tablecloths, and as you ate lunch you could peer down through the gaps in the floorboards and see the waters of Pine Island Sound as they lapped gently against the shore.
By the early 1990s Timmy’s Nook had claimed the title of Captiva’s oldest restaurant and was often assigned, at least on an informal basis, “historic” or “landmark” status. Its days, however, were numbered. In 1994 the Wiles family sold Timmy’s Nook to Andreas Bieri, a local restaurateur and co-owner of another Captiva landmark, The Mucky Duck. It served its last meals on April 15, 1994.
Timmy’s Nook was soon demolished, its concrete remains used as landfill for the modern and much larger restaurant that Bieri built in its place. The Green Flash, so named for the fleeting spot of intense green light that you can sometimes see as the sun disappears over the horizon at sunset, opened on December 8, 1995.
Blueberry Sour Cream Pie, the signature dessert at Timmy’s Nook, later appeared on the menu at The Mucky Duck. But if you want to make it yourself, here’s the original recipe.
