Fox's Sherron...Out?

I really hope my friend Amanda is a vicious, heartless pathological liar.

It would be against her character, but stranger things have happened and maybe when she told me that Fox's Sherron Inn has been sold and may be slated for a million-dollar renovation, I'm hoping that it's some delusion brought on by a curable, and temporary palsy.

I don't want to believe her. And you probably don't want to believe her.

No one wants to believe her, because in my time in Miami, pushing eight years now, I have never met a person who doesn't hold Fox's in the highest regard - in this City, that's kind of amazing.

And so, for the moment, I'll suspend my belief, and chalk Amanda's news up to the ramblings of a woman who's suffering from some temporary dementia.

Fox's is in my top 5 places in Miami. It's a dark, wood-paneled, red-lit timewarp back to 1946 -- it's even got a walk-up package liquor window in the back, which I imagine is a holdover from Miami's Jim Crow days. Before smoking was outlawed in restaurants in Miami, a dense haze of cigarette smoke undulated over the Geriatric Old-Miamians (Read: Southerners) as they drank their "Seven-and-Sevens" and ate their clam sandwiches, ensconced in circular red booths of cracking vinyl, bouncing on springs that had long-since gone bad. I mean what I'm about to say in the nicest possible way, but if you can imagine what a restaurant would have looked like "on the other side" in Beetlejuice, that's pretty much what Fox's used to look like - Ghouls breathing smoke and eating what very well could be their last meal.

Although the haze is gone, the ceiling has been stained a deep chocolate brown from fifty-six years of constant exposure to plumes of Chesterfield smoke, and everything has a slightly-sticky-nicotiney film on it. Which is one of the factors contributing to Fox's overall awesomeness.

I'm sure even in the middle of the day, the interior of Fox's is as dark as it is at 2:30 in the morning, when you really should go home, but one last Manhattan is calling your name.

There's really... just so much to love about the place. I have a lot of different groups of friends, but the one universal commonality between all of them besides having excellent taste in friends (me) is that I could suggest going to Fox's for dinner and a couple drinks, and everyone would think that was a capital idea.

The food is about as classic American as you can get. And it's plentiful and it's GOOD. I always get the open faced turkey sandwich, which comes with a side salad with the best garlic dressing ever. And I put that motherfucker down, because it's so tasty, I can't help but eat 3,000 calories in one sitting. And who cares if the Waiter looks like the Peter Lorre based villain in Mighty-Mouse, the guy, as creepy as he is, is a damn good waiter, who's been at the place forever, and used to know what my order would be, when I lived just up the street, and was a regular.

Their drinks are stiff, well-made and phenomenal. And their happy hour always seemed to be whenever I was there.

I'm not doing the bar justice, because I can't put into words the depth of my love for that shopworn old dame, past her prime, but perfectly aged nonetheless - basically, Fox's is Rue McClanahan, if she was a bar. I think that's probably one of the biggest compliments I could pay.

And so, if you've never been there -- GO. Go tomorrow, before it's too late. If you have been there, go again. We all know this City is pretty atrocious at preserving its nearest and dearest institutions, and now I have something else to worry about -- that the Fox's I have known, and grown to live, will soon be just another memory.

Hopefully whoever bought Fox's will realize that there's no need to touch a silver hair on her head; that the formula has worked for 63 years, and there's absolutely no need to alter it now...

Or maybe Amanda's just a big lying jerk. I hope it's the latter.