Farmer John's changes hands
The new owners say they plan to stick with the popular restaurant's winning formula but add some of their own wrinkles, including a new name.
By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published March 23, 2006
BROOKSVILLE - Farmer John's Pancake House has new owners. The popular breakfast and lunch place a couple miles north of downtown soon will even have a new name.
But don't worry.
New owners Doug and Kellie Edwards know what old owner John Carlone built up over the last eight years. Farmer John's melds greasy-spoon grub with fine-dining fare and has a large, local, often fanatically loyal group of regulars. And the Edwardses aren't about to mess with that - at least not much.
The name will change by July to Nature Coast Cafe, and the restaurant might be open at night and on Mondays and definitely will be open through the summer, but the recipes will stay the same, the menu will stay mostly the same, and the old owner and the new owners say the staff is staying too.
"You don't fix what ain't broke," Doug Edwards said Tuesday morning at the restaurant.
The sale happened last week. The transition should be done by next week.
Carlone is 71 years old. He said Tuesday it was time for him to move on.
"I'm just fading away like an old soul, like an old rancher, like an old cowboy," he said. "Riding off into the sunset. Kicking off my spurs."
What he leaves behind is pretty darn good.
Carlone didn't want to talk about the sale price. Neither did the Edwardses. "But we got a gold mine," Kellie Edwards said.
As Hernando County's ever-increasing population keeps reaching numbers that make big, national chains see a viable market here, Farmer John's becomes that much more of an anomaly, and an institution.
"Most restaurants are bag-openers now," Carlone said this week. "You're going to get a processed product distributed by some big company and thrown in the toaster, in the microwave or who knows where.
"That's not what this is all about."
Carlone opened Farmer John's in 1998 - a blip, of course, in Brooksville time, where the roots run Old South, not New Florida. But the place just feels like one of those old spots that's been around forever.
Farmer John's, all 34 seats and 600 square feet of it, serves 2,000 to 3,000 plates a week, John Edwards said. It's in a little brick building at 1171 Howell Ave. "To get there," St. Petersburg Times food critic Chris Sherman once wrote, "head out of Brooksville on Howell Avenue, down the hill past the high school until Florida looks more like the Ozarks."
Carlone really is a farmer. He is trim, tan and has 35 head of cattle and 5 miles of fencing on 50 acres out on Lake Lindsey Road. But before he moved up from South Florida in 1984, he owned five restaurants in and around Fort Lauderdale, and a pub, he said, and two of those restaurants were four-star, white-glove type places.
At Farmer John's, the menu has standard bacon and eggs, biscuits and gravy and something called the Florida Cracker Breakfast. But it also offers honey orange crepes, French toast stuffed with cream cheese and blueberry compote and omelets with spinach, fresh asparagus and cucumber dill sauce. The house special is Crepes Grand Marnier.
Even the toast tastes special.
The Times' Ernest Hooper once said in a column that "you haven't lived in Tampa Bay" until you've eaten a Farmer John's omelet "as big as your head."
Carlone started talking in earnest with the Edwardses in January.
Doug and Kellie Edwards are 40 and 36, respectively. They were married in October 2000 and moved here from Tampa two months later. They own Nature Coast Catering around the corner from Farmer John's and live on 5 acres in northwest Hernando with eight cats, two dogs, four birds and a turtle.
Doug likes the Gorgonzola salad at Farmer John's.
Kellie calls herself more "a banana pancake girl."
Carlone said Tuesday they were "good people" who "would take care of Farmer John's."
Farmer John's, of course, is traditionally closed from May to September. Now it will be open in the summer - except this July, the Edwardses said, when they're going on a previously scheduled family vacation. They eventually might add more pasta dishes and cold sandwiches, and maybe some wheat, rye and pumpernickel bread to white and cinnamon raisin.
Overall, though, the Edwardses are promising more of the delicious same.
"This place has a rhythm," he said.
"It kind of has its own heartbeat," she said.
They know because they're like most folks around here. They eat at Farmer John's all the time.
Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.