Cap’s Place

If you love museums, but think you’d love them more if they free-poured cocktails like they were hired by an enemy to make you sleep past your alarm clock, then you might love Cap’s Place. This Lighthouse Point seafood restaurant, which has been around since the ‘20s, is not making mind-blowing food. But the crab cakes are great, the fish of the day does the job, and the history of this place has been preserved beautifully.

Cap’s Place knows that history is its biggest strength. Photographs and documents that are nearly a century old line the wooden walls. Along with a menu, your server hands you a piece of paper that provides a history lesson on Cap’s, in addition to a hilariously random list of notable attendees that include Ken Burns, Walt Disney, Al Capone, and Paris Hilton.

To get here, you have to take a 90-second boat ride from a nearby marina. Once dropped off at the dock, you can head right to the dining room for a cold glass full of bourbon (which they refer to as a “Manhattan”), or spend some time at the bar, a separate wooden shack that would probably look very familiar to a time traveler from 1929. Get something fried, or just fill the table up with nothing but crab cakes, the only thing on the menu we’d swim back for. But more than anything, Cap’s is a place to sit back and feel grateful that the spirit of old South Florida hasn’t been completely paved over.