Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/375259
(top, both photos) rob o'neal photography/the ernest hemingway home and museum, (key lime pie) michael kissinger, sloppy joes f a l l 2 0 1 4 | w e s t w o r l d 21 party zone – imagine a fresher-smelling Bourbon Street with a higher ratio of Tommy Bahama shirts. Sure you can party with snowbirds and long-weekenders or brave the jugglers and fire-dancers of Mallory Square for the nightly Sunset Celebration, but scratch beneath the touristy surface and Key West oozes with character, unintentional kitsch and a certain rough-around-the-edges charm. All of which you'll find in abundance at Blue Heaven. A favourite with locals, the open-air, driftwood-clad eatery is part hippie, part beach bum, and you'll likely share your al fresco meal alongside one of the thousands of chickens and roosters that run wild in the streets of Key West. Protected by a city ordi- nance, these free-roaming "gypsy chickens" apparently descended from those brought over by Cuban settlers in the 1800s, which in turn came from Spain. With the banning of cockfighting in the 1970s, the population of Key West's charismatic cluckers took flight. As for Blue Heaven, lore has it the property once hosted cockfighting, gambling and Friday night boxing matches refereed by Ernest Hemingway. e restaurant/bakery also makes a mean lobster benny and gravity-defying key lime pie – perfect for a day of dodging rambunc- tious roosters, boozy introspection and soul searching. My server? From Belarus, of course. Importance of Ernest A few blocks from Blue Heaven, it's hard to miss the Keys' best-known and most-frequented tourist attraction, the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum. e literary giant lived in Key West on and off throughout the 1930s, ini- tially enticed by an invitation to go big-game fishing. But his time in Key West was also pro- ductive, and during his stay he wrote many of his best-known works, including To Have and Have Not, the non-fiction work Green Hills of Africa and short stories e Snows of Kilimanjaro and e Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. Visitors can walk the lush grounds, wander through the Spanish colonial estate-style home built in 1851 and peruse Hemingway's writing studio above the pool house. According to Hemingway Home events director Dave Gon- zales, the Nobel Prize-winning writer was not only the godfather of big-game fishing but also a pioneer of the home office and teleworking. So, I guess we have him to blame for that. en there's the matter of the 40-plus cats who call the place home. Said to have descended from a cat named Snowball, which Hemingway brought over from Cuba, the famous felines are a tourist attraction in their own right. Half of the cats carry the recessive polydactyl gene and subsequently have six toes. For Whom the Bar Tolls Key West's love for Hemingway goes beyond the cat-scented walls of the Hemingway Home, however. Every year, Sloppy Joe's, a frequent watering hole of the writer, holds a look-alike contest, while the slate of events during the annual Hemingway Days includes a tongue-in-cheek running with the bulls, (top left) The Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum is the Keys' most-frequented tourist attraction; (above) one of the many cats that roam Hemingway's former home, this is Hairy Truman inside the Nobel Prize-winning writer's studio; (below left) a signature dish of key lime pie at Blue Heaven eatery; (bottom right) Would-be Hemingways gather at Sloppy Joe's for the annual look-alike contest.