Thirty years of never cooking the same day twice

Kool Beanz Cafe opened on 4 June 1996. It has been open, in the same building, under the same chef-owner, ever since — which in the restaurant business is roughly the equivalent of a geological era.

Before the restaurant

Keith Baxter was born in London. His mother was a nurse; his father worked for NATO, which meant a childhood spent moving between postings and bases in different countries. What he wanted, from the evidence of television, was America. He got there in his twenties and has now lived here longer than he lived anywhere else.

The early jobs were not glamorous. He has been open about the low-paid work he did before cooking took hold, including a clerk’s job he describes as one of the worst he ever had. Cooking was the thing that stuck. He worked as a chef in kitchens up and down Florida, learning the trade the long way round, before landing in Tallahassee.

With the generosity and faith of a dear friend, together with a small group of people who were prepared to work very hard, on a wing and a prayer… this was to be my last stop on my personal restaurant business journey. Keith Baxter, writing on the restaurant’s 25th anniversary

Opening night, 1996

In 1996 the stretch of Thomasville Road where Kool Beanz sits was not the neighbourhood it is now. Midtown as a dining destination did not really exist yet. A small independent restaurant with an unpronounceable concept — a menu that would be thrown away and rewritten every day — was not an obvious business plan.

The building did not help the pitch either. Guests still write about it: a low, unassuming structure with a small sign, looking nothing like a first-class restaurant. Then the paint arrived. The hand-lettered sign, the sun mural, the turquoise panels. From the outside it now looks exactly like what it is.

The daily menu, and why it survived

Most restaurants that promise a daily changing menu quietly stop after a year. The arithmetic defeats them: new costings, new prep lists, new descriptions, new training, every single morning, forever.

Kool Beanz kept going because the daily rewrite is not a marketing device here, it is the working method. What comes in decides what gets cooked. The kitchen’s influences run from the American South through the Caribbean and Central and South America to South and East Asia, and the cooks pull from wherever their travels and their reading take them. A plate might carry harissa and collard greens and a miso vinaigrette in the same week.

A few dishes have earned permanent residency by popular demand. The mojo spiced chicken with shrimp and chorizo. The linguini with crawfish and tasso ham. The peppered flank steak. The black bean cakes. Regulars order them without looking, and everyone else gets to discover something new.

Art on the walls, food on the plate

The dining room doubles as a gallery for local artists, and the work is for sale. It has always been that way. It is why the room is a riot of colour, why the paintings change, and why guests get up mid-meal to look at something on the way back from the bathroom. More on the art programme.

The dessert section

Sylvia Gould joined the restaurant as a server about five months after opening. When the pastry chef left, she asked for the job, having never done it before. Baxter gave it to her on the strength of how she worked. Two decades later she was named one of twenty national semifinalists for the James Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Pastry Chef award — the only pastry chef in the state named alongside a Miami-area finalist that year — and was invited onto Food Network’s Best Baker in America.

Her desserts draw on her background: she was born in Michigan to a Vietnamese mother and a German-American father, and studied fine art at Florida State. The Vietnamese coffee baked Alaska, served with candied kumquats, sesame tulip, blackberries and hibiscus and chocolate syrups, is the dish most often described back to us by guests years after the fact. See an example dessert menu.

Thirty years

On 4 June 2026, Kool Beanz turned thirty. Local television came down; regulars came in; Baxter called the whole thing surreal and said it had been a great journey so far. The restaurant has been through recessions, a pandemic, industry-wide staffing shortages, and the ordinary attrition that closes most independent restaurants inside five years. It has also picked up a Best Casual Dining award, a run at the top of the local Tripadvisor rankings, a place on Florida Trend’s list of the state’s top restaurants, and a line in The New York Times. The full list is here.

None of that is the point, though. The point is the sentence painted on the wall, which has been the house rule since 1996 and is still the most accurate description of the place anyone has managed: eat, drink and talk loud — you’re among friends.