Greetings from Key West!
Or at least a trip down Memory Lane.
Amy Drew Thompson can follow a winding road as you will see when you read this story about me and ‘The Eternal Honorary Mayor of Margaritaville’!
The chef & the rock star: Norman Van Aken remembers Jimmy Buffett
Two transplants as fused to Florida as Carl Hiaasen or alligators, the chef and the rock star knew each other before either was famous.
Chef Norman Van Aken has beer and a cheeseburger at Off Site in Miami on Tuesday, September 12, 2023 as he reflects on his long-time friendship with entertainer Jimmy Buffet. (Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun Sentinel)
By AMY DREW THOMPSON | amthompson@orlandosentinel.com | Orlando Sentinel
September 25, 2023 at 5:15 a.m.
“It wasn’t just about the passing of an individual, it was all about the cosmic wheel we’re all on together,” Norman Van Aken tells me slowly, thoughtfully, as he ponders the passing of his friend and fellow fabled Floridian Jimmy Buffett.
“And when a person like Jimmy checks out, there’s certainly a bell that rings in the universe.”
Neither the rock star, nor the rock-star chef, were natives, but both are inexorably tied to this state by way of the city that would become Margaritaville, which they found in the same year: 1971.
Van Aken got there first. But he wasn’t chasing any dreams of the kitchen. Not yet. He was just getting out of the cold.360p
“I was doing all sorts of s— back then,” the Father of New World Cuisine tells me. “Painting houses, hot-tar roofing, working at a carnival…” he continues. “And then I went to this party.”
‘Margaritaville’ singer Jimmy Buffett, who turned beach-bum life into an empire, dies at 76
Old friends, brothers and former neighbors, greeted him, but another of their siblings was missing. Van Aken inquired as to his whereabouts. Turned out he’d been dealing and got caught, so he ran off to Key West.
“Where’s Key West?” Van Aken asked.
“You know, you go to Miami and just keep on going,” they said.
Van Aken pondered that, beneath the frozen Illinois skies and the weight of a broken relationship, and said, “Anyone wanna go to Key West?”
The brothers had an open calendar and a Ford Econoline van. They left right from the party, with a few other willing gypsies along for the ride.
“Thirty-six hours later we pulled onto the orchid-scented streets of Key West. It was about four o’clock in the morning. And my friend, who had grown up just across the creek from where I was born and raised, was living there in a little conch shack with his girlfriend. And they didn’t bat an eye.”
Beers were cracked. Pipes were lit.
“I was inaugurated,” he says. “I was like This is my place.”
A young Norman Van Aken cooks in Key West. (Courtesy Norman Van Aken)
Time passed, and Van Aken, ‘til then a jack-of-all-trades — master of none — found himself working the midnight shift at a 24-hour barbecue joint. Two nights later, a barefoot guitar slinger showed up and started playing songs beneath the banyan tree outside. His name was Jimmy Buffett.
“He didn’t have his record deal. No one knew him. No one knew the music. He hadn’t performed the miracle yet,” said Van Aken, who’d left the country’s southernmost town for a time, but returned and put down roots.
“The island had that Lorelai effect on me, but in a good way,” he says. “Still does”
Buffett had grown roots, too, and a couple nights after hearing the busker, they met in earnest in about as Key West a moment one could have — right outside Sloppy Joe’s. He was walking with a girl who’d been in the van the morning Van Aken first rolled into town. Her name was Helen, and she waved him over.
“Hey, Norman…! You know Jimmy? He just did a record. He’s gonna be famous.”
They shook hands and said hello and Van Aken ambled on, soaking up the sunshine.
It was a pleasant exchange on the figurative eve of Buffet’s forever marriage to the town.
With the release of ‘A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean,’ the world came to know songs like “Grapefruit – Juicy Fruit,” “He Went to Paris” and the relevant-throughout-all-time standard, “Why Don’t We Get Drunk.”
“That album really became a soundtrack to life in Key West,” Van Aken remembers. “I was just amazed by the whole thing.”
By that time, he was cooking at Louie’s Backyard and well past his greasy-spoon beginnings, but still entirely smitten with the town.
“There was this overall Bohemian art scene. Jimmy was the center of this constellation of people. He was a poet and an author.”
And, he notes, a gourmand who’d happen into Louie’s often with writers such as Thomas McGuane, whose “Ninety-two in the Shade” had built on the Key West mystique, or artists like Russell Chatham, or author and filmmaker Guy de la Valdene (“he was a French count!” Van Aken tells me) or poet/author/food writer Jim Harrison.
“Jimmy hung around all these guys, and Harrison was a legendary eater…” Van Aken gets lost in the conjuring of his late friend, who died in 2016.
“He was an amazing person to look at. He had one eye that just went way out, like Jean-Paul Sartre. Total walleye. And big gap teeth. He was built kind of like a wrestler … a real outdoorsman, and at that time he was just making a name for himself, having written a few books.”
Van Aken, by his own admission, wasn’t the Norman Van Aken folks know today, the NVA who meanders the dining room greeting guests. He spent his shifts in the kitchen. But one day, Harrison caught him working on the galleys of what would be his first book.
He ceremoniously autographed them. Then he asked what Van Aken was doing.
“I said, ‘Well, dinner’s gonna start in about an hour.’ And he goes, ‘F— that. Let’s get in the car.’”
It was a Ford Mustang convertible. There were two topless girls in the front. He and Harrison jumped in back (“Someone else was back there, too,” he tells me. “I remember it being a little cramped.”) Van Aken had a cooler into which he’d thrown a deli quart of conch salad, figuring his friend would get hungry.
“Jim had a thermos of straight rum — obviously he’d been drinking before we ever got to that point — and he and Jimmy were best friends. We pulled into what eventually became Shrimpboat Sound, walked in without anyone stopping us and just sat down. Jimmy was playing. And we were drinking rum and having conch salad. A good memory.”
Then there was the night he fell out Buffet’s window.
“Jimmy was living next door to Louie’s Backyard, I was living at the restaurant,” Van Aken jokes.
Service was over. He and the bartender, who’d grabbed a bottle of rum for their late-night happy hour, headed over to the waterfront home to hang out. Buffet and his buddy, Keith Sykes, were working on a song.
Sykes, whose tunes have been recorded by an army of superstars, holds esteem with Parrotheads in part for a co-writing credit on “Volcano,” but on this night, they were working on a ditty with the Buffett-esque refrain of “s— happens.”
It was profoundly prophetic.
“I sat in the window, there was a breeze coming through, and the water was really beautiful,” Van Aken remembers. “The moonlight was dancing across the Gulf of Mexico and they were working on the song and then, I don’t know…”
He chuckles.
“Maybe it was one extra glass of rum, but I fell over backwards out the big, second-story window.”
No one realized it at the moment, but Van Aken only fell four or five feet, right into a giant pile of sand.
“Chris took the keys to my motor scooter, and they finished the song.”
Chef Norman Van Aken kept a copy of his book in the restaurant for notable folks and friends to sign. Jimmy Buffett was one of them. (Courtesy Norman Van Aken)
Years later, Buffett would pop into Norman’s, sometimes with colleagues from Margaritaville. On one occasion, he signed a copy of Van Aken’s book, which many other notables had signed over the years.
To Norman – I knew you when neither of us were famous (in Key West). Your pal, Jimmy
There was another time, in Las Vegas at a food-related event, when Van Aken, at Buffett’s request, introduced him to French chef and restaurateur Daniel Boulud. He left them to chat, figuring it would be a solid match.
“I figured Daniel would get a kick out of it,” he tells me. “He’s always up for a good time. That guy can party like nobody. He’s epic.”
Jimmy was epic, too.
“He was able to bring everybody to a mythical place,” says Van Aken, who does much the same with food. But before there was food, there was music. Van Aken’s first love was writing songs.
“And I wrote them … but I didn’t have that thing where I could deal with the rejection of a song not being loved. With food, I wasn’t quite so dramatic when I was a young person. I was just pretty good at being a short-order cook and then I began to read and taste and wonder.”
And fuse.
Though the now-ubiquitous term he used to define his contribution, “fusion,” came from more than the idea of melding cuisines, like French and Thai: “It was about haute and rustic. There were people doing fancy French food in Key West at that time, but they were missing the guts of the Caribbean food and Latin food I was tasting in people’s homes and in the little restaurants.”
Van Aken’s style began to evolve, “but Jimmy never turned into anything. The Beatles were simple when they started off, and then they became Sgt. Pepper. Jimmy never did that. He stayed with what we could all understand easily.” He laughs. “That’s why he’s a billionaire and I’m not.”
Like most people, Van Aken didn’t know Jimmy was sick.
“When I learned he’d passed, it really set me back on my heels.”
He remembers his friend as easygoing. Non-judgmental. Grateful for what life had brought him.
In this photo provided by the Florida Keys News Bureau, Florida Keys residents and visitors march along Duval Street Sunday, Sept. 3, 2023, in Key West, Fla., during a procession celebrating the life of musical icon Jimmy Buffett. Singer-songwriter Buffett, who popularized beach bum soft rock with the escapist Caribbean-flavored song “Margaritaville” and turned that celebration of loafing into a billion-dollar empire of restaurants, resorts and frozen concoctions, died Friday, Sept. 1. He was 76. (Rob O’Neal/Florida Keys News Bureau via AP)
“He always seemed to be having a good time with the Parrotheads, and I think that was why he was so loved and embraced. They could adore him. A lot of celebrities today would be really uncomfortable with that, but he just seemed to think it was a hoot.”
Buffett would cut nearly 30 more studio albums after “Sport Coat,” — Van Aken cites “I Have Found Me A Home” as his enduring favorite — but it’s “He Went to Paris” that he points to as perhaps Jimmy’s most prescient bit of writing.
“Some of it’s magic, some of it’s tragic,” he recites. “But I had a good life all the way.”“