Second Street in Cedar Key will be flooded with tourists and locals Saturday and Sunday for the city’s 45th Annual Seafood Festival.
From 9 a.m to 5 p.m., patrons will stroll the street to Cedar Key City Park for a taste of the festival’s world famous seafood.
Sue Colson, vice mayor of Cedar Key, said the town of about 700 swells to 15,000 for the festival each year, “but we haven’t sunk yet.”
“I like to call it ‘island time,’” Colson said. “Sometimes people need a little island time, and here, it’s just eating and relaxing.”
Arts and crafts will line the street, and an assortment of nonprofit seafood vendors will pack the park, offering items like crab cakes, oysters, clams and grouper sandwiches.
The festival will feature the Smithsonian Institution’s The Way We Worked exhibit, which shows the lives of blue-collar Americans.
Thelma Cain, president of the Cedar Key Lioness Club, which is co-hosting the festival with the city’s Lions Club, said although crab cakes are her specialty, she’ll be making fried mullet dinners to go along with the exhibit.
“That’s how we started this 44 years ago,” Cain said. “It was fried mullet and oysters on the half-shell.”
[A version of this story ran on page 11 on 10/17/2014]
