Some of the best meals in Florida hide at the end of a two-lane road with nothing around but moss, water, and quiet. You drive past palmetto scrub thinking you have made a wrong turn, then a low wooden building appears and the parking lot is somehow full at one in the afternoon.
Inside, the walls are stacked with old books, the grits are stone-ground, and the dessert menu carries a pie recipe with a Pulitzer Prize attached to its history. It is the kind of stop that rearranges your idea of what rural Southern cooking can be.
A Swamp-Edge Dining Room at the End of County Road 325
Follow County Road 325 through Alachua County and the landscape narrows to water on both sides. Cross Creek is the thin ribbon of land between Orange Lake and Lochloosa Lake, an unincorporated dot on the map with more herons than houses.
The Yearling Restaurant sits at 14531 County Road 325 in Hawthorne, a low building with a weathered exterior that gives away almost nothing about the interior. Opened in the 1950s, it has served Southern and Old Florida cooking to anyone willing to make the drive ever since…