Seventy-five years of Ted Peters Famous Smoked Fish

If you’re driving down Pasadena Avenue with your windows down, you’ll smell it before it comes into view: Florida red oak, crackling beneath racks of freshly caught mackerel, salmon, mahi-mahi, and mullet. Ted Peters Famous Smoked Fish has been smoking fish this way since it opened in 1951. It’s the first stop for many St. Petersburg natives and vacationing snowbirds after a long afternoon on the beach, and for over seventy years, it has remained gloriously stuck in the time of the Kennedy administration. Rows of lacquered brown picnic tables line the exterior of the open-air dining room as sun-kissed waitresses breeze past, dropping handwritten checks, their T-shirt collars stained with sweat. In the kitchen, line cooks flip jumbo-size hamburger patties and anoint slices of toasted Wonder Bread with heaping scoops of house-made fish spread. Frosted glass mugs of Barq’s root beer are served by the tray, and the centerpiece, smoked fish, is served on turquoise melamine plates.

“Which, by the way, are rudely expensive,” says Mike Lathrop, one of the second-generation owners and a nephew of Ted Peters, a plumber turned fisherman who opened the restaurant with his half brother after relocating from upstate New York to Tampa Bay in the 1940s. “So many people, for so many years, came in and said, ‘Don’t change anything about this restaurant,’” he says. So he didn’t. It’s what makes dining at Ted Peters a singular experience.

Floridians have been smoking fish for centuries, a common preservation practice among the indigenous Tocobaga community that inhabited the region, where the waters of Tampa Bay teemed with schools of mullet. Ted Peters learned the technique after foraging an old smoker off the side of a highway in the mid-1950s. He refurbished it and placed it near the road outside his restaurant, so that the smell of the slow-cooking fish could lure in customers driving by in their Thunderbirds and Bel Airs. Half a century later, my own memories of Ted Peters begin with impromptu family lunches. From the kitchen, my mom would call, “Uncle Rick’s getting burgers with Pati. You hungry?”

Soon enough, we’d all find ourselves crowded around a sun-drenched picnic table. My order has hardly changed: a jumbo cheeseburger oozing with Velveeta, topped with lettuce, onion, ketchup, and mayonnaise. On the side, a bowl of warm German potato salad speckled with onion and bacon bits. As I got older and my taste for fresh seafood grew, I added smoked mackerel doused in fresh lemon juice and horseradish sauce. Surrounded by family, I would sit back and take it all in: The constant perfume of red oak burning in the smokehouse next door. The sea breeze, drifting through the dining room, carrying with it the sweet scent of sunscreen and salty air.

“There are still some of the same servers that were working there thirty years ago when I started going,” says Danny Newberg, a chef who grew up in St. Petersburg and moved to New York City after culinary school, where he cooked at Momofuku Ko and Estela. Ted Peters, he says, is his favorite restaurant. Like me, his go-to order has always been a cheeseburger and root beer, plus a smoked mullet for the table. “The consistency isn’t luck,” he observes. “There’s someone there with passion.”

The Ted Peters smoked fish spread is something of legend in St. Petersburg. At every backyard barbecue and pool party, there it sits: a Styrofoam pint container nestled between a tray of hot dogs and a bowl of Lay’s potato chips. A combination of locally caught mahi-mahi and mullet, the smoked fish is mixed by hand with celery, onion, sweet relish, and mayonnaise. It’s consistently briny and perfectly smoked. Like the rest of Ted Peters, the recipe has never changed.

“I can’t go anywhere without somebody saying to me, ‘Did you bring some fish spread with you?,’” says Lathrop, the owner. It might be a dentist interrupting him during a routine checkup or a contractor jokingly stopping him in Home Depot.

For years, St. Petersburg was defined by its nickname, “God’s waiting room,” a serene rest stop for Northeastern snowbirds on their final migration. Still, the small city was a cultural hub for music and arts, with the largest collection of works by Salvador Dalí outside of Spain. Small music venues highlighting local punk bands and independent art galleries lined Central Avenue, the sidewalks overflowing with flip-flop-wearing concertgoers and art enthusiasts with facial piercings.

Line cooks flip jumbo-size hamburger patties and anoint slices of toasted Wonder Bread with heaping scoops of house-made fish spread

St. Petersburg’s population has experienced significant growth in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic. Young remote workers looking for a change of scenery relocated to Tampa Bay from cities like New York City and Chicago, drawn by its warm weather and year-round beach access. Between 2020 and 2024, nearly 25 percent of relocating Americans moved to Florida, almost half of them settling in the Tampa Bay region. To those of us who remember the St. Petersburg of two decades ago, the development that has occurred as a result can be observed everywhere you look. What was once an independent bookstore is now a bustling craft brewery surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings. A quiet block of Central Avenue is now home to a Sweetgreen.

“When I was in high school, people would go to Tampa or Ybor City to go to bars or restaurants, and now I feel like the inverse is happening,” reflects Lisa Finegold, a New York–based actor who moved to St. Petersburg as a high school student in the early 2000s. At that time, the small downtown punk scene offered her a community in which to express teenage angst and individuality, but these days, the same sidewalks where she spent late weeknight evenings with friends seem to boast far more Vineyard Vines than Doc Martens. “I hope that St. Pete never loses its weird local vibe, but I can feel it slipping, which is scary.”

To many, dining institutions that have stood the test of time like Ted Peters are a window into a Florida that is increasingly shadowed by a growing South Beach influence: old Florida, before the tech bros and salad chains.

“Ted Peters is so classically Florida, in the sense that you might be going there on your way home from the beach, but it’s not a tropical spot. There are no palm trees. There’s no Ritz,” says Margot Ash, a longtime St. Petersburg resident. “It feels like it’s preserving the spirit of the place we grew up.”

This past fall, hurricanes Milton and Helene ravaged the Gulf Coast beaches in an unprecedented way. Ted Peters was not left untouched. The restaurant experienced significant flooding, losing refrigerators as well as priceless memorabilia, like letters from celebrities and politicians who had frequented the restaurant, and a gun case owned by the outdoorsman Eddie Bauer, a family heirloom. Still, the staff recovered quickly, and the restaurant was back open for business within days.

The home I grew up in off Treasure Island Beach took on over half a foot of floodwater in the storm. The morning after, my mom sent me photos of the flood line in my childhood bedroom and of our furniture in a pile on the street, echoed by rows and rows of my neighbors’ mattresses and refrigerators tangled up across from them.

Walking into the house for the first time two months later, the walls had been gutted, and the floors had been scrubbed ten times over. Hungry for some semblance of normalcy, I got back in the car and started driving. Turning left onto Pasadena Avenue, I rolled down the windows, the smell of Florida red oak and mackerel wafting through my window like it always has.