Islamorada Fishing Club opens new home, honors 1950 roots

The Islamorada Fishing Club opened its new home on Madeira Road at mile marker 82 with a three-story building that tries to do two things at once: modernize the member experience and keep the club from feeling like a brand-new restaurant. Covered parking sits on the first floor, along with an entry lobby, elevator, historic photos, a coral rock from the old entrance and a commemorative plaque tying the new clubhouse to the one that came before it. Upstairs, the second floor holds the main dining room, an elegant bar, retail space and an outdoor patio, with room for 140 guests. The third-floor deck has become part of the everyday draw as the club settles into its first full year in the new building.

That balance matters in Islamorada, where the club says it was founded in 1950 by avid fishermen, fishing guides, charter boat captains and their peers. The organization says it now has more than 450 members, many of them from the same families that have used the club for generations. It also says it helped shape the rules and regulations for Everglades National Park, a reminder that this has long been more than a dining room on the edge of the highway. The club kept its existing tables and chairs through the move, a deliberate choice by board president Joe Roth III to make sure members still felt they were walking into the fishing club, not a generic new venue.

The transition took more than a year of visible work. In March 2025, the club said construction was still moving ahead with exterior stucco and painting, electrical and plumbing rough-ins and drywall ahead. By Aug. 16, 2025, it was announcing the last dinner service at the temporary location before the move into the new clubhouse. In April 2026, management said attendance was way up at the new facility and credited the atmosphere, food quality and staff, even as work continued on acoustics, lobby furniture, the retail area and shade structures on the upper level. General manager Vinnie Feola, a Culinary Institute of America-trained chef, led the search that brought in chef Oscar Pajares, signaling that the food program is now part of the club’s identity, not just an amenity.

The club has also pushed fishing back to the center of its calendar. Its Captain’s Cup Sailfish Tournament drew 68 anglers on 19 boats in January 2024, and the club says tournaments, youth events and seminars are once again part of the operation. Its education and conservation trust, IFACT, has a lease arrangement tied to the new building so it can hold fundraising events there and help finance the interior buildout. IFACT has historically funded scholarships for young people pursuing marine careers and helped working captains in need.

That combination of private-club access, public-facing events and fishing heritage is what gives the new clubhouse its weight in Monroe County. In a village officially promoted as the Sport Fishing Capital of the World, with charter fishing dating to the late 1930s and a long history of backcountry and saltwater fly-fishing innovation, the Islamorada Fishing Club is trying to prove that modernization can strengthen a local institution without erasing the culture that built it.