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Pensacola's iconic, family-owned seafood market thrives on tradition and change
It's 10 a.m. on a Tuesday and raining, but Joe Patti's Seafood Co. is popping.
The market - a Gulf Coast institution for decades - is impossible to miss. It hulks on the fringe of downtown Pensacola's waterfront and is heralded by a replica of a Viking ship and a shrimp-shaped and lighted sign.
Tourists might want help finding the place, but not locals. Around here, the Patti name is synonymous with seafood. Millions of customers - natives and tourists alike - visit the market each year.
On this particular June morning, like most mornings, the walls are lined with people. They clutch numbered tickets or lug coolers heavy with ice, while a small army of clerks bark orders, bag shrimp and carve off hunks of tuna.
Around the comer, through a doorway and down the hall, Frank Patti watches from his desk as the spectacle unfolds on a dozen camera monitors. Patti, who is known in these parts as "the seafood don," is reigning patriarch of one of the region's most enduring and successful seafood dynasties.
For a king, Patti takes an unusually avid interest in the minutiae of the market, hence the screens. He can be gritty and short-tempered - "Shut that goddamn door!" "Where's my coffee?" "Is that a puddle on the floor?" - but he's also a hard worker. Even in his 80s, he shows up early and leaves late.
Mostly, he is fiercely proud of what his family has built. He should be. Today, the market grosses $25 million to $27 million in sales each year. It's a far cry from his humble upbringing.
Patti, the son of Sicilian immigrants, was raised in a three-room shack on De Villiers Street, just a few blocks from his present-day office. The oldest of six siblings, he worked with his father, Giuseppe, on his shrimp boat and with his mother, Anna, in the seafood market she ran out of the front room of their house.
In those days, nobody knew the Patti name. There were no hordes of tourists, no neon shrimp signs proclaiming seafood specials, and no Viking ships. People looked down their noses at those who hauled their living from...