Best Bar on the Water

The sky is heavy and gray. A soft rain falls. You're sitting on a dock built by hand in the 1970s from bits and pieces of other people's Hollywood Beach docks, at a table fashioned from a big hunk of flotsam that washed up here too. Russell Kohuth's littoral creation would never get past a 21st-century building inspector. The catch of the day is mahi-mahi; take it deep-fat fried and crunchy. Tom Waits growls from the jukebox. Bob Dylan is queued up next. A cabin cruiser slides by with Fax-It written on the stern in cursive script. It would be nice to own a yacht. But right now, watching the raindrops make interlocking ripple-circles over the surface of the bay is engrossing. You are untethered. Computer, Worldwide Web, e-mail, fax, Palm Pilot, cell phone have no hold. You have entered the Le Tub zone. A phalanx of toilets and bathtubs transformed into planters separates that world from this slice of Floridian weirdness. It's comforting somehow. With toilets as a decorating motif, Le Tub's not a fitting setting for sleek fancy techno-cats. Breathe. Note the menu: In the evening, shoes required.