Blackbeard’s Inn: The Family Behind a New Smyrna Tradition

Harry and Mary Kinzey opened Blackbeard’s with their son Randy and his wife Peggy in 1980. Their history of the restaurant describes the sustained effort it took to establish the business. The next generation, Randy and Peggy’s son Jason, became part of its continuing story.

Those names make the beginning more tangible. Several people put their working lives into the same undertaking. The result would have to become useful and enjoyable to people outside the family for the effort to carry forward.

I appreciate the distance between that early uncertainty and the ease with which somebody can now say a familiar restaurant’s name. The customer’s confidence is an achievement. It comes after the decisions and work that made the place worth remembering.

A family restaurant contains those two perspectives at once. For the people building it, the business is a livelihood and a responsibility. For the people arriving, it can be a welcome pause in the day.

When it works over time, other families begin attaching their own lives to the place one family created.

Blackbeard’s gives longtime staff a place in its own history, recognizing employees whose connection has extended across decades. That is a detail worth slowing down for.

A restaurant’s identity lives partly in things that are easy to photograph. Much of it also lives in people: how work is understood, how a room runs, and the accumulated familiarity that makes a complex evening appear natural.

Long service gives a business human continuity. People carry knowledge that belongs to the place, including countless small things learned through experience. A name on a sign depends on that living knowledge inside the building.

I like that the Kinzeys include the staff when they describe their extended family. The restaurant’s history becomes larger and more accurate when the people doing the work remain visible in it.

A tradition needs people willing to repeat the effort. Blackbeard’s makes that part of its story explicit.

The restaurant’s generous dinner tradition gives the human story a form people can experience. There is a sense of a whole occasion being provided, something with enough substance to settle into.

That matters because a familiar restaurant has to give memory something concrete to hold. People remember how an evening felt through particular details. Small pleasures can become shorthand for the entire place.

At Blackbeard’s, the well-known cinnamon roll is one such detail. It is an unexpectedly personal way for a seafood-and-steak restaurant to stay in someone’s mind. A person can remember a small part of the meal and recover the larger feeling around it.

The connection between generosity and recognition is part of the restaurant’s character. People can look forward to returning because they have something specific to anticipate.

A family’s effort becomes a guest’s familiar pleasure.

When another generation joins an established restaurant, it encounters a name other people already care about. That affection is valuable, and it brings responsibility with it.

Blackbeard’s history makes the next generation visible. The story has a beginning, people who sustained it, and someone helping carry it onward. New Smyrna gets to keep building its own associations around that continuity.

Norwood’s offers a different local example of a restaurant whose history remains active. Each place has its own character, but both reveal the people behind the familiar address.

What I admire about Blackbeard’s is the work inside the word tradition. The family took the chance. The team helped make it last. Generations of guests found reasons to return. That is a story a town is fortunate to have.