Robert Is Here — The Last Real Fruit Stand in Florida and the Homestead Gateway to the Wildest Everglades

You turn off the Florida Turnpike at exit 2 and drive south through Homestead until the strip-malls thin out and the avocado nurseries start. Twenty more minutes on SW 344th Street and the road has narrowed to two lanes lined with mango trees. On the right, a yellow-and-red roadside stand with a sign the size of a billboard. The sign says ROBERT IS HERE in letters that have been there, in one form or another, since Eisenhower’s second term.

You pull in. There are tour buses. There are families. There is a goat. There is a line out the door for a milkshake. You join the line.

This is the moment everyone has at Robert Is Here. The fruit stand that became a destination institution by, somehow, never becoming an institution.

Robert Moehling was seven years old in 1959 when his father parked him at a roadside table with a pile of cucumbers and a hand-painted plywood sign — ROBERT IS HERE — so passing drivers would stop. Robert is still here. He’s in his mid-seventies and he still shows up most days.

What it actually is

A 12,000-square-foot indoor-outdoor market on the corner of SW 344th Street and SW 192nd Avenue, eight miles west of the Florida Turnpike and eight miles east of the southern (Homestead) entrance to Everglades National Park. Sixty-plus employees in season. Open every day of the year except Christmas. 8 AM to 7 PM in winter, closes earlier in summer.

The stand sells fifty-plus varieties of tropical fruit, depending on the week and the season. Some of it is grown out back on the family farm. Some of it comes from the Redland — the agricultural district that wraps Homestead on three sides, the only sub-tropical farm belt in the continental United States. Some of it is flown in from Central America or the Caribbean when the local trees aren’t fruiting. The labels say which.

There is also a free petting zoo. Emus, goats, donkeys, peacocks, a tortoise. Children disappear into it and have to be retrieved later. There is also, more importantly, a milkshake counter that produces what I think is the best milkshake in the state of Florida and possibly the country.

The fruit you’ve never heard of

The point of Robert Is Here is not the bananas. The bananas are fine. The point is the fruit that you cannot buy in any supermarket north of Miami-Dade County because it does not survive long-distance shipping or because the rest of America does not know it exists.

A partial list, sliced and ready for tasting at the front counter most mornings:

• Mamey sapote. The icon. Football-sized brown fruit; cut it open and the flesh is the colour of raw salmon and the texture of pumpkin custard. Tastes like sweet potato married a peach. This is the milkshake order. Don’t argue.
• Soursop / guanábana. Spiky green, white inside, pulpy. Tart-sweet, somewhere between pineapple and strawberry. Common in the Caribbean, almost unknown in Anglo America.
• Longan + lychee. Translucent grape-flesh inside a brittle shell, floral and aromatic. Lychee is the famous one; longan is the slightly less perfumed cousin. Peak June through August.
• Dragon fruit. Magenta-skinned, white or hot-pink flesh dotted with black seeds. Tastes like a mild kiwi. The plant is a climbing cactus and the Redland is full of them.
• Jaboticaba. A Brazilian tree-fruit that grows directly on the trunk and branches — not from twigs. Looks like clusters of black grapes glued to the bark. Tastes like a lychee wearing a Concord-grape jacket. Almost nobody outside Brazil sees the tree in person.
• Sapodilla / chico. Brown, fuzzy skin; the flesh is the colour of butterscotch and tastes like maple pear. Sticky, dense, sweet.
• Canistel / eggfruit. Yellow-fleshed, dry-mouthed, dense. Tastes like custard meets sweet potato. Better cooked than raw.
• Black sapote. Looks like a green tomato outside; when ripe the inside is the texture and colour of chocolate pudding. Locally called “chocolate pudding fruit.” Sells out fast.
• Mango. A different category of mango than the supermarket Tommy Atkins. The Redland grows Glenn, Kent, Haden, Carrie, Keitt, Beverly, Mallika, Lancetilla — peak June through August. Robert’s runs a Mango Festival in July; it’s worth the drive on its own.
• Florida avocado. A different species (Persea americana var. americana) from the Hass that supermarkets sell. Bigger, smoother, less oily, brighter green. Peak August through November.

Plus the more familiar lineup: starfruit, passion fruit, papaya, coconut, pineapple, guava, pomegranate, persimmon, cherimoya, atemoya, custard apple. Tomatoes the size of a softball. Citrus by the bag. Honey from local hives. Cuban-style boiled peanuts in a bucket by the door.

The milkshake

It is a milkshake. It is ice cream and fruit and milk in a paper cup with a straw. There is no secret. There is no proprietary blend. There is just enough fruit per shake that you can taste the actual mamey or the actual key lime, and the line is long because most milkshakes are not made this way.

Order the mamey. Order it even if you’ve never had mamey. The colour alone is worth the $9.

Other contenders: Key lime pie shake (real key lime, real graham), coconut, soursop, mango (in season). The strawberry-banana is a dignified retreat for the child in the back seat.

The line on a winter Saturday at noon can be 30 minutes. The line on a Tuesday morning at 9 AM is nothing. Adjust accordingly.

Why it’s worth a whole day, not a stop

Robert Is Here is on the way to two national parks and one agricultural district that almost nobody from out of state has ever heard of. The combination is the actual day trip. Here’s how the geometry works.

Everglades National Park, Homestead entrance — 8 miles west. Drive west on 344th Street, hang a left where it ends, follow the signs. You’ll hit the main entrance station in 15 minutes. From there the Main Park Road runs 38 miles south to Flamingo, the southernmost paved road in the continental United States. Stops along the way:

• Royal Palm Visitor Center — 4 miles in. The Anhinga Trail leaves from here, eight-tenths of a mile of paved boardwalk over Taylor Slough. In dry season every alligator and wading bird in the southern Glades is concentrated on this trail. (See our separate Anhinga Trail post.)
• Pa-hay-okee Overlook — 13 miles in. Quarter-mile elevated boardwalk into a sawgrass panorama. Three minutes of walking, a horizon you’ll remember.
• Mahogany Hammock — 20 miles in. Half-mile loop into a tropical hardwood island — a slightly raised patch of limestone in the river of grass, dense with West Indian trees you won’t see anywhere else north of the Caribbean.
• Nine Mile Pond + Hells Bay — canoe-trail launches if you brought a paddle.
• Flamingo — the end of the road. Visitor center, marina, boat tours into Florida Bay (manatees in winter, crocodiles year-round, the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles share habitat), campground, glamping eco-tents.

Biscayne National Park — 30 minutes east. A national park that is 95% water. Mainland entrance at Convoy Point, just east of Homestead. The visitor center has free aquariums and a short walkable boardwalk to a bay overlook. The actual park — coral reefs, shipwrecks, mangrove keys — requires the concession boat tour ($35-65) or your own boat. This is the most-visited unvisited national park in the system.

The Redland. West of Krome Avenue, south of Tamiami Trail, the agricultural district nobody photographs. Backroads through nurseries (orchid, palm, bromeliad), U-pick farms (winter strawberries, spring tomatoes), Cuban bakeries selling pastelitos for a dollar fifty, taco trucks, and the Mennonite-run Knaus Berry Farm on SW 248th Street — open mid-November to mid-April only, $8 cinnamon rolls, strawberry shakes, lines wrapping the building. Worth every minute of the wait. Closed Sundays.

A note on the F-16s. Homestead Air Reserve Base is a few miles north. The base flies F-16 training sorties on most weekdays, and the touch-and-go pattern runs over the Everglades buffer zone. You’ll be standing on the Anhinga boardwalk listening to an alligator slide into the water and a fighter will scream past at 2,000 feet. Tuesday through Thursday, daytime, is the most common window. It’s surreal. It’s also, oddly, one of the most American things you can experience in twenty seconds.

A real Saturday in South Dade

If you have one day and you want the whole thing — fruit, parks, food, weirdness — here’s the schedule that actually works:

• 8:00 AM. Knaus Berry Farm for a cinnamon roll and a strawberry shake (November through April only). If it’s closed season: a Cuban bakery in Homestead — Don Pan, La Carreta, or any of the panaderías on Krome — coffee plus a guava-cheese pastelito for $4.
• 9:00 AM. Anhinga Trail at Royal Palm. Wildlife is most active before the heat builds, and the lot fills by 10 AM in peak season.
• 10:30 AM. Drive deeper. Pa-hay-okee Overlook, then Mahogany Hammock.
• 12:00 noon. Back out the park road. Robert Is Here for the mamey milkshake. Sit at the picnic tables out back, do the petting zoo with the kids, buy a bag of fruit for the road.
• 1:30 PM. Optional: Biscayne National Park visitor center at Convoy Point. Free, twenty minutes, gets you a national-park stamp and a bay view.
• 3:00 PM. Drive the Redland — SW 192nd Avenue and SW 248th Street between Krome and US-1. Wander. Stop at a nursery. Buy a hot sauce.
• 5:30 PM. Dinner at Casita Tejas or Mexico Lindo in Homestead — both unfussy, both excellent, both honest about the agricultural town that surrounds them.
• Dark. Home.

That’s the day. It is not a Miami day. It is not a Key Largo day. It is a South Dade day, which is its own thing, and the part of Florida most visitors miss because the brochure went to South Beach instead.

When to come

Mid-November through April is the right window for the combined trip. Dry season in the Everglades means wildlife is concentrated in the deeper sloughs (the only place still wet), so the Anhinga Trail is at its theatrical peak. Mosquitoes are tolerable. Mornings are 60s; afternoons 75-80. Knaus Berry Farm is open. The fruit stand is in citrus + avocado + mamey territory but the summer mango glut hasn’t started.

May through October is mango season — the actual peak of the stand’s headline fruit, plus lychee and longan. But the Everglades go waterlogged, mosquito-bitten, and emptier of visible wildlife. Knaus Berry Farm is closed. Afternoon thunderstorms are daily. If you can only come in summer, come early, eat fruit, accept that the parks will be a different (quieter) experience.

The July Mango Festival is a destination in itself if you’re into stone fruit — fifty-plus varieties laid out side by side for tasting, growers explaining the differences, lines around the block. Check Robert’s website for the year’s exact dates.

The hurricane footnote

Homestead was the epicenter of Hurricane Andrew in August 1992 — Category 5 at landfall, 165-mph winds, the costliest natural disaster in US history at the time. The town was leveled. Robert’s stand survived because Robert had cabled the wooden structure to the ground; almost everything else on 344th Street did not. When you drive through Homestead today and notice that most of the houses look like they were built in 1995, that’s why. The Redland’s tropical-fruit canopy was destroyed and has been re-grown one tree at a time over thirty years. The Glenn-mango grove you’re driving past is younger than you’d guess.

What it’s not

It’s not Miami. South Dade is an agricultural working-class county that happens to share a name with a vacation destination. The accents are Cuban and Mexican and Haitian. The trucks have hay in the bed. The 7-Eleven sells pan cubano. If you came to Florida for clubs, you are not in the right ZIP code.

It’s not a roadside curiosity. The stand will hold your attention for 45 minutes minimum, longer if you talk to the staff about what’s in season, longest if you actually eat a sit-down lunch at the picnic tables.

It’s not the boardwalk-only Everglades. The day described above puts you on actual hammocks and overlooks where the park stops being a drive-through.

What it IS

A working family fruit stand that has been on the same corner since 1959, run by the same person who has been running it since he was seven years old, in the middle of the only sub-tropical farm belt in the United States, eight miles from one of the wildest national parks in the country and thirty miles from the southernmost paved road in the lower 48. With a mamey milkshake at the front and a goat in the back yard.

You drive in for a snack and you leave four hours later carrying a bag of dragon fruit and a small confused child holding a peacock feather.

Practical card

• Where: 19200 SW 344th St, Homestead FL 33034. Off the Florida Turnpike at exit 2.
• Hours: 8 AM to 7 PM daily, closes earlier off-season (roughly 6 PM May-October). Closed Christmas Day only.
• Cost: Free to wander. Fruit is priced individually; milkshakes $9-12; a typical mixed bag runs $20-30.
• Best months: November through April for the combined Glades day; June through August for peak mango/lychee at the stand itself.
• Pair with: Anhinga Trail (15 min west), Pa-hay-okee + Mahogany Hammock (deeper into the park), Knaus Berry Farm (15 min north, winter only), Biscayne NP Convoy Point (30 min east).
• Eat in Homestead: Casita Tejas, Mexico Lindo, Don Pan bakery, La Carreta.
• Cell signal: Fine at the stand, nothing in the Everglades. Pre-download maps.
• Kids: Free petting zoo, smoothies, room to run. High kid-tolerance.
• Cash + cards: Both accepted. Tipping the milkshake counter is appreciated.

Robert is, statistically, here. He has been here for sixty-seven years. The mamey milkshake will be waiting.