Jo Ann Bass, the matriarch of Joe’s Stone Crab, a century-old family restaurant that leveraged the claws of a ubiquitous local crustacean in becoming a Miami Beach institution, not unlike the Fontainebleau hotel and the Art Deco jewels of Ocean Drive, died on Jan. 31 at her home in that city. She was 94.

The restaurant announced her death on its social media channels.

With its tuxedoed waiters and frenzied bustle, Joe’s Stone Crab, on Washington Avenue near the southern tip of Miami Beach, is consistently ranked as one of the highest-grossing independent restaurants in the country.

“One of those sleeves-up, hammer-clacking seafood houses,” as critic Bryan Miller of The New York Times described it in 1988, Joe’s has bathed in the glow from its high-wattage clientele over the years — Al Capone, Amelia Earhart, Elton John, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Madonna, Muhammad Ali, Larry King and numerous presidents, including Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, were just some of its patrons — while packing tables with a river of tourists.

Third-Generation Proprietor

Bass was a third-generation proprietor, a granddaughter of the restaurant’s founders, Joseph and Jennie Weiss, who started the business in 1913.

While her father, Jesse Weiss, was the colorful face of Joe’s for more than six decades, Bass had effectively run the restaurant since the 1960s, overseeing the menu and adding signature dishes such as Key lime pie, while presiding over the opening of Joe’s Take Away, a more casual bistro and to-go operation next door.

With the assistance of her son, Stephen, Bass helped guide Joe’s during the widely-chronicled renaissance of South Beach as a pastel outpost of style, art mecca and Lamborghini-friendly celebrity playground.

“It’s in my blood,” she said of Joe’s in an oral history for the Miami Beach Visual Memoirs project. “I love it. The whole place. It’s my family, it’s my security blanket, it’s a new movie every day.”

All along, Joe’s resisted the shifting tides of taste. As with other grande dame power spots around the country, such as Musso & Frank Grill in Hollywood or the now-shuttered 21 Club in New York City, legacy, not culinary fashion, is the point.

“You’ve got to offer more than just great marketing skills if you want to stick around for more than a century,” noted a review in Condé Nast Traveler, “and Joe’s is the real deal.”

The magazine declared that the outsize claws of the seasonal, locally abundant Florida stone crab are “slightly sweeter than its fellow crabs, and is more akin to lobster in both flavor and texture.” Joe’s serves them cracked and cold, alongside its signature mustard sauce. (Once claws are harvested, stone crabs are usually returned to sea alive, where they can regenerate new ones).

Despite the restaurant’s enduring popularity, Bass could not pinpoint any single formula for success. “Maybe it’s 100 years, you know,” she said in the oral history. “There’s a cachet for a restaurant to make it,” she added, “and I don’t know what that quotient is.”

Born in Miami Beach

Jo Ann Weiss was born in Miami Beach on Oct. 18, 1931. Her mother died when she was 6 months old, and she was raised by her father and stepmother, Grace Weiss.

Her paternal grandparents, Hungarian immigrants, had fled New York City for the mild climate of South Florida to ease Joe Weiss’ asthma. They opened Joe’s Restaurant as a lunch counter in 1913. They changed its name after a visiting ichthyologist suggested that they add stone crabs to the menu, even though many considered them to be inedible at the time.

Jo Ann came of age mingling among stars including Elizabeth Taylor and Arthur Godfrey and witnessing no shortage of high jinks among the celebrities.

She recalled an evening when Walter Winchell, the godfather of modern gossip journalism, dressed up in a busman’s uniform and dropped a tray of dishes behind J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI. “The guns were not drawn,” she said, “but it was just short of that.”

She graduated from Miami Beach High School in 1949 and briefly studied at the University of Miami before returning to work at the restaurant, working any number of jobs, including dishwasher and line cook.

Jesse Weiss, who died in 1994, considered her a worthy successor. “I’m the most fortunate man in the world,” he once said, “for one reason: my daughter, Jo Ann. She has my hot Hungarian temper, but like me, she forgets what she got angry about five minutes after she got angry.”

Her marriage to Irwin Sawitz ended in divorce. Her second husband, Dr. Robert Bass, a physician, died in 2006. Her survivors include her son, Stephen Sawitz; a daughter, Jodi Hershey; three granddaughters; a grandson; and two great-granddaughters.

Bass might not have been able to define Joe’s Stone Crab’s secret to success, but the restaurant was central to who she was. As she said in the oral history, “I went straight from my birth at the hospital to the second floor of Joe’s.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Alex Williams/Saul Martinez
c. 2026 The New York Times Company