SCRATCH KITCHEN CUSTOM DRINKS

“You won’t find anything here from those other restaurants. “This is its own baby.”

If it’s theme you seek, The Twisted Fork has everyone beat. We wanted to develop a unique experience for every visitor. We decided to go all out on what you see and what you do while you’re here. Everything, from the distressed metal exterior and the interior’s repurposed barnwood down to its floor, has a story.

Passing through Alva one day, Bert Parsley spotted a century-old barn that Hurricane Irma had shifted three feet off its foundation. It perfectly fit a sketch he’d just made on a bar napkin while hatching the plan. From the barn’s teardown, he salvaged the Fork’s walls, beams, shelves and floor joists that still bear the original axe marks.

The exterior’s distressed metal once covered the 49th Street St. Pete flea market where Bert’s Barracuda Harley-Davidson now stands. Parsley also moved his own considerable gearhead collection into the Fork. There’s Bert’s own patch collection as well as an additional community patch wall for customers. Two walls of license plates Bert collected since childhood add to the décor along with motorcycles dangling from the ceiling.

Over the foyer hangs a chandelier of motorcycle and car parts, mechanically connected without a single weld. Elsewhere, there are three engine blocks welded into a glowing wine rack.

“For years I’ve picked things off at auctions for this place,” said Parsley. “I got motors and transmissions and tore them apart to put bins and bins of parts into our 38-foot bartop, filled with 90 gallons of epoxy and embedded laser wire. Some of it was from old cars and drum kits I’ve owned.

“The traffic light was in my living room. We restored that 1920s Staten Island boardwalk phone booth (repurposed, tongue in cheek, as a cell phone charging station) in my garage.”

With 36 televisions and the largest flat screen in Charlotte County, this is the place to watch sports. But instead of speakers at all the tables, point an app called Tunity at your TV of choice and it plays the audio on your phone. In Merch, you can rent or buy a Bluetooth speaker for your table.