| Notes |
- The Orlando Sentinel, Florida, Tuesday, 3 February 2026
Jo Ann Weiss Sawitz Bass
Matriarch of Joe's Stone Crab, a Miami landmark, dies at 94 Matriarch of Miami Beach landmark Joe's Stone Crab, dies at 94
Orlando Sentinel, The (FL) - Tuesday, February 3, 2026
Jo Ann Weiss Sawitz Bass, the matriarch of the landmark Joe's Stone Crab, died Saturday in hospice at her Miami Beach home across the street from her family's restaurant. She was 94.
Bass helped lead Joe's Stone Crab, the oldest surviving restaurant in Miami Beach, for decades and into her late 80s. Joe's predates the incorporation of the city in 1915. That happened two years after Joe's founding. She worked there even before World War II had ended in 1945.
The restaurant has attracted almost every A-lister through the years, including Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Muhammad Ali, Elizabeth Taylor, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and even the actor who played Hoover in a 2011 movie, Leonardo Di Caprio.
Joe's has remained family owned since it was founded in 1913, by Jo Ann Bass' grandfather Joe Weiss who had the brilliant idea to establish an eatery on his Washington Avenue front porch serving fish sandwiches and meat dishes.
That savvy turned to genius when Joe starting serving stone crabs there in 1921, turning his namesake restaurant into a century-old global phenomenon. Joe's Stone Crab is as definable of the Miami Beach essence as the city's distinctive Art Deco along Ocean Drive, its beaches and the Fontainebleau hotel.
Joe's son Jesse ran the restaurant for 60 years after the founder's death in 1930.
But it was Jesse's daughter, Jo Ann, born near the restaurant in Miami Beach on Oct. 18, 1931, who, alongside her son Stephen Sawitz, has led Joe's as its co-owner through its 1990s renaissance, renovations and some of its greatest challenges. Those challenges included Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which interrupted deliveries of stone crabs from a Keys fishery and required cleanup around the grounds -- after Jesse stepped down before his death at 86 in 1994.
"It's in my blood," Bass said of Joe's in a 2012 interview 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 in the actions of the customers and the people that work there. It's Joe's. It is a wonderful place."
Joe's had to be wonderful. It carries a reputation. Jo Ann, the matriarch, with her attention to detail and her customers' needs, ensured it maintained its appeal to a broad base.
Streisand had played one concert in Miami-Dade as an opening act in March 1963 at Miami Beach's Eden Roc hotel. She was not yet 21.
That was it until 2016. Then, at 74, Streisand returned to Miami to perform a sold-out show at what's now the Kaseya Center, the Heat's arena. One of the first things Streisand told the Miami Herald during an interview to promote the concert was the real reason she was finally returning to Miami.
"You know why?" Streisand teased. "Because they have Joe's Stone Crabs there. I go where the good food is."
The "Funny Girl" Oscar-winner was just five miles away via the MacArthur Causeway after leaving the arena stage to get through Joe's doors. Her promoter had her food ready.
To keep the Streisands, the hungry 9-to-5ers on Friday payday, and the attention-seeking politicians satisfied, Sawitz teamed with his mother to run Joe's.
"You figure out how to do it. That's something that you have to live and that's something you have to do. And I can tell you that mom loved to work, and she loved to play hard. Her playing hard was getting dirty and working the land and planting seeds and cutting the flowers and the vegetables and then taking them and cooking something. She was remarkable, because she was so simple and ordinary, I guess. And that makes her extraordinary," her son said.
Bass was 13 in the mid-1940s when she started her first full-time job, inside the family restaurant during the waning year of World War II. She was there through her graduation from Miami Beach High in 1949. Making salads. Working the dessert station. Managing the books. Meeting customers on the floor. Staying through her marriages to Irwin Sawitz -- the father of her two children, son Sawitz and daughter Jodi Hershey -- and Miami Beach physician Dr. Robert Bass.
She took one 10-year "sabbatical" to raise her two children but returned to work at Joe's, and to co-own it with her son, until 2019 when she was around 88, just before the following year's COVID pandemic.
There were educational detours but no degrees from the University of Miami, where she enrolled after Beach High. She returned to Joe's at her parent's request. Later, in her 60s, she took enrichment classes at Barry University in Miami Shores near one of her homes. Bass also had a seasonal home in North Carolina.
But there was always her primary home, and it wasn't in Miami Shores or North Carolina or even the one she lived in across the street from the restaurant until the end of her life.
"I went straight from my birth at the hospital to the second floor of Joe's," Bass said in the Miami Beach memoir. "There was an apartment up there, a two-family apartment. My grandparents lived at one end, my mother and dad lived at the other."
Bass, despite never completing higher education, was an avid reader, and sharp. Miami native and U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno was one of her friends and member of a shared book club.
Bass privately donated to dozens of charitable causes, including Miami Rescue Mission, Mount Sinai Medical Center, Urban Construction and Craft Academy, the Miami Dade Public Schools Foundation and many more, her son said.
"People would be stunned by the extent of her philanthropy -- mostly because she never wanted anyone to know. That's the type of woman she was."
Bass' survivors include her son Stephen Sawitz and daughter Jodi Hershey; granddaughters Julia Sawitz, Jessica Uchuya, Lauren Walton; grandson Blayke Kogan and great-granddaughters Alexandra Uchuya and Iyana Walton.
Services will be 10 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 4, at Temple Beth Sholom, 4144 Chase Ave., Miami Beach. Her family says that donations in Bass's memory can be made to Urban Construction and Craft Academy, Miami Rescue Mission and Mount Sinai Medical Center.
|
Bassett Family Association Database
d. 30 Aug 2006, Miami, Dade County, Florida