For eight years, over 700 reviews flooded the internet from at least 35 different usernames. All praising a restaurant’s miraculous key lime pie. The pie that caused “piegasms”. The pie that cured erectile dysfunction and increased penis size by 50%. The pie that healed injuries with a single bite…
The only problem? The restaurant had been closed for three years before the first review ever appeared. This is the Bizarre But True! unsolved mystery of Kutchie’s Key West Cafe.
The Restaurant That Wouldn’t Die
In 1976, Oswald Pelaez Jr. (nicknamed Kutchie) and his wife Anita opened Kutchie’s Steak and Lobsterhouse in Arden, North Carolina, just outside Asheville.
This wasn’t your standard roadside restaurant.
The place was upscale enough to hire an organist for live entertainment – a tradition they maintained through the 1980s, with Jack Fischer tickling the ivories like it was still the 1930s. Locals confirmed the restaurant had a crocodile (or alligator) in a tank and was visited by celebrities including Jimmy Buffett.
The restaurant rebranded in 1981 as Kutchie’s Dine and Dance Supper Club, then again in 1991 as Kutchie’s Key West Bar and Grill. In the early 2000s, it changed names one final time to Kutchie’s Key West Kutcharitaville.
That last name change proved fatal.
Jimmy Buffett’s lawyers allegedly discovered the Margaritaville-inspired name and threatened legal action in 2006. Rather than fight in court or simply rename the business yet again, Kutchie, then pushing 60 years old, chose to close shop and move back to Florida.
The irony was brutal: Kutchie’s Steak and Lobsterhouse had been serving customers for nearly a decade before Buffett’s “Margaritaville” song even existed, let alone his restaurant empire.
The restaurant closed in 2005 or 2006 and that should have been the end of the story.
But Then The Reviews Started…
In October 2009, three full years after Kutchie’s closed, someone began posting comments about the restaurant’s key lime pie across the internet.
Not just a few comments. And not just on review sites.
Over 700 confirmed comments. From at least 35 pseudonyms. Posted persistently for nearly eight years.
The poster appeared to Google specific phrases – “key lime pie”, “burgers”, “Kutchie”, “Pelaez”, “Anita”, “Captain”, “Asheville”, “Florida Keys”. But also bizarre terms like “Hemingway”, “Reggae”, “Sharks”, “net worth”, “market value”, and sex-related keywords like “size matters”, “better than sex”, “package”, “body image”. Then they’d leave comments on whatever articles came up.
Food blogs. News articles. Social media. Tabloid sites. Even random posts about skinny dipping. Anywhere. Everywhere the reviews appeared…
The Comments Were Insane
The most common pseudonyms were Jake Carson, Willie Jordan and Roger Ramjet. Each had a slightly different style.
Some directly referenced the blog posts they were commenting on. One comment on a skinny dipping blog addressed the author, Jessica, by name:
“Yep, Yep, All Of Us Are Really Butt Naked Right Before Our Very Own Eyes… I Vote Along With ‘Jessica’, We Should All Get Butt Naked Together And Smile With Each Other… And While We Are Spreading Our Naked A***s All Over Each Other, Then Perhaps We Should Totally Delight Ourselves By Ordering Ourselves Many Of Those Delightful Delicious Key Lime Pies”.
Others were completely generic copypasta about Captain Kutchie and his “drop dead gorgeous wife Miss Anita”.
The posts claimed the key lime pies caused “piegasms” and that you had to be over 18 years old to purchase one or have an adult present. They described monthly million-dollar giveaways where cousins won a million dollars, their wives won Jaguars and the commenter won a car that was “INNICE” – “more than nice”.
They quoted “Chef Captain Kutchie Pelaez” saying “Size really does Matter cuze nobody really want’s a small Burrito!”
One comment claimed Donald Trump and Stephen Colbert were planning a party for Pope Francis at Kutcharitaville, then said: “Think, I’ll just get all the girls together and we can all Nude-Up and go too ‘Captain Kutchie’s’ and Get Drunk and Screw! Let’s Go Y’all!”
The bizarre part? Kutchie’s was actually known for burgers when it was open, not key lime pie…!
Nobody Noticed For Seven Years
For nearly eight years, the reviews accumulated across the internet, completely unnoticed by anyone except blog owners and moderators who deleted them.
Then in September 2016, someone posted about the phenomenon on Reddit.
The response was immediate. People became captivated by the sheer volume and enigmatic nature of reviews promoting a restaurant that had been closed for a decade.
And then something even stranger happened…
The poster appeared aware of the Reddit discovery. That November, the eighth and final copypasta message appeared, beginning with “Hey, Bob” followed by a joke about Ashton Kutcher. Variations included concerning messages: “Caution, I think we’re being watched.” Other versions made similar comments about feeling observed.
After 2016, all legitimate correspondence from the original poster apparently ceased. The posting frequency decreased markedly in late 2016, coinciding precisely with the first Reddit mention.
Seven years of obsessive posting. Reddit noticed. Then silence.
So Who Was Behind It..?
Nobody knows for certain. Some believed it was a bot – they can reply to blog posts with related content, current events and pop culture references.
But why would anyone create a bot to advertise a restaurant that closed several years before the postings began? The content was too strange, too specific, too responsive for simple automation.
In 2012, there was a brief detour where reviews promoted ozsgold.com, a website supposedly owned by Oswald Pelaez and his brother Pete. The site hosted a multilevel marketing scheme dealing in coin and rare metal collecting, with claims Oswald was guaranteeing profits on gold purchases.
Those posts quickly disappeared back into the key lime pie obsession.
The Leading Theory
Most internet investigators pointed to one person: Oswald Pelaez Jr. himself – Kutchie.
The posts demonstrated intimate knowledge of the restaurant. They mentioned details Asheville locals confirmed were true. They obsessively promoted his wife Anita. They called him “The Most Interesting Man In The World”.
But Kutchie died in April 2022. His obituary described him as a “renaissance man” and “celebrated chef” who provided “The Place To Be” to his community for over three decades. And then, bizarrely, the same comments appeared in his own obituary guestbook!
Multiple comments. Same style. Same sexual innuendo. Same rambling about key lime pies, prime ribs and “Captain Kutchie Pelaez”.
Either someone was trolling a dead man’s memorial, or the mystery runs deeper than anyone realised…
700+ comments still scattered across the internet like digital ghosts, praising a key lime pie that may never even have existed from a restaurant that’s been dead for two decades. Nobody stopped them. Nobody explained them. Nobody ever will…
