Internet Freakshow

Kutchie's Key Lime Pies

Internet Freakshow - Kutchie's Key Lime Pies

In October of 2009, a user on the internet took to comment sections on various blogs and articles and started leaving comments about key lime pies from a restaurant named Kutchie’s Key West Cafe. Comments like this are one of the reasons the internet is so great. In fact, entire social networks are devoted to leaving reviews like these, like Yelp. Even Google and Apple Maps have restaurant reviews built into the respective apps. If you find a restaurant or a dish you enjoy, it makes sense to take to the internet and spread that advice.

The Kutchie’s Key Lime Pie poster (who I will refer to as KLP from now on) has posted on many different sites for many years, even using pseudonyms.

The strange part about this particular internet mystery isn’t the posts themselves. It’s the fact that the posts started at least 3 years after Kutchie’s Key West Cafe closed, and the comments were posted persistently for nearly a decade and hundreds and hundreds of times. What would possess a person to take to the internet for 8 years, over 700 confirmed comments from at least 35 pseudonyms, reviewing items from a restaurant that no longer exists?

That question is at the heart of this internet mystery. Many people on the internet are trying desperately to unravel this mystery and find the person responsible for posting these messages.

So let’s talk about the restaurant.

The restaurant, which is still available to be seen on Google Street View

Kutchie’s Key West Cafe opened in Asheville, NC in 1978. Oswald Pelaez Jr. (a.k.a. Kutchie) and Anita Pelaez owned and operated the establishment. It closed in either 2005 or 2006. There’s very little information about this restaurant on the internet, but if you dig enough you can find newspaper articles written about it. Residents of Asheville have chimed in, with several mentioning their experiences with the restaurant and the food. Although the main topic in all of this random comments across the internet is the key lime pies, at the time Kutchies was actually known for their burgers.

For as little as is written about Kutchie’s online, the key lime pie comments seem to confirm what is known about the restaurant. Residents of Asheville who were familiar with Kutchie’s when it existed confirm many of the statements made by the person posting these comments. The KLP poster mentions a crocodile in the restaurant, as well as visits by celebrities like Jimmy Buffet. These facts are confirmed by Asheville locals, which seems to confirm that the Kutchie poster is quite familiar with the restaurant. This may seem obvious, but until Asheville residents confirmed this, there was a lot of speculation that the KLP poster was just making things up or using Kutchie’s as a random restaurant name.

So let’s dig deep into what these posts say.

I want to give credit here to MarkDungo333 on Reddit for investigating this mystery to figure out why and where the Kutchie poster chooses to leave these messages. It seems clear at this point that the Kutchie poster frequently Googles certain words or phrases, and then comments on those articles or pages. Some of these searches include, “Key lime pie, Burgers, Food in general, ”Kutchie”, “Kutch”, etc., ”Pelaez”, “Anita”, “Captain”, Asheville, NC, Florida Keys / Key West, ”Goody Goody”. Those words and phrases make sense of course as they’re directly related to the posts he or she is making, but other phrases don’t seem to apply at all. Like “Hemingway, Reggae, Sharks, Urban legends, “Net worth” and “market value”, Sex-related keywords: “size matters”, “better than sex”, “junk”, “package”, “dick”, “naked”, “body image”, “modelling”, Pop culture. Politics.”

The content of the posts vary wildly, and for the most part the posts are totally unique, although there are some exceptions to that rule. The pseudonyms used have different posting styles as well. For example, Jake Carson almost always copy/pastes his comments.

Another pseudonym, Willie Jordan, tends to reply to articles and blog entries about things of a sexual nature, although not pornographic. To the best of the knowledge of the community, the KLP poster does not post pure pornography, although Willie Jordan sometimes skirts that line. For example, on an article titled “Naked”, Willie Jordan left a comment that read:

You Know, Down Under Our Cloths We Are All Naked As A Bunch Of Jay Birds! My 7 1/2 Inches Just Flopping Around Down There In The Breeze. All My Wife's Beautiful Attractive Package Is Butt Naked And Ready For My Attention On The Drop Of A Hat. Yep, Yep, All Of Us Are Really Butt Naked Right Before Our Very Own Eyes, Just A Few Cloths Separating Us From Our True Self's. I Vote Along With "Jessica", We Should All Get Butt Naked Together And Smile With Each Other And Love One Another Right Now. And While We Are Spreading Our Naked Asses All Over Each Other, Then Perhaps We Should Totally Delight Ourselves By Ordering Ourselves Many Of Those Delightful Delicious Key Lime Pies To Eat From "Anita and Kutchie Pelaez's Key Lime Pie Factory and Grill In Asheville, N.C. Near The Biltmore Estate. Yeah, Now That Sounds Like A Plan Indeed. Are You Ready?”

This is interesting because the comment directly references the blog post which it is commenting on, which is about skinny dipping, and its author Jessica.

While Willie Jordan reads and replies to the content of what he is posting on, another pseudonym, Roger Ramjet, tends to leave replies that are more generic and seemingly disconnected from the content of the articles they are replying to. Like on a post about a man’s life story in Africa, he replied,

Hey Bob, do you know what the difference is in one of Captain Kutchie’s Famous King Size Sirloin Steak Sandwiches and an Ashton Kutcher Movie is?

Answer:

The Steak Sandwich is GOOD!…..ha, ha, ha…

And don’t forget the Key Lime Pie!…It’s To Die For.

….Roger

From 2009 to 2013, every KLP post was totally unique. Starting in 2013, replies started getting copy/pasted on multiple articles. Users on Reddit have dutifully collected large lists of these copy and paste replies. You may assume a small amount of these replies, but his library of posts to copy and paste is very, very large. You can read some of these replies here. Here's one example:

“I sure hope that this will be a great opportunity for everyone to see some of “Don’s Scenes” from his productions of his classic hits “Tales From Kutcharitaville”. You know that Rickles and Johnny Carson together produced those comedy hits about their friend “Mr. Kutchie Pelaez” and their wild and crazy exploits of Kutchie’s Key West and The World of Key Lime Pies from the perspective of (Johnny Carson, Don Rickles, Kutchie Pelaez and Steve Martins Eyes!) What a Hoot Those Classic Hits Surely Were. Don’t miss them, be sure to tune-in next month. We Laughed Until We Cried Watching Those Funny Movies. “The Tales From Kutcharitaville”, I Think That They May Still Be Available In A Boxed Set.”

So we know about the restaurant, why is the KLP poster continuing to post these? There’s several theories here.

First up, some assume based on the sheer volume of posts, that these have to be an automated bot of some sort. This isn’t a terrible theory. Bots are capable of replying to blog posts with related content, and current events and pop culture and other things that these posts have done through the years. But why would anyone create a bot to advertise a restaurant that closed several years before the start of the postings? While 700 posts have been verified as KLP posts, there’s some evidence, like a Disqus account with some posts removed, to believe that the real amount of posts could be double that. But even if we assume 1500 posts over 7 years, that’s less than a post per day. Certainly very doable for a dedicated person with time on their hands. So I don’t think this is a bot.

Is this a tactic for SEO, similar to a service like Reputation Defender? Let’s say someone, at some point, left a negative review for Kutchie’s on the internet. By flooding comment sections with positive references to Kutchie’s, it could theoretically push the negative comments out of the search results. This is a pretty common tactic, but I have the same exact question as before… why bother doing this for a restaurant that closed several years before the postings began?

Is this some sort of ARG or performance art? This question comes up with most online mysteries, and the answers are always the same. If it’s an ARG, it’s a bad one with many years of clues and absolutely no payoff. If it’s some sort of online performance art, it’s also not very satisfying.

If this was performance art of some sort, you’d assume the person posting these would thrive on the attention. Unfortunately, the opposite seems to be true, here. In 2016, after 7 years of KLP posts, Reddit users outed him and started digging into this mystery. In November of 2016, the Kutchie poster started making references to people reading his posts and discussing them online, with phrases like, “Do you ever feel like you’re being watched?”

In 2017, there were only 3 Kutchies posts made. In early 2018, he also made 3. He hasn’t resurfaced since.

So unless this was a very shy performance artist who thrives on being left alone, I think we can rule out that explanation.

So who is he?

Users on Reddit have several theories (read an in-depth look at the mystery and the potential posters here), including Kutchie himself, Oswald Pelaez Jr., his son, or maybe even mentally ill Asheville resident who used to love the restaurant and the key lime pies. They go so far as to examine writing styles and pop culture references to guess the age, gender and location of the KLP poster. I’m not going to speculate on his identity here, but I will be sure to leave some links on internetfreakshow.com with threads you can read to form your own conclusions. But for me, I’m going to let this commenter live the way he or she wants to live. Anonymously. Without the prying eyes of the internet needing to find answers and investigate every single little thing.

Sometimes the story is all about the questions, and once those questions are answered and the mystery solved, the magic is gone. Assuming this is Kutchie reliving his glory days, or a mentally ill person posting frantically, you’ll probably leave this story feeling very different things. And isn’t that the whole point of stories like these?

I will leave you with the last Kutchie post:

Captain Kutchie’s Award winning Cheese Burgers in Paradise, King Size Sirloin Steak Sandwiches and The World’s Greatest Key Lime Pies could possibly be “The Best Food” you’ll ever eat in This Life!

Available only at “Miss Anita and Captain Kutchie Pelaez’s, Key West Kutcharitaville Cafe, Grills,, Bars and They’re Historic 1917 Key Lime Pie Factory”.

The Best in the West, they serve the South With the Finest, Famous Since 1976 in Beautiful South Asheville, NC, on US 25 South, just 10 minutes south of The Biltmore House and Gardens.

Merry New Year Y’all, See You Real Soon……………………..the Captain . . .oh no, he’s back!.