No, we're not talking about Stranahan House or the old Brian Homes. We're talking the old Anchor Bar just across from the Port Everglades entrance, where longshoremen could unwind with a few short ones after their shift. It's been replaced by a Mercedes Benz dealership.

And the old Riptide, the brawling biker bar that, if hazy memory serves, provided a footnote to Britain's Profumo scandal in the '60s. It's now a Holy Cross diagnostic center.

These were the sort of places where you knew that when the cops began bringing out the handcuffs, it was probably time to go home.

Thank heavens Ernie's is still hanging tough after all these years. Local gadfly and perennial presidential candidate Ernie Seibert opened the place in 1957. Seibert advocated the abolition of negotiable currency, in concept if not in practice: He didn't cotton to credit cards and would accept only hard cash at his restaurant.

The old place brings back fond memories of sitting on the outdoor deck upstairs and watching the hookers ply their ancient trade on Federal Highway while drug dealers lurked around the corner. When Fort Lauderdale's finest set decoy operations loose on the strip, they'd net dozens of arrests nightly.

These days, the only drug dealers you're likely to encounter hanging around Ernie's are pharmaceutical reps for Pfizer or Eli Lilly. That's not to say the place has gone upscale, but the dinged-up pickup trucks in the parking lot are often outnumbered by the tricked-out SUVs.

I suppose we all have to grow up sometime, and Ernie's current owners, Butch Samp and Angelo Terrana, have done an admirable job of updating this old gem.

Upstairs under the red awning, for example, where tiny ceiling fans struggle against the still air, the old wooden picnic tables and benches have been replaced by resin tables and arm chairs that are a lot more forgiving. And the downstairs dining room has shed its basement-grunge-garage look.

They've even added the wonder of modern credit-card technology.

What they haven't done is just as admirable: They haven't messed around with the menu. At least not too much.

Ernie's does now offer a number of low-cal salad options as well as, gasp, turkey burgers and buffalo burgers (``50 percent less cholesterol, 70 percent less fat''). But the old Florida barbecue and Bahamian conch recipes remain sacrosanct. Ernie's motto: ``Where conch is king, barbecue is a way of life and the bar is open late.''

For smaller appetites, start with a cup of conch chowder (that's what those little bottles of sherry on the table are for), and a barbecue sandwich. It's a simple affair, really -- about seven pounds of sliced, smoked beef or pork between two-inch-thick slabs of wonderfully sweet and doughy Bimini bread. It comes with a bowl (a bowl, mind you) of tangy barbecue sauce for dunking.

Hungry? The conch salad and conch fritters are some of the best this side of Nassau, and the barbecue also comes as platters: more like maybe 12 pounds of pork, beef, ribs and/or chicken with plenty of Bimini bread, cole slaw and corn on the cob (rather neatly done, speared with a wooden skewer).

I'm sure that people do order extra sides -- French fries, Cajun fries, cottage cheese, onion rings, you name it -- but I've never actually seen it done.

And then there's dessert, your choice of Key lime pie or chocolate cake. Never seen one of those, either.