We left around sunrise. After driving for hours along a sole highway, surrounded on both sides by cerulean water, tropical mangrove forests, swaths of palm trees and retro, neon-signed motels, we arrive in the heart of the Florida Keys. Here, in the middle of this 120-mile chain of barrier islands that stretches between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, we are sitting at a dock, waiting for the first catch of the season.
Florida’s waters are blessed with an abundance of native species — spiny lobsters, pink shrimp and hogfish snapper, among many others — but king of the winter months is the stone crab, a six-inch-wide red, beige and black saltwater crustacean celebrated for its enormous, meaty claws. Fishing stone crabs, one of Florida’s most sustainable seafood sources, is only permitted from October 15 until May 1, a period that sees their claws in the spotlight at restaurants across Miami. Stone crab claws are sweet and delicate but textural — fibrous like beef short rib, with a flavour more crab-like than any crab imaginable — and are usually cooked, served and enjoyed in the same fashion: boiled, cooled, cracked and delivered to diners on ice, with a creamy, mustard sauce on the side.
“Stone crab season carries a lot of excitement and anticipation,” says Scott Dekle, general manager of Keys Fisheries, a seafood wholesaler, crab-trap yard and restaurant that has been operating for more than 40 years. As we wait for the first crab boats to arrive, virid iguanas laze on hot rocks nearby, under the focused gaze of mammoth pelicans perched on log piles overhead, their bill pouches eagerly twitching.
In the wake of Helene and Milton — the back-to-back hurricanes that made landfall in late September and early October — this fishing season arrives shrouded in uncertainty, with fears over how the storms may have affected the crab population. “Did they kill them? Did they move them?” Dekle says. “It’s not just the wind and waves, but the rain — that’s a whole lot of freshwater.” But so far today, the first opportunity to pull traps from the water, none of Dekle’s fishermen have radioed in. “No news is good news,” he says with a smile.
By mid-afternoon there’s a flurry of activity, as boats dock and crew unload buckets of claws — and it is only claws. Stone crabs have the ability to regenerate lost limbs, so their tasty bits can be harvested at sea without the animal being killed. (Grim, but murder-free, I keep reminding myself.) “It’s part of nature’s design,” Dekle says. “If an octopus — the stone crab’s biggest enemy — wraps its tentacles around an arm, the crab can just let it detach and it lives another day.”
Fishing is via tricky black plastic traps; the cube-shaped cages are pulled on to the boats, and just one claw is yanked off each crab caught — as long as the limb is regulation size — and the crustacean is then tossed back in the drink. It takes around 12 months for a crab to regrow a claw back to fishable measurements. (However, there are no rules around how big its other claw must be, so if a crab is caught twice in a season, it’s out of luck.)
“Today wasn’t a big catch,” says Dominic Alzugaray, the 32-year-old captain of a boat called NFG (which stands for “Never Forget Grandma, if the coastguard asks” — use your imagination otherwise). “The storms did hinder us a bit.” Though hurricane season ends in November, and “[from then] until January are the best months for fishing, when the water is really cold”, he says.
Today’s catch is weighed, boiled in an enormous stainless-steel vat and chilled with ice, and will soon be on its way from the Keys to Joe’s Stone Crab, which when it opened in 1913 was the first eatery on Miami Beach. Based in what’s now called the South of Fifth neighbourhood (at the island’s southernmost tip), the restaurant can also be credited with introducing stone crabs to the local diet a century ago, when a Harvard ichthyologist, who was in town studying local marine life, discovered the crustaceans and brought a sackful to founder Joe Weiss. The pair experimented with different ways of cooking them until landing on a winning formula, including the now-traditional accompanying dip made mostly of mayonnaise, English mustard and Worcestershire sauce. They started a revolution.
The family-run Joe’s became a Miami institution — and one of the highest- grossing independent restaurants in America. Over the decades, it has expanded in size (it can now house about 450 covers at a time) and welcomed several US presidents, foreign dignitaries, major sports figures, movie stars, royals, law enforcement officials (J Edgar Hoover visited so often that a gold plaque identifies his usual table), the legally casual (Al Capone) and anyone, really, whose name has ever appeared in newsprint. “Trump sat right there,” says Stephen Sawitz, Joe’s bubbly fourth-generation custodian, pointing to the chair next to mine when we meet ahead of the restaurant’s reopening for the season. (Sawitz, who has been working at Joe’s since graduating from college in 1979, says he was most star-struck when Michael Jordan dined.)
“There are a lot of layers to this particular restaurant — but stone crab is really what drives it,” he says. “It’s synonymous with Joe’s.”
A couple of days later, it’s opening night at Joe’s and the excitement is palpable. “Living in Miami, stone crab season is something we really look forward to,” says 34-year-old Alexandria Guerra as she sips a martini while waiting for a table. “I’m from Miami — my family has been coming here for generations.”
The bar area is packed with customers awaiting their seats, chatting convivially with cocktails in hand, while tuxedo-clad servers whip through the crowd, carrying gigantic trays overhead. “We went off the reservation system way back in the early 1960s,” Sawitz tells me. “Joe’s became the type of place where you expected to wait for a table.” According to local lore, the maître d’s have been known to accept cash-filled handshakes from regulars on their way out the door — a $20 or $50 bill to guarantee future service. “As long as they do it after dinner, that’s OK,” Sawitz says. “You can’t buy a table before you’re seated.”
We are soon settling into our seats, and Harry Sloane, a friendly, white-haired server who has worked at Joe’s for 30 seasons, steps behind my chair to delicately attach to my neck a paper bib, emblazoned with the company’s red logo, before delivering a platter of large stone crab claws (on menus across Miami, claws are usually priced according to size: medium, large, jumbo and colossal, the latter being almost the size of my hands). The three large claws ($84.95) are served with the restaurant’s traditional extras (for an extra $30): a coleslaw starter, sides of crispy hashed brown potatoes and creamed spinach, the mayo-mustard dip along with a little pot of melted butter, and, for dessert, a slice of tangy Key lime pie.
Amid the hubbub and clanging of claw shells hitting metal bowls, we meticulously remove the sweet crabmeat from its pincers, careful not to leave any behind, while admiring the high-octane, slickly choreographed service. It takes the staff just three minutes to reset a table for the infinite churn of diners. More than 800 names are on the maître d’s list tonight.
Joe’s may hold legendary status, but come winter, stone crab claws are the menu highlight, well, everywhere. I struggle to think of a native ingredient, aside from the Amalfi lemon, that is as widespread and worshipped. Stone crab can be enjoyed at a wide range of venues, from casual seafood spots along the Miami River to cool, contemporary venues such as Stiltsville Fish Bar, a neighbourhood restaurant in chichi Sunset Harbour.
“A lot of the seafood restaurants down here do Mediterranean or sushi, but we wanted to be welcoming to people with flip-flops and still give an elevated dining experience,” says chef Jeff McInnis, a Florida native who runs the restaurant with his Australian wife, chef Janine Booth. Their skilfully crafted dishes are a little bit retro and a lot of fun: devilled eggs topped with trout roe and dill, a zingy yellow jack tiradito adorned with avocado, coriander, lime and popped corn, and melt-in-your-mouth coconut shrimp wrapped in kataifi pastry.
At this time of year, Stiltsville is most popular for its stone crab happy hour, which runs every Thursday from 3pm–7pm, with medium claws for nearly half price at $9 each. I stop by early for the first event of the year, and the restaurant is already fizzing with guests.
“I think,” Booth says, as she surveys the dining room, “that every table so far tonight has ordered stone crab.” Who am I to break a trend, and I tuck into a few claws, served with Stiltsville’s tasty twist on the usual dip — a champagne-based sauce that’s wonderfully sharp and citrussy but creamy, with a whisper of mustardy heat.
I ask the seafood specialist chefs what is it about stone crab in particular — why are Miamians so mad for it? “You know you’re eating a good piece of seafood. It sort of bites you back,” McInnis says. “There’s a bunch of different native crabs here, but stone crab is the king of Florida.”
“The first time I ever tried them was on the back of a boat, cracking claws and throwing shells back in the water,” Booth concludes. “I had this epiphany and thought, ‘Whoa, this is what people are talking about.’”
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