Hours before daybreak, lights flick on at Southwest Florida’s last two remaining crab houses. Crabbers step into rubber boots, adjust their slickers and amble through the silent dark toward the shore.
A still inlet at the mouth of Charlotte Harbor comes alive as Leland Locke, a 19-year-old waterman for Punta Gorda’s Peace River Seafood, exchanges shouted hellos with fellow crabbers readying buckets of bait. Boat motors warble to attention, their echoes trailing for miles. As Leland makes his way to a sprinkling of white buoys, he drops the boat’s engine to idle, snares a line and loops it through the motorized puller. A black wire crab pot emerges, little claws poking out here and there, shining in the waning moonlight. It’s a far cry from the imported blues that arrive pre-picked in plastic tubs—waterlogged, pasteurized and stripped of the briny sweetness that comes from pulling them fresh from the Gulf. But for most diners, price wins out over provenance.
He lifts the pot aboard, sets it upside down on the edge of the boat’s gunwale and unlatches the bait well. Fish bones drop across the water as pelicans trail closely behind, picking the remains.
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tale of two crab houses peace river seafood storefront
Local blue crab was once an $8.5 million industry with thriving crab shacks lining shores from Punta Gorda to Everglades City. Storms and imported, pasteurized crab have forced them to shutter, leaving only two: Peace River Seafood in Punta Gorda (pictured here) and Joanie’s Blue Crab Cafe in Ochopee.
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tale of two crab houses eating crab at peace river seafood
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tale of two crab houses inside joanies blue crab cafe
Open since 1987, Joanie’s is a beacon for locals and tourists, who make the pilgrimage to the barn-turned-restaurant to crack blue crabs surrounded by totems of the swamp.
One hundred miles south, a similar scene unfolds. Jayde Freeman, a 17-year-old whose grandmother runs Joanie’s Blue Crab Cafe in Ochopee, dashes to the end of a dock and jumps aboard a pale blue skiff, eager to check her string of traps before school. She gaffs a buoy and pulls the trap by hand, flipping the pot to shake loose its catch. Blue crabs writhe, pincers holding one another tight, tumbling into the pine box below. She stuffs the pot with fresh bait and returns it to the water.
For as long as there’s been a Southwest Florida coastline, there have been fishing families to tend it—folks of strong heart, will and heritage, intertwined like the mangroves along the coast. Blue crabs have been hailed along our shores since the 1800s—found texts enumerate the best ways to crack their hard shells and savor the flavorful meat. Those beautiful swimmers, as the blues are affectionately called, grew into an $8.5 million industry after World War II, with picking houses and crab shacks lining our coast from Punta Gorda to Everglades City. But time changes all things. As commodity crab flooded the market and hurricanes battered the coastline, the industry thinned. The crab houses that once lined these waters—where generations of watermen carved their names into dock pilings—fell one by one, leaving just two survivors: Peace River Seafood and Joanie’s Blue Crab Cafe. Each holds fast to Florida’s history, with crab pots stacked along seawalls and grown men bent at the knee teaching young ones how to tie a fisherman’s knot, carve their names into buoys, and live off the water and with it, moving in time with its rhythms.
As the noon sun rises, Leland hauls his crabs to Peace River Seafood, an open-air cracker shack built in 1927 with an ice house, bait room and crab locker out back. Kelly Beall, the daughter of a mullet fisher, and her husband, Jimmy, a crabber, opened the crab house in 2003, intent on paying watermen a fair and steady wage for their catch. Kelly has worked with Leland’s mother, Shannon Locke (a scion of the legendary Godwin fishing family), for more than 20 years, hashing out the details of wholesale accounts over bottles of bourbon. Peace River would keep a portion of the catch, then sell the rest to local restaurants, ensuring each hardshell drew top dollar. No longer at the whim of a single buyer, the approach placed power back in the hands of the crabber—the ability to earn a steady living along these waters. Kelly knows there’s no other life for a waterman. “My father told me, ‘Don’t you ever ask Jimmy to get off the water.’ Because once it’s in your blood, it never leaves,” Kelly says. “When the price drops in the open market, I’m not telling these guys to hang up their hooks or nets.”
Much like the Louisiana bayou, where children are raised on crawdads, cleaning blues is a rite of passage along our working waterfronts and mangrove-tipped isles. Little girls and boys break the bodies, pinch the meat and find their place—the next generation learning the water’s ways.
ANNA NGUYEN
ANNA NGUYEN
The tap-tap-tap of wooden crab mallets lulled Shannon’s babies to sleep and still punctuates her days. Her four sons and daughter were born with tide charts in their hands. Leland began crabbing at 14, homeschooled by Kelly in a small office out back. “It’s all he thinks about, that boy,” Kelly says, running her hand across one of the porch’s oak railings. “He gets up in the morning and wants to chase mullet or blue crabs. That comes from growing up on these boats. It’s a way of life.”
When the catch comes in, a flurry of activity breaks loose as the crab houses ready for the day’s service. At Joanie’s, Terri Rementeria, the daughter of its namesake matriarch, scatters several blues across the bottom of a cast iron skillet, sautéing them in butter, fresh herbs from the front porch garden, garlic and Old Bay until a thick gold sauce emerges. The crabs are piled on a tray with lemon and fry bread, a recipe Joanie picked up from an Indigenous visitor from out West. Terri’s granddaughters help in the kitchen, picking meat by hand for a pot of she-crab soup—a Southern staple named for the female crab’s roe, which formed the base of the recipe’s earliest iterations.
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tale of two crab houses joanies blue crab cafe Terri Rementeria
Local blues are prepared simply. At Joanie’s, Terri Rementeria sautés them in a cast-iron skillet with butter, herbs, garlic and Old Bay.
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tale of two crab houses eating crab at peace river seafood
Pulled from warm waters, Gulf blues rival Maryland’s celebrated hardshells. Local crabbers argue the meat is sweeter, with a briny flavor more nuanced than lobster.
Terri’s mother, Joanie Griffin, turned the red 1930s cattle barn into a crab shack in 1987. The family’s local history dates back more than a century to when Joanie’s grandfather, Clarence, bought several tracts of land on what would become the western edge of Big Cypress Preserve, passing the property down from generation to generation. The barn has been many things. Joanie sold sandwiches and sodas on the front porch, then, on a whim, bought a bushel of blues from a local crabber and steamed them porchside. Spurred by the response, she cleared out the barn, built a small kitchenette and asked local crabbers to bring her their brightest and bluest. Before long, her face appeared on televisions stateside and abroad, with travel hosts touting Joanie’s as the destination for a real taste of the Gulf.
At Peace River, the rolling water beneath a series of steamer baskets turns the shade of fire as crabber and cook Jerry Collins adds dashes of Old Bay to the steaming pot. He shuffles a box of hardshells into the baskets. Red potatoes and corn, each kernel hiding a deep well of honeyed broth, top off the platter. As trays of blues spill out of the crab shack’s kitchen, the hardwood dining rooms hum. Young crabbers, still slick from the water, sidle up to one of the wraparound porch’s picnic tables. A mother guides her daughter’s small fingers, tracing the ridged shell, prying the bright ochre-colored backs off a half dozen steamers and pinching out the meat. Then come the claws—the little girl holds the pincer up to the light to peer inside before placing the claw in her mouth, teeth sliding the meat forward. The crab’s red-tinged juice runs down her arm as towering live oaks bend with the wind.
Such experiences draw devoted patrons to Peace River and Joanie’s. Local blue crabs have become something of a specter in Southwest Florida, even among restaurants that trumpet their connection to our waters and their traditions. Stone crab, far less cumbersome with a single dense claw served pre-cracked, and imported, pasteurized crabmeat have steadily replaced local blues for decades as the picking houses and crab shacks that once lined our coast shuttered one by one. (Island Crab Company in Saint James City is the region’s only remaining picking house, where crabs are processed for commercial sale.) Other factors, like seasonal migrations, red tide, and changing patterns in temperature and salinity, also affect local crab populations. Those who remain dedicated to local blues know Gulf water crabs rival Maryland’s celebrated hardshells. Local crabbers argue that our warm waters impart a sweeter flavor with a touch of brine, the meat more nuanced than lobster.
Word of mouth, passed from locals to tourists, has kept Peace River and Joanie’s alive, with folks traveling from around the world for a taste of Gulf blues. At Joanie’s, cowboy hats, motorcycle helmets and snapbacks smelling of fish hang from table corners while French tourists ask Miccosukee for tips on cracking claws. Sketches and totems of the swamp line the walls. A gator’s head teeters atop the cash register while a taxidermy owl hangs from the ceiling. Windows and doors remain open, nature’s air conditioning carrying the breeze from the dining hall to the back porch.
Terri shuffles through a stack of frayed postcards. Joanie gave one to each visiting traveler and asked them to mail it back to her from home. Thousands piled up over the years, weaving a portrait of a hard-working woman and her crab shack. “Life here is built around food—the preparation, the gathering of the things that bring a meal to fruition, and the talk that comes after,” Terri says. “Nobody gets up from the table, not even the children. We laugh at each other sucking on crab shells, and we hold steady together.”
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tale of two crab houses joanies blue crab cafe spread
The future of these remaining crab houses is fragile, but not lost. “Life here is built around food—the preparation, the gathering of things that bring a meal to fruition, and the talk that comes after,” Terri says. “We hold steady together.”
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tale of two crab houses crab tools at peace river seafood
Catching and cracking crabs is a way of life along local waterfronts. “Once it’s in your blood, it never leaves,” says Kelly, who opened Peace River in 2003, intent on paying crabbers a fair wage. “When the price drops in the open market, I’m not telling these guys to hang up their hooks or nets.”
Kelly echoes the sentiment at Peace River as she watches a trail of crabbers file across the front porch, Leland among them. “This is a gathering place. A family home-turned-crab house. We honor the crab and those who caught it,” she says, shaded by pine and palmetto. “Break the body in half as if you were breaking bread—and you are.”
In recent years, imports and hurricanes have pushed Peace River to scale back— from more than three dozen crabbers and wholesale accounts up and down the coast to just five crabbers delivering a daily haul. After Ian knocked out the fryer and half the kitchen, the menu went back to the heart of the thing, with only steamers. The future of the crab houses is fragile, but as long as there’s a stretch of water, there will be blue crabs and watermen, their boats rising and falling with the tide. “We thought about folding, but we’re still here, shining,” Kelly says. “The people keep coming. They fly down, drive down, for a taste of those beautiful blues and to support the folks keeping the tradition alive.” That’s all it takes—a handful of folks asking where the crabs came from and who caught them, spreading the word until it catches like fire. At Peace River and Joanie’s, the answer is often the person seated next to you.
As the day ends, discarded crab shells are carted to a grinder out back, crushed and returned to the earth as a nutrient-rich fertilizer. Nothing is wasted. In the morning, the rivers will rise once more. Jayde and Leland will be working in the quiet hours, their shadows cast beneath the half moon, white buoys dotting the water like stars.