Just about all of Terrance Doucet’s customers want crab, but an order recently placed through an online delivery service was accompanied by a special request: This customer wanted crab with lemon pepper sauce.
“I was like, ‘This is the wrong place’,” says Doucet, who with partner Nickai Eldridge two months ago opened Garlic Crabs on Wheels on Ashley Phosphate Road.
Doucet suspects the customer was influenced by the Asian-Cajun seafood boil restaurants which are now sprouting up in Charleston County at a brisk pace. Although the restaurants operate independently, their menus are nearly indistinguishable: Each restaurant offers plastic bagfuls of boiled seafood saturated with garlic butter, Cajun seasoning, lemon pepper or all of the above.
Yet despite the sudden availability of crab legs in a sit-down setting, Charleston area garlic crab specialists aren’t concerned about the new batch of seafood houses cutting into their sales. They say garlic crab, a longstanding Lowcountry tradition, can’t be supplanted by a preparation that strikes them as impersonal.
“I just feel like at end of the day, we don’t follow a blueprint,” Doucet says. “Your garlic crab recipe is sacred to you: None of us do it the same way.”
As the name suggests, garlic is typically the dominant flavor in the butter-based sauce applied to blue crabs boiled in a peppery broth. But depending on the sauce maker, it can be enhanced with anything from brown sugar to sour cream.
Since winning a garlic crab contest, Chenequa Smith of Taste My Garlic Crabs has promoted herself as the “Boss with the Sauce.”
“Those new restaurants that are opening, they don’t sell garlic crabs,” Smith clarifies. “They sell, like, crab boils.”
Smith just four months ago opened her restaurant in Ridgeville; she previously sold her garlic crabs exclusively by special order. Doucet and Eldridge followed a similar trajectory, hawking garlic crabs through Facebook for two years before moving into a permanent location.
At least in the Charleston area, the informal market is where the bulk of garlic crab activity is concentrated, although established restaurants such as Nana’s Seafood & Soul have earned national recognition for the garlic crabs on their menus. Doucet estimates there were four local home cooks advertising garlic crab boxes and trays online when he and Eldridge first got into business.
Now, he says, there are more than 50 garlic crab peddlers in the Charleston area.
“You know how it is: monkey see, monkey do,” he says. “When you see someone else being successful, you think, ‘I can do that too.’”
With a new restaurant to run, Doucet doesn’t have much time to check out potential competition. But he visited one of the restaurants promoting its Cajun-style boils just before he opened Garlic Crab on Wheels.
“I didn’t like it,” he says. “I just feel like at the end of the day, we cook with T.L.C.”
In Doucet’s opinion, that’s even better than lemon pepper.
2020-02-11 13:05:51Z
https://www.postandcourier.com/blog/raskin_around/charleston-area-garlic-crab-makers-say-asian-cajun-seafood-boils/article_1a0e7686-4c5c-11ea-bd9d-3fed46c66d80.html
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