Welcome to Out of the Kitchen, our ongoing exploration of the relationships that build and sustain the food industry. This year, we’re traveling the country to look at how sustainability has become a rapidly growing movement within the food world. Chefs at the forefront of this trend are introducing their patrons to local farms, fresh ingredients, and innovative dishes while farmers are educating chefs and consumers about where their food comes from and what it takes to grow the food served. Their practices and personal customer approaches provide a bigger impact to the community at large, hoping to create a better and more sustainable future for all.
It's Friday afternoon at Joe's Stone Crab in Miami Beach, Florida, and lunch has gotten off to a rollicking start. Mario Batali's expected in at any moment with a party of several dozen. The Alinea Group's asked for even more seats to be reserved. Meanwhile, Martha Stewart's just called in on her way from the airport, and may or may not need a relatively modest table of fewer than 20. And yet another celebrity chef, in the midst of a messy divorce, has called in his regrets and apologetically explained that it's not a great time to claim his usual table. Meanwhile, the dining rooms are already booming with the laughter and clatter of Miami's elite—federal judges, businessmen, doctors—chowing down on endless platters of Florida stone crabs with the requisite ramekins of Joe's signature mustard-mayo sauce.
But Joe's is like a massive iceberg, and the dining room is just what customers see on the surface. Behind the swinging doors, the sprawling kitchen has all the frenzied efficiency of a well-oiled machine, with cooks, servers, bussers, stockers, managers, and other staff pumping out a constant stream of stone crabs, fish, salads, sandwiches, and Key lime pies under the watchful eye of general manager Brian Johnson. The back rooms, which include its retail and distribution end, and storage and freezer rooms the size of full kitchens in most Manhattan restaurants—would alone cover much of an average city block.
A longtime Miami Beach institution, Joe's is a mainstay with South Florida's powerful and well-connected.
Joe's is an industry unto itself, turning seafood into hundreds of happy customers every day, and it's all thanks to the humble Florida stone crab 103 years ago. That's when Hungarian immigrant Joe Weiss opened up a beachside seafood shack, selling local fish and, eventually the odd-looking local stone crab that no one had really thought to try eating before. "We have a product that is unique and is indigenous to Florida, and that represents our brand by being sustainable," says Steve Sawitz, Joe Weiss's great-grandson and the current COO of Joe's Stone Crab. "That, right along with the other million details gives you a good chance of staying open for a 100 years."
"It's Mother Nature's perfect gift," chef André Bienvenu says. "And the fact that the restaurant's over 102 years old itself, proves to me the product continues to get better and better."
They're both talking about the special regenerative properties of the Florida stone crab and how it's fished. The crustacean can regrow lost limbs over and over again. Crabbers twist off the claws and then throw the crab back in the ocean, where they can recover. Restaurants only serve the claws for customers to eat. That means that Joe's regulars can be confident that they and their descendants will be eating that sugar-sweet, slightly briny stone crab meat for a long time to come. "We were green before going green was a thing," general manager Johnson says.
It's a small but necessary detail: All of the claws at Joe's are pre-cracked by kitchen staff, making it much easier to get to the sweet, delicate flesh.
It took a while for even Joe's to recognize what really made the stone crab special—besides its tasty flesh. "The sustainability aspect wasn't discovered until the 1950s," Sawitz says. "For 30-odd years, they were taking the bodies and discarding them into the garbage after the claws were taken off."
But once they learned the claws could be regrown, Sawitz's grandfather and father worked with researchers and legislators to craft regulations to ensure that the goose would be laying golden eggs forever. "From what I've heard, it was a no-brainer, and everyone was for it, to have that feather in everyone's cap," Sawitz says.
A big part of making that happen was cultivating a relationship with the fishermen who trap the crabs, and convincing them that it was worth the extra effort to make sure the crabs went back into the water alive once they'd harvested the claws aboard ship. Generations crabbers have grown alongside generations of the Joe's Stone Crab family, ensuring that customers get the best crustacean dining experience around in South Florida–and that the crab in question will be around to offer its sweet flesh for a long time to come. Joe's has its own fishery in the Keys, which keeps plenty of local fishermen like Justin Bruland busy seeking out prime, plump crab claws to pretty up diners' plates.
Fishermen pour their day's fresh haul into a large container before the claws are boiled and delivered to Joe's.
"They'd created an industry, and the fishermen were tired of losing fish populations that weren't sustainable. Everyone knew that they had to have something sustainable, which at the end of the day, even if there weren’t red fish or snapper, there'd be stone crabs tomorrow. Mother Nature created a great, green opportunity for everybody, and it was miraculous."
In more recent years, the restaurant's tried to branch out and make sure more and more of the rest of its menu, followed the stone crab's sustainable lead. "We're working with small fish companies to pin down exactly where the grouper was caught, where the snapper was caught," Bienvenu says. "We're definitely using more local foods, and going to the heart of the product itself. My philosophy is everything on the menu should be something you could get in a grocery store here, as local and simple as possible—I won't bring in opah from Hawaii."
When a new customer comes in, the servers explain the special qualities of the stone crab claws, and other aspects of the restaurant's practices. "We tell them that it's guaranteed that they're locally caught, that we have our own fisheries, and that we serve them cold, cracked, and ready to eat—the shells peel off like a hard-boiled egg," Sawitz says.
Longtime regulars might not get the sustainability spiel, but they keep coming back for the delicious meat a local, sustainable industry brings them year after year.
"Joe's stone crabs are the best, freshest, juiciest, highest-quality, and unparalleled in consistency," says cardiologist Paul Swaie, sitting down to lunch with four friends.
Best of all, it's not a treat you're not going to find in New York or San Francisco, retired attorney David Kenin says: "We're all old-time Miamians, and this place is tradition."