Cleonice Archives: Shellfish Notes from Crystal River
“I am absolutely not going in here to eat.” I am usually a great food researcher, but I had made a terrible mistake, and now we were parked outside an enormous deserted mall in Crystal River, Florida (population 3,108). Looking up at the old bricks and the huge K-Mart sign, my fantasies of fried oysters and jambalaya began to drift away. I was starving, but my survival instinct would not permit this.
“Come on,” Ari laughed. “Let’s just check it out and if it’s scary, we’ll leave.”
“No way in hell. I’m not eating here. Oysters at a food court!? No, NO!” He cajoled me and cajoled me some more – he was seriously craving some Cajun-style seafood, evidently even at the cost of his life – and didn’t give up until we finally parked our hokey rental car and walked in, adorned in slightly-too-expensive beach garb that belied our Yankee roots, faces the tiniest bit sunburnt and aviator sunglasses hanging indiscreetly from our noses.
I was already not too enthusiastic about checking out Seafood Seller & Café. My relationship with New Orleans-style cooking is complicated because of a debilitatingly-deranged romance that began in The Big Easy a few years ago (like, I think I’ve finally made it out alive); making matters worse, I had just started dating another apparently-crazy guy who grew up in NOLA (fast forward a couple weeks: this one also ended up debilitatingly deranged, so I’m going to go ahead and not date people with ties to New Orleans for a bit, but that’s a story for another time…). So I was feeling a little hesitant and weird about that whole thing, and felt like eating crawfish would just force me to face the music (ugh; it’s a pun, basically, I know). Our concert two nights before – for a truly lovely crowd of Sarasota chamber music fans – had left me wiped out and still a little depressed (my cello was open for the seventeenth time this winter – not sure if this is a hyperbole? Possibly NOT? – and my youthful love for Mendelssohn, even in my formerly-beloved C minor trio, had faded into something more akin to begrudging, not-really-accepting acceptance).
When we walked in, The Crystal River Mall smelled just like it looked: deserted, lonely, musty. The old-popcorn air led us to a dilapidated movie theater that was showing second-run action films. Our excitement from being IN Crystal River’s eponymous tributaries earlier that morning and swimming with manatees (YES! Seriously!! And – hold on – take a moment to consider why this blog post isn’t even about that part of the trip. Just you wait…) started to wear off, and despite my happiness at being a Bostonian wearing flip-flops in February, I wondered if our extended vacation in Florida (while our trio’s pianist had gone home for a Yellow Barn audition – ah, the things we do for Yellow Barn…) was a miscalculation – culinarily speaking, that is.
But then we saw it: Seafood Seller & Café, in all its fleur-de-lys-smothered, mardi-gras-beaded glory, a little corner of paradise inside this Floridian wasteland. There was a worn dry-erase board outside the restaurant, listing market prices for crawfish and shrimp by the pound, raw oysters, and a smoked amberjack-habanero fish dip (smoked fish! Habaneros! Sounded like a recipe for magic for the two half-Jewish chile-pepper fanatics that we are…). Ari let out a single-syllabled chortle – he was right, so plainly right that there wasn’t even need for a “told-you-so” glance my way; so he ambled in with a self-satisfied look that I’ve only seen him wear when he’s about to delight in beautiful seafood or when he’s played an entire concert perfectly in tune (can I just say: he does that sort of often, the sicko).
The amberjack-habanero dip was as great a bite of food as I have ever had: wild, creamy, bracingly spicy, acidic from some lemon, and with just enough smoke to provide a tremendous depth to balance out its exalting thrill. It was, rather incongruously, and somehow pleasingly, served with saltine crackers still in their tiny wrappers. From those first tastes – our jaws dropped – Seafood Seller could do no wrong. (“Does this really taste this way,” I began. “Or…?” Ari looked at me with clear understanding – no, we didn’t have heat stroke, and this was no mirage. “We may be a little hungry, but there is no way to explain this food. This really is exactly this good,” he said.)
Bite after bite, it was pure magic: blackened scallops, perfectly cooked and juicy and charred; jambalaya whose flavors were so deep and varied and wild that neither of us (really excellent cooks, both) could begin to imagine how they made it; tiny fried crawfish, which we doused in Crystal hot sauce and ate by the forkful; delicate fritters filled with blue crab and sweet peppers, with a remoulade so zippy that it stopped just short of lurid; the very greatest hush puppies of our entire lives (the tiniest bit sweet, so tender, blindingly delicious).
So there it was, our triumphant chamber-musician discovery of the trip: this most improbable of spots – this mall that looked like certain doom and which I entered only under extreme harassment (thank you, Ari: you were right, you were right, you were right) – held one of the truly great restaurants in the world. It was poetic, masterful, sensual, electrifying food, food that made my intonation woes and artistic struggles melt away, food that made me remember why I love to travel and to eat, and food that made my getting heckled by no fewer than seven (7) people in Logan Airport on my way to this meal concert a very-happily-distant memory.
– Gwen Krosnick, 2016
