by Earl Swift
Much to do, but—as she has learned over the seventeen years she’s owned the place with Irene Eskridge, her first cousin and Ooker’s wife—doable. Stuart crosses the room to a big industrial cooler that closely resembles the model Ooker keeps in his crab shanty. Lisa Crockett, first cousin to Ed Charnock and a ten-year veteran of the kitchen, is already there, and together they perform a quick inventory. It’s rainy and cool outside, which will no doubt keep some tourists away, so the crab cakes they’ve made over the past couple of days—about fifty of them, incorporating ten pounds of crabmeat—will probably be enough. One item down.
Stuart pulls a cauldron of tomato-based vegetable soup from the cooler, ladles some of it into a large bowl, and stirs in fresh-picked crabmeat to create one of the restaurant’s signature dishes, crab vegetable soup. It goes into a pot and onto the six-burner stove, part of a wide commercial range that occupies much of the room’s back wall. The ventilation hood was hand-painted by Irene: HIS MERCIES ARE NEW EVERY MORNING.
As the women settle into their routines, their speed and energy rise. Lisa slides a dozen russet potatoes into the oven, while Stuart turns to a stainless steel island three feet away to tackle another specialty of the house, crab bisque. She combines evaporated milk, butter, flour—“No calories whatsoever,” she assures me—and puts the mixture on low heat, working it with a spoon to make a roux that will give the bisque a satisfying thickness.
While Stuart stirs, Lisa pulls a large tray of toast points from the oven, an accompaniment to the Corner’s popular crab dip. At the far end of the prep table, Ginna Giles, in her fourth year of cooking and waiting tables, mixes fresh-cut spring onions into the batter for crab hush puppies. She asks Stuart to taste it.
“It needs more hot stuff,” the boss says. “Did you put Old Bay in it?”
“No,” Ginna says.
“I’d put in some Old Bay and a little cheese.”
The rest of the staff wanders in: Stuart’s aunt, Dot Dize, the dishwasher; waitress Jennifer Bowden, an Eastern Shore native of Tangier descent, now married to an islander; and waitress Erica Daley, Ed Charnock’s newlywed granddaughter. While Dot starts on the dishes, Jennifer and Erica make coffee and set up the salad station near the door to the dining room. Ginna prepares the squash casserole—today’s featured side—and Stuart chops celery and halves shrimp for crab and shrimp salad. She interrupts the task to add crab and evaporated milk to the bisque and to pull a pot of green beans off the stove.
Shortly before eleven, Irene arrives to run the register. She and Stuart take turns overseeing the kitchen and dining room, while dividing the other duties of ownership. “Irene handles more of the administrative stuff,” Stuart says. “We complement each other.
“We don’t argue. We couldn’t have worked all these years together if we did. We try to run it as a God-centered business, as a Christian business.”
It’s also a family business. The restaurant gets its soft crabs from Ooker and Andy Parks, Stuart’s husband, one of Tangier’s few remaining scrapers. Ooker has told me he supplies six or seven dozen a day at the season’s height. He often eats lunch in the dining room, witnessing firsthand the product of his long hours in the Sreedevi and his crab shanty. Here, on the plates of the tourists around him, his peelers’ journey from bay to basket to bustering comes to an end.
The final chapter of that journey is not for the squeamish. Stuart, or whoever’s cooking, places the living soft crab on its back and pulls away its apron. She takes the animal in hand and cuts off its face—including its eyes, antennae, and complicated mouth—with scissors. With the crab’s front end excised, she can lift its upper shell to expose its innards and plucks out two clusters of long, spongy “dead man’s fingers,” the crab’s gills. Contrary to pervasive belief, they’re not poisonous, but their taste and texture are disagreeable, so out they come.
Stuart also scoops out the crab’s bright yellow hepatopancreas, a mushy organ that filters the creature’s blood. It has a sharp, somewhat bitter flavor, which contrasts with the crab’s sweet and succulent meat. On the mainland, many restaurants leave this “mustard” in place, and many diners seem to love it. On Tangier, however, it’s denigrated as “yellow mess” and removed. Though it’s a decision based on taste, not safety, there’s strong argument for siding with the island, for if a crab ventures into polluted water and absorbs its toxins, the hepatopancreas is where they accumulate.
Stuart then dunks the animal in batter, breads it, and either deep-fries or sautés it. If it’s to be eaten on a sandwich, frying is the way to go, because a sautéed crab will make the bread soggy. True to tradition, the bread is always untoasted white. No need to dress up the proceedings with a bun—it will only get in the way of the crab’s innate deliciosity. No, the less bread, the better; it serves only to ease the crab’s journey from plate to mouth.
FEW RESTAURANTS—VERY FEW—can claim their crabs travel so direct a path from bay to plate as those served at Fisherman’s Corner. Ooker sets his peeler pots within sight of the Tangier shore. He busters up his catch about five hundred yards from the restaurant’s stove. Coming ashore, he carries his contributions to the menu across two hundred yards of Meat Soup from the Sreedevi’s tie-up.
The soft crabs that Lorraine Marshall serves up at her namesake restaurant, about a dozen feet from Fisherman’s Corner, are likewise the most local of products, supplied by Tangier crabbers. Order a soft-shell crab sandwich anywhere in bay country, and you can rest easy that you’re getting a blue crab caught and bustered up on Tangier or elsewhere in the Chesapeake—or in the other American waters (North Carolina, Louisiana) where one can haul peelers aboard. But the farm-to-table experience you’ll find in these two island restaurants sets them apart. No middlemen are involved. The provenance of their softshells is beyond question.
Down the road at the Chesapeake House, which serves a vast all-you-can-eat lunch and early supper built around its massive crab cakes, a patron can be equally assured that the crab on her plate originated nearby. The restaurant buys its crab from Lindy’s Seafood, where Tangier hard-potters sell their catches. Lindy’s steams and picks the crabs and delivers the meat to the Chesapeake House, ready for fashioning into cakes.
Off the island, however, bona fide Chesapeake Bay blue crab has become elusive—at least in terms of the steamed and picked crabmeat that goes into crab cakes, crab dip, and other regional specialties. That’s even true in restaurants that trumpet their connection to the bay and its traditions—that decorate their walls with crab pots, buoys, and photos of watermen and deadrises, and that tout their timeless Chesapeake Bay recipes. All too often, there’s nothing Chesapeake Bay about the crabs they put in their dishes. Many Mid-Atlantic restaurants, if not most, use pasteurized crabmeat from thousands of miles away. As for restaurants outside the region: assume their crab is imported.
Economics drives this state of affairs. The bay’s crab population fluctuates—at times alarmingly—which over the past thirty years has prompted both Maryland and Virginia to tighten their harvest regulations to safeguard the species. Even in good years, the supply of fresh Chesapeake Bay blue crab is limited by the animal’s life cycle, in that it’s unavailable from December to March. So restaurants and their suppliers sought a substitute, and have found it in the Asian swimming crab—similar to the blue crab in many particulars, plentiful throughout the Philippines and Southeast Asia, and far cheaper to obtain. Most of the crab you’ll find in the supermarket, whether canned or refrigerated, is imported, too.
Why should you care? First, the influx of imported crabmeat affects the bottom line for crabbers on Tangier, Smith Island, and the many small watermen’s communities around the Chesapeake. Imported crab cuts into the earnings of the companies, like Lindy’s, that buy, process, and market the bay’s crabs. And not least, the Asian swimming crab tastes nothing like the Chesapeake Bay blue crab. To me, the homegrown crab is sweeter and more luscious than any other. I’d argue that its distinct flavor even sets
it apart from the Callinectes sapidus fished up in Carolina and along the Gulf Coast—that within the same species, place affects taste.
I’m not alone. Aficionados can detect the difference readily. “I’m from Mississippi, so I grew up eating blue crabs down there. They’re delicious,” said Hampton Roads chef Sydney Meers, who has earned a reputation for imaginative dishes and flamboyant style at a succession of storied restaurants over the past thirty years—and whose sautéed softshell had a transformative effect on me when I first encountered it in the late eighties. “But when you get them up here, they’re a different kind of flavor. Chesapeake Bay blue crabs are sweeter.”
Such nuance is lost on many diners, particularly those who haven’t grown up eating the bay’s crabs. “I don’t think you can get no crab anywhere else that’ll beat this for the taste,” Ed Charnock told me. “But I guess those restaurants don’t care as long as it’s cheap. People get a crab cake, and they don’t know how it’s supposed to taste, so they don’t know the difference.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “It makes a difference to us.”
Back at Fisherman’s Corner, two parties of diners enter. An order reaches the kitchen: a crab cake sandwich and a side salad. The waitresses assemble the salad and hurry it out the door. Stuart warms a half inch of oil in a high-sided pan, and after waiting a few minutes to allow the customer to start on his greens, she sets two roughly spherical cakes into the pan. They sizzle loudly. She flips them to brown and caramelize the other side, but plucks them out in under a minute—the crab inside has already been steamed and is easily overcooked. From the pan they go into the microwave just long enough to heat through, and from there to the plate.
In walks Ooker, carrying a Ziploc bag of crabmeat, which he hands to Stuart. Fisherman’s Corner has a menu side called “Chesapeake Bay Soft Crab Treasures,” and here’s the chief ingredient: pieces of soft crabs that have lost most of their legs and have thus become what watermen call “doorknobs.” Rather than try to sell them damaged, Ooker cuts the soft crabs into meaty chunks.
Stuart pulls four from the bag, batters and breads them, and tosses them into the deep fryer. A couple minutes later she places them before me, warning, “Give them a minute. Let ’em cool.” They’re each the size of a hush puppy and unrecognizable as softshell—until, unable to wait more than a few seconds, I take a bite.
The shell gives way with a perfect snap. Inside is an unbroken lump of tender, sweet, and remarkably juicy meat. If there is a better food in all the world, I haven’t encountered it. And the waterman who caught it, and who plucked it from a shedding tank just minutes ago, is loitering a few feet away.
“How are they?” Stuart asks.
“Amazing,” I tell her.
“Well,” she says, “they’re certainly fresh.”
FISHERMAN’S CORNER has operated under its present ownership since May 2000, when Stuart, Irene, and two other island women threw in together to buy the business. “None of us had any idea. We were just housewives,” Stuart says. On opening day, “we cried, we were so scared. We had no training at all.”
The other two partners eventually moved away, leaving the cousins in charge. Both Stuart, born in 1954, and Irene, born in 1959, grew up in Rayville, a snug cluster of houses in Meat Soup that was named for Irene’s maternal grandfather. The two have known each other since childhood and remained close as adults—and even more so as business partners. “We worked together and found each other’s strengths,” Stuart says, looking around the kitchen. “It’s changed a lot in here. Like, we originally had the dishwashing over here”—she points to a sink near the range—“and we were constantly running into each other. Every year we would learn how to make it all flow a little better.
“Tables of ten, it don’t even faze us anymore. We used to be, ‘Oh good Lord, how are we going to do this?’ Now it’s nothing.”
This feat is all the more remarkable for the fact that none of the restaurant’s founders came into the venture with a lot of capital; they were all married to watermen and hostage to crabbing’s uncertain revenues. All had busy lives with family and church. Stuart’s two sons were grown, but she was still raising a young daughter. Irene carried a titanic load, and not just because she was married to the island’s emerging mouthpiece. The Eskridges’ younger son, Joseph, was still in high school at Tangier Combined. And then there were the four girls.
Irene and Ooker had long talked about adopting. The subject moved to the fore after Irene suffered a miscarriage while carrying their third child. After learning that a domestic adoption might take years, they chose the expensive but speedier option of seeking a daughter in India. Sreedevi, four years old, arrived from an orphanage in the Indian city of Hyderabad in 1996. “Lice? She was covered with lice,” Leon recalled. “Four of us went up to get her when she come in. We all had to get RID—we went to a store in Salisbury. We had lice all over us.”
Leon’s sentimental recollection notwithstanding, the entire town embraced the quiet little girl. Her assimilation went so well that two years later, the Eskridges sought to adopt a second daughter. They aimed for a second or third grader, so that Sreedevi would have a playmate. That brought them Devi, from the same orphanage, whose operators claimed that she was seven. She was more likely nine or ten.
The orphanage also told the Eskridges that Devi’s mother had given her up for adoption and that both of her parents had since died. That was another fiction—she’d been kidnapped and sold to the orphanage. “It said on all my papers that my mom had me out of wedlock and couldn’t keep me,” Devi recalled nineteen years later. “I thought, ‘That’s a funny thing, because I was with her.’”
On the plane to Washington Dulles Airport, an Indian adoption agent coached her to say “Hello, Mother” and “Hello, Father.” That was the only English she knew when she stepped onto U.S. soil. “I wasn’t scared, but I was nervous,” she told me. “I didn’t want to be there. I was homesick. When the doors opened to the airport, they pointed to James and Irene and said, ‘Those are your new parents.’”
Despite this traumatic introduction, the outgoing and adventurous Devi took to Tangier. For one thing, it seemed familiar. “When I lived in my home of Kakinada, the business was mainly fishermen,” she said. “I would come into town to sell spices and would watch them come in with their boats and nets. And when I got to Tangier, I was surrounded by seawater, and most of the men are fishermen.”
Irene homeschooled her in English, labeling everything in the house with Post-its—beds, doors, salt and pepper shakers, the fridge. Devi caught on fast, which isn’t to say it was easy. “You take children from India who can’t speak English,” Principal Nina Pruitt observed, “and move them to Tangier, where some people think we can’t speak English, and you’re in for an adventure.”
Once she had tentative command of the language, Devi explained to Ooker and Irene that she’d been stolen from her mother. Horrified, they contacted an Alabama couple who’d adopted two sisters from the same orphanage the same year, and with whom they regularly spoke. When the couple approached their girls with Devi’s story, they learned that the sisters had been stolen, too. The discoveries spurred investigations and the prosecution of orphanage officials in India. The Alabama couple still actively campaigns to reform the adoption process.
Both the Eskridges and the Alabamans gave their children opportunities to return to India, to meet their surviving relatives, and to choose where they wanted to live. All decided to remain in the United States. Meanwhile, to distill a long and complicated story to its essence, the Alabama couple sent their two girls to live with the only people in America the youngsters knew from India, those being Sreedevi and Devi. In 2003 the Eskridges took Bhagya, thirteen, and Manjula, fifteen, into their already crowded household on the West Ridge.
And so it was that Tangier became home to a tiny but celebrated Asian population. “They had a good childhood. Oh, yeah,” Leon said. “They accepted them like crazy arou
nd here.”
So, yes: Irene had her hands full when she cofounded the restaurant. And her life didn’t get any less complicated for years. The oldest of the girls, Manjula, graduated from Tangier Combined in 2005. The youngest of her six children, Sreedevi, didn’t graduate until 2010.
Nowadays, all the girls live on the mainland. Manjula is married to Warren Eskridge, a barge captain and the son of Ooker’s brother Allen Dale. They have two children and live on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Bhagya is a hairdresser in Birmingham, Alabama. Sreedevi is a nanny and studying to be a teacher in Austin, Texas.
And Devi, who visits the island frequently, lived in Delaware, Florida, and the Eastern Shore before moving to Lovingston, Virginia, just east of the Blue Ridge, where she works as a nanny. She’s an hour’s drive from Ooker and Irene’s son Joseph, who has lived in Lynchburg since leaving Tangier for Liberty University. They often attend church together.
WHEN NO CUSTOMERS ARE ABOUT, the kitchen crew at Fisherman’s Corner will decamp to a table out front, to thumb through a pile of magazines and catalogs they keep on hand for such breaks. The publications are smudged, their paper crackled and supple with age. One is a Country Living from 2006. Lisa Crockett studies an issue of Southern Living dating to 2010. “We look at ’em like we’ve never seen ’em,” she tells me. She points out an ad. “They probably don’t even make that anymore.”
A call comes in for a to-go order—fried pickles, fried green tomatoes, hush puppies, and two cups of crab bisque—from workers at Daley & Son. The staff hustles into the kitchen. Lisa uses an ice cream scoop to dollop Ginna’s crab hush puppy mix into the deep fryer.
Everyone who works at Fisherman’s Corner is female. That’s true, too, of the crew at Lorraine’s. The relative dearth of testosterone on either premises might help explain how the competitors have coexisted on good terms for so many years. “It’s not the greatest thing to have the two restaurants next door to each other,” Stuart says, battering up pickles for the fryer. “You’ll see tourists come up and look at one, then the other, trying to decide, and it’s nerve-racking on a slow day.