Garlic Crabs in Jacksonville
“Famous in Jacksonville.” That’s how Akam Sorany, manager of Seven Seas Crab House on Main Street in North Jacksonville, describes a local delicacy: garlic crabs. Though not as famous as its culinary cousin Mayport shrimp, Jacksonville is the epicenter of this distinctive dish, which is served up at dozens of crab shacks and restaurants across town.
Garlic crabs are a variant of the traditional Lowcountry seafood boil, in which shellfish are cooked in a pot with potatoes, sausage, corn and eggs. The distinguishing element of garlic crabs is the use of a rich garlic butter sauce. Both dishes originated with the Gullah Geechee people, the descendants of West Africans enslaved in the coastal Southeast from St. Augustine to Wilmington, North Carolina. Traditionally, native blue crabs are the main protein, but especially when they’re out of season, soft shell crabs, snow crabs and other shellfish like shrimp, crawfish and mussels are also on the menu. As Sorany says, “pretty much anything we can get our hands on from the sea.”
Downtown Jacksonville’s Greedy Spoon, which opened in April 2021, also specializes in garlic crabs, and owner Marilyn Craig comes by her love for seafood honestly. Her great grandfather was the first African American to own a seafood distribution company in Mayport, and her grandfather and father were commercial shrimpers. Her brother, a fisherman currently based in Tampa, is Craig’s main supplier. “Seafood has been my whole life,” she says. “That’s all I’ve ever known.”
Growing up, Craig’s family moved with the fishing seasons between Mayport and Louisiana, and she loved learning recipes from both regions. As a child the family would boil crabs or crawfish over their backyard fire pit. “When you said crab boil, it wasn’t a one-person thing, a crab boil was like the whole family,” she says. “You’d sit around with your nice cold drink and just eat out of the pot.” The Greedy Spoon is Craig’s attempt to combine her extensive knowledge of seafood with her passion for cooking. “My parents wouldn't let me get out there and run the boat,” she says, “so I figured the next best thing is to open up a seafood restaurant.”
Craig’s garlic crabs are from a recipe passed down through the generations. “The garlic sauce for the crabs, that’s my mom’s recipe. Mostly everything in here is my mom’s, and she got it from my grandmother.” Her recipes are an inheritance, and she takes them very seriously – only real butter for her crabs. “We like to boil in a blend of seasonings, like the old way, with a lot of spices and garlic actually boiled with the crabs,” she says. “It's just delicious.”
Sorany at Seven Seas Crab House also has his own recipe for garlic butter sauce, which is so popular that customers buy it on the side to use at home. “We call it a signature kick sauce,” he says. “It has a tingle of spice in there, a little kick to it. Each tray, we mix it all fresh.” Before opening Seven Seas in 2013, Sorany, like Craig, discovered his passion for cooking crabs “in the backyard.” Of his decision to open a restaurant, he says, “really I just like to play around with food. It’s a love, that’s what it is.”
Within Jacksonville, many don’t appreciate the city’s status as the garlic crab center of the world. Elsewhere, however, the reputation is firmly established. In Charleston, the renowned Charlie Brown’s Seafood Kitchen has “Jacksonville-style garlic crabs” on the menu. Says Craig’s sister Christine Khabir, “in Georgia we have several places that do them, but my daughter will come all the way here [to Jacksonville] to get them.”
Hopefully Northeast Florida will lean into celebrating garlic crabs as a signature local dish. They’re delicious, they’ve got a deep local history and the ingredients are ubiquitous in the natural environment. “Anybody can get crab in Jacksonville,” says Sorany. “Basically, in the St. Johns River, all around us everywhere is the blue crab.”
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Ready to plan a Garlic Crab adventure of your own? We'd recommend you try Seven Seas Crab House (5326 N Main Street) or The Greedy Spoon (311 W. Ashley Street) in Jacksonville.
