Florida Dining: Do-It-Yourself Stone Crab Restaurant

Stone Crab and Seafood Truck
located at Yankee Peddler
12174 US Highway 1, North Palm Beach, FL
(561) 627-9876

Originally, I was going to do a post about one of those really expensive Florida stone crab restaurants, like Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami, or Billy’s Stone Crab in Hollywood, but upon returning from lunch at Little Moir’s Food Shack in Jupiter (which we’ll get to later) we noticed an interesting truck in the parking lot of the Yankee Trader Produce Market.

Want to know what to do with Stone Crab claws bought off the back of a truck? Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.

Stone Crab claws for $7.99 a pound? What a bargain!

The guy selling the claws let us taste a sample (as clean and as tasty as can be) and sniff the freshness level of the claws, which smelled just like the ocean, in a good way. Apparently, he’s totally legit.

Stone Crabs, Menippe mercenaria are indigenous to the Gulf region and are a very tasty and expensive seafood delicacy, and are only avaliable mid-October thru Mid-may. Only the claws are harvested — the crabs are thrown back into the sea (with the smaller of the two claws remaining) to regrow its other claw. You can expect to pay upwards of $30 per plate for them. As you can see, these are sold along with the mustard/cream/mayo/worcestershire dipping sauce that was made famous by Joe’s Stone Crab restaurant.

In addition to Stone Crabs, he had grouper filets, lobster tails, and these Florida Pink Shrimp, also known as “Pinkies”.

Bagging up the Pinkies and the Stone Crabs. I almost felt like I was engaging in some sort of illicit activity.

Florida Pink Shrimp closeup.

Here we have our timeshare condo’s breakfast bar set up just like an expensive Florida stone crab restaurant, with all the side dishes. The small saute pans were used in lieu of mallets to crack the claws open.

Sour Cream potatoes with Parsley

Fresh local sweet corn, steamed.

Sauteed Carrots with Garlic

Sauteed Spinach with Bacon and Garlic. At a Stone Crab restaurant, it would be creamed spinach, just as you would find at a steakhouse, but we didn’t have any heavy cream and frankly, we didn’t miss it.

With the Pinkies, we did a simple scampi saute with butter, garlic, lemon juice and parsley. This was excellent, and we didn’t have to add any salt or pepper to it either (and well, we didn’t buy any for the timeshare) because we used salted butter and the heavy garlic made up for the lack of black pepper.

Yellow Squash with Garlic, Onion and Poblano Pepper