Food
King Crab
In tiny Sabine Pass, two restaurants battle to see which will be the barbecued-crab master of the universe.
(Page 2 of 2)
“We had some magnificent years,” says Jerri wistfully. At its peak, from the mid-seventies to the early eighties, Sartin’s was feeding an incredible 1,500 to 2,000 customers a day on weekends was grossing $1.25 million annually. The family lived high on the hog. Just like the rest of the state, though, Sartin’s and Sabine Pass were floating along on the bubble of the oil boom, living in a kind of dream state that simply did not recognize words like “thrift” and “prudence” and “tomorrow.”
As bubbles have a way of doing, however, this one finally burst. In January 1985 Sartin’s got a spectacularly low inspection score (47 on a scale of 100) from the Port Arthur Department of Health; although the restaurant quickly pulled the score up to 90, local gossip persisted. Then, three years later, Hurricane Gilbert tore up part of Highway 87. But the most serious blow was the steadily unraveling oil economy—that and the restaurant’s stubborn refusal to gut up to hard times. “I don’t have no degree in cost cutting,” say Jerri defiantly. “I like to serve a big full plate; I want to fill that sucker up and be proud of it.” Food costs hurt, but the biggest drains on the business were overhead and personnel. Jerri says, “I had twenty-five to thirty tons of air conditioning just sucking those dollars up. And we didn’t want to lay anybody off.” In December 1989 Sartin’s big red neon crab sign went out for the last time. Some six months later, the Internal Revenue Service seized the restaurants for back taxes.
Once again, it appeared to be the end of an era—no more barbecued crabs—and it would have been except for one small fact. Across the highway from Sartin’s was a restaurant that had been waiting three years for a break like this: the Channel Inn. “I always had a dream to own a restaurant,” says the Inn’s owner, Bill Williams, 42, a second-generation resident of Sabine Pass.
In 1986 he borrowed $140,000 and fixed up the old Geneva’s restaurant. Then he sought out Lenora Orphy, who had cooked at Sartin’s until about 1982 and was known to make a mean gumbo, and Frank Lewis, the man who knew all there was to know about barbecued crabs. It was rough going at first. “We didn’t start off with no boom, that’s for sure,” says Williams. And he didn’t exactly get respect from Sartin’s. “They just laughed at us—‘Who the hell did we think we were?’” he says with a trace of bitterness. But he persevered, building up his business one customer at a time.
In subtle ways the Channel Inn was a little nicer than Sartin’s, but the basics—all-you-can-eat “platter service” ($14.95), paper towels, trash cans—were a carbon copy. As Williams sees it, the big difference was that he was a better businessman: “We’ve sold four million crabs since we opened, and in 1990 we did $1.2 million in sales,” he says. “We’re expanding right now from 290 seats to about 400; we already have 286 reservations for tonight, and winter is a slow time.” If Sartin’s had been the carefree grasshopper in the local restaurant scene, the Channel Inn was the serious ant.
As you might expect, feelings between Sartin’s and the Channel Inn ran high, with suspicions of dirty tricks abounding. Sartin’s customers noticed that after Sartin’s closed, for example, the recorded disconnect message gave out the Channel Inn’s phone number. Was that because somebody made an honest mistake, or was it because Bill Williams had relatives who worked for the phone company? For his part, Williams was plenty steamed that Jerri Sartin wouldn’t go along with his idea to promote Sabine Pass as the barbecued-crab capital of the world in 1987. “She never was much of a businesswoman,” he scoffs. Jerri’s daughter, Kelli Sartin Boudreaux, a perky blond with a wry Dolly Parton smile, rolls her eyes and says, “Anything I say about the Channel Inn is liable to get a lawsuit slapped in my face.”
By all logic, the mantle of fame worn first by Granger’s and then by Sartin’s should have been passed to the Channel Inn. Jerri and Charles had gone back to commercial fishing, and although Kelli and her brother, Doug, 22, had started Sartin’s restaurants in Beaumont and Crystal Beach, both establishments subsequently closed (they have since opened one in Nederland in October 1990). But as usual, logic didn’t have a lot to do with life in Sabine Pass. After failing to sell the restaurant, even at the ridiculously low price of $5,000, the IRS cut a deal with Jerri and Charles: It let them buy back their place for $70,000 on the installment plan.
When the final papers were signed last November, everybody connected with Sartin’s—the family, the waitresses, the cooks, the Vietnamese women who cleaned the crabs and shrimp—just about went crazy with happiness. Kelli bought champagne and party hats, and they laughed and cried and pounded each other on the back. “We felt so stupid because we were crying over a damn building,” says Kelli, “but we just couldn’t help it.”
On Friday, December 14, Sartin’s red neon crab sign went on for the first time in nearly a year. The next night Jerri sat in the dining room with a look of wonder on her face. “I can’t tell you what this feels like,” she said, “except it’s like coming home. I think we have a real good chance of making a comeback.” Sartin’s newly repaneled dining room was half full of locals and boisterous passengers from two charter buses from Houston. True, it wasn’t like the old days, but it wasn’t bad, considering. Across the street, the Channel Inn’s parking lot was full. There were a lot of happy, more-than-slightly-greasy people in Sabine Pass that night.
Someday somebody ought to put up a monument in the little community, like the giant jackrabbit in Odessa or the Popeye in Crystal City. It would be a crab, of course, but not a fresh crab. This one would be the color of mahogany and would have a peculiar speckled, almost crispy look to it. Visitors would be puzzled at first, but then they would stop at a restaurant—maybe Sartin’s, maybe the Channel Inn—and they would understand. As Bill Williams puts it, “Barbecued crabs: That’s what Sabine Pass is all about.”
Pages: 1 2
My Library
