Shucking Its Image

Apalachicola, Fla. — Anyone who's ever slurped a single raw one just 24 hours out of the bay knows that it would be no hardship to live by oysters alone. Papa Joe's Oyster Bar has come up with a dozen more ways to fix 'em, and Boss Oysters down the road brags on 17 ways with oysters.

But there is more to Panhandle dining than oysters.

Like shrimp, especially the ones they call hoppers: brownish-pink beauties with a little crimson dot that come out of the same bays as the oysters.

And the scallops, bay scallops, specifically St. Joe Bay scallops, raked up off Cape San Blas.

That's just the beginning of the catch that feeds visitors along the Panhandle, where the fishing boats work some of the cleanest waters left in the United States. From Apalachicola, which some call the Last Great Bay, around to Pensacola, local crab, red snapper, grouper and cobia have joined hush puppies on captain's platters in tourist restaurants for years.

Now there's an equally remarkable ingredient: the ideas of gourmet chefs, led by Johnny Earles, who are clustered around the fashionable resorts of south Walton County. Earles came from New Orleans 20 years ago to help friends open a casual restaurant in Grayton Beach, taught himself to cook and proceeded to teach chefs and feed diners up and down the coast. New chefs and native seafood seem to be a successful recipe.

The restaurant is called Criolla's because it specializes in the Caribbean Creole and New Orleans fusion cuisine Earles created, in which entrees of swordfish with purple yam dumplings, kaffir lime broth and pan-fried oysters are dressed with a buerre noisette and tarragon — and hefty prices.

Criolla's (170 E Scenic Highway 30-A, Santa Rosa Beach; 850-267-1267) is a landmark on a map of the gourmet South, a rare stopping point in travels from New Orleans or Atlanta to Miami, and a training ground for student chefs.

Chefs and cooks from France, Hungary, Belgium and Peru, as well as Louisiana and California, also have opened shop in slick restaurants all along the coast with entree prices that can hit $30.

That's a big change from the restaurants that made seafood a staple of Panhandle vacations. Most look like old legion posts or fish camps. Some of the paneling is new, but beer signs and stuffed game and fish are still the flashiest touches of decor.

The old haunts still exist, stocked with warm welcome, cold seafood and never a doubt about freshness or local pride.

At the Tiki Hut, a quarter-mile down a dirt road to Carrabelle's fishing docks and icehouse, the waiter had no doubts about the shrimp. Her boyfriend shrimps a lot, and those hoppers were, well, "They're almost too pretty to sell."

Sold they were, and when steamed they were also remarkably fresh and sweeter than any shrimp in memory, testimony to the still-clean local waters.

That's most obvious in Apalachicola's famous oysters, with their tell-tale tastes of the passing weather. Even though oyster beds, natural and man-made, have fixed locations, oysters in them will change week to week with the winds and water.

At the best of times, the temperature drops, the fronts shift to blow freshwater farther out of the estuary, and the oysters are plump and their flesh sweet and almost salt-free. In other places and with other winds, you can taste more salt, but even the saltiness tastes clean.

One of the biggest tourist attractions is a shrimper by the side of the road selling 14- to 16-count head-on shrimp for $5.95 a pound to steam in your cottage. The oyster bars are happy to add nacho topping or gild the oysters in ways that would embarrass the Rockefellers. However, the best oysters are fresh out of the shell shucked by someone else's firm, rough-cut hands, straight from the roaster or minutes out of the skillet.

The new chefs, if they're smart — and Earles is — find that shellfish this fresh brings out their simpler side.

Or relatively simpler. Earles does add curry powder to the flour he uses to dust the oysters, but after that, he's obsessive about treating them right, as careful as he would be with crawfish.

"I don't like soggy pan-fried oysters," he says firmly. He cooks them quickly, and "just before you think they're done, I deglaze the pan with lemon juice and add cilantro and take them off the heat." The juice from the oysters and the lemon make a sauce, and the shellfish keep cooking on their way to the table.

Earles keeps an eye out for those summer St. Joe Bay oysters, which get a similarly creative but gentle treatment, too. He treats his beloved crawfish the same in a classic etouffe: Once the stock is right, he puts in the crawfish tails, which are three-fourths cooked, stirs them around twice and pulls them from the heat.

"Right now, cobia are running out here along the beach. There's only one way to cook them: grilled," he says.

Treating seafood right is not new, but Earles brought something else. He had to, because when he arrived in 1983, "there wasn't anything but pine trees and peanuts" beyond the seafood. Over the years, the chef has found some ingredients, such as local prickly pear cactus he can use in syrups and ice creams, and persuaded one family farmer to grow vegetables for him (recognized on the menu as Farmer Brown's salad).

The biggest ingredient has been a classic commitment to quality and a modern chef's relentless imagination. The efforts have produced a restaurant that is painstakingly smooth in operation and a menu bursting with creativity.

"I can tell when people walk in, maybe they've just gotten off a plane from New York, they're still all jumpy, and after a few minutes, they realize they're going to be safe. And they won't have to eat fried grouper," he says.

During the early '90s, Earles spent his slow winter season working under New York greats Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Charlie Palmer and Tom Colicchio. Now he's constantly teaching, too.

After bringing a French maitre'd, Michel Thibault, from New Orleans, he now has a French sous chef and a French pastry chef among a kitchen staff of 20.
On the Florida coast, the chef says that there is no true "Panhandle cuisine" but there is a new style. Its hallmarks are fresh seafood and modern cooking, influenced first by New Orleans, then by the Nuevo Latino flavors of Miami and ultimately the casual attitude of a Southern cottage beach.

This cooking has arrived at the right time and in the right place for the new high-end tourist areas around Seaside and parts of Destin.

"I call them New Southerners," he says. "This is a new group of affluent diners, but they do have their roots in the South."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, SHNS.com.)