Innovative chef Johnny Earles has elevated Panhandle dining far above the raw oyster and the captain's platter.
By CHRIS SHERMAN
Published April 9, 2003
APALACHICOLA - 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 in the best culinary schools.
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 ice house, 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 and curiosity about native cooking and folklore around the equator. Like the time he wanted to add a three-course Trinidadian meal to his menu but didn't want "some lame dessert with mango or baked pineapple." So, sometime after midnight, he was on the phone pestering information operators on the island until he found a native cook to ask "what did your mama make you for dessert?" (The answer: cassava pone with a touch of black pepper; Earles added a ginger cream).
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. At first they were surprised by the chef's combinations, such as putting a little cayenne in chocolate syrup for tropical ice cream. So he explained the history of chocolate in Mexico, where it was a hot beverage that included chile.
But last month, one of the French chefs came to him with what he called a "Chino-Latino" sauce.
Yet, Earles doesn't approve of all culinary combinations. He's not keen on the Asian-creole fusion popping up in his beloved New Orleans, one of the few parts of the country that has long had a distinct regional character. Though Louisiana has historic connections to Central America and the Caribbean, "I hate to see the influx of sushi bars there. I'd rather see the roots of creole be renovated and elevated," he says.
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."
Earles is fully aware of the development boom around him.
"Real estate is the game; restaurants are only the halftime entertainment," he says, and he is working on getting a commercial real-estate license.
The new visitors support the newest string of fine dining restaurants in the state and creative restaurants in small towns such as Apalachicola and Port St. Joe, too.
In many of the new restaurants, you'll find touches of Criolla's, sometimes former employees and certainly a more adventurous palate.
Down by the dunes in old Grayton Beach, the ancient Cracker hotel where Earles and friends opened their first restaurant is now the Red Bar. Two young Belgian entrepreneurs have wallpapered with surfing posters and soccer scores, installed live jazz and sturdy pastas. And lighted the joint redder than a lava lamp, to the delight of a new generation of beachgoers and an offduty chef or two.
Criolla's Barbecue Shrimp (with an eye on the moon)
1 pound jumbo shrimp
1 pound unsalted butter
3 tablespoons Worcestershire Sauce
2 tablespoons fresh ground black pepper
1/2 lemon, sliced
1 tablespoons fresh parsley, minced
1/3 cup shellfish stock or water
Salt to taste
In a medium skillet on medium heat, add the butter, Worcestershire Sauce, black pepper and lemon.
Add the shrimp when the butter is two-thirds melted.
Chef Johnny Earles says to shake the pan in a clockwise motion if the moon is waxing and counterclockwise if it is waning.
Add the rest of the ingredients. The stock or water reintroduces into the mix water molecules that evaporated while cooking, thus allowing for an emulsion to take place.
Suggestions: Best served with a crusty French baguette. Variations can be made by adding things such as rosemary or oven dried tomatoes to the recipe.
Chef's note: The trick to the dish is how you shake the pan. If you were a youngster before the advent of the microwave, your mother may have cooked Jiffy Pop popcorn; she would have to constantly shake the pan over the heat.
The same technique is required for barbecue shrimp in order to emulsify the sauce that is the critical element differentiating the great from the acceptable.
Source: Chef Johnny Earles, Criolla's.
[Last modified April 8, 2003, 10:17:21]
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