Crab Man

"I called Emily and we talked about it. She isn't doing all-you-can-eat anymore either," Lynch said. "The problem is human nature. When they're all-you-can-eat, people just eat the easy parts and throw the rest of the crab away," she said. "We used to go through 200 dozen crabs a night. Now we're making more money selling 100 dozen."

Kelli Sartin's location near Clear Lake is the last one offering the all-you-can-eat option. "She's just getting started," Lynch said. "She has to do it for now." But Lynch is convinced that the days of all-you-can-eat barbecued crabs are coming to an end. And she isn't going to miss them.

"You want something to drink?" Doug Sartin asked me. We were in the kitchen of Emily Summers's Sartin's location on Highway 90 in Beaumont, cleaning our giant crabs. If I wanted to eat the ultimate barbecued crab, then I was going to have to work for it.

"Yeah, I'll take an iced tea," I said. Doug set down a Miller Lite on the work table in front of me.

"We call these iced teas here," he said with a laugh.

Cleaning the live crabs is the most difficult part of making barbecued crabs. If Doug hadn't shown me how to do it, I probably never would have figured it out.

First you have to plunge the crab into ice water to stun it enough so it stops fighting. Then, with the crab upright on a flat surface, you hold down a flipper on the bottom left side of the crab with your left thumb and then rip off the shell from left to right with your right hand. It takes considerable force to get it started. Then you clean out the exposed guts under running water.

When we were finished, we handed our crabs to the kitchen manager, a Vietnamese woman who's been with Sartin's since the early days in Sabine Pass. She would dip the crabs in the spice mix, drop them in the fryer and bring them to us when they were ready.

We waited in the dining room, where a few of Doug's friends had gathered. Emily Summers's Sartin's location is by far the most comfortable of the three. The dining room is furnished with wooden tables and lit naturally by large windows looking out on a tree-shaded patio.

The subject turned to Rita, and I told the group I was shocked by all the damage I'd seen driving around Beaumont and Port Arthur all day. You didn't hear anything about this devastation from the national media, I remarked.

"You guys must be pretty tired of seeing New Orleans and Katrina coverage on television," I said. The table suddenly went silent.

After a few seconds, somebody said, "You mean they had a hurricane in New Orleans, too?" And then everybody had a good laugh.

Then the ultimate plate of barbecued crabs arrived, and it was my turn to be silent for a while. There were six of them on the plate, and they were indeed the best I've ever eaten. I could barely believe the huge gobs of meat I was getting out of those sea monsters. The meat was sweeter than crabmeat usually tastes and very juicy. I sucked each body cavity clean and washed the spicy crabmeat down with one last beer.

Since I had just been to all three Sartin's locations, Doug's friends asked me what I thought.

I said it was a novelty to have a Sartin's in Houston, and Kelli seemed like quite a character.

"Kelli is a fruit loop," said Doug Sartin.

"That's the nicest thing I've ever heard Doug call his sister," said one of his friends, laughing. They were drinking Coronas now; I lost track of how many beers Doug drank in the few hours we were together, but it was more than six.

"Sartin's has a new image," I said. "There's three good-looking women running the restaurants now--"

"And one dumbass named Doug running around in the background," interrupted Doug Sartin.

It is indeed a bizarre situation. Doug Sartin is the only thing the owners of the three Sartin's restaurants have in common -- and not one of them wants him around.

Kelli, Kim and Emily aren't terribly fond of one another, either. Each Sartin's restaurant prints its own T-shirts, runs its own Web site and generally acts as if the other two don't exist. It all sounds kind of like a William Faulkner plot -- a proud family dynasty battered by booze, bad marriages and incessant hurricanes, but still hanging on.

Of course, none of the Sartin family melodrama matters much if you're hungry. In that case, you'll want to know that crabs are in season right now. And that the new generation of Sartin's Seafood Restaurants is serving bona fide Sabine Pass barbecued crabs -- and keeping an old Texas food tradition alive.

Where To Eat Barbecued Crabs

Sartin's Seafood (Houston)
18023 Upper Bay Road
281-333-4040

Sartin's Seafood (Nederland)
3520 Nederland Avenue
409-721-9420

Sartin's Seafood (Beaumont)
12647 Highway 90
409-866-1625

Floyd's Cajun Seafood House (Webster)
20760 Gulf Freeway
281-332-7474

Stingaree Restaurant (Crystal Beach)
1295 Stingaree Road
409-684-2731