Soeurved

Good food often tastes like the past to me. In fact, I think taste is my most nostalgic sense, even more so than smell. I spent the first week of December in Miami. Despite two recent articles in the New York Times and T Magazine lauding Miami as a gastronomical destination, the restaurants there disappointed me. Sure, I enjoyed my “Pulled Pork Sandwich with pickled red onion, creamy cucumbers & parsley sauce” at Michael’s Genuine Food & Drink, but not enough to forgive the 40-minute wait or the Pottery Barn-esque decor. Same thing at 8oz Burger Bar. The turkey burger was flavorful, but the TV-plastered walls and black leather banquette recalled a midwestern chain restaurant (the kind I would have begged my mom to take me when I was 12). My favorite meal came from Joe’s Stone Crab—an order of 5 large (albeit pre-cracked) stone crabs with “their famous” mustard sauce. I grew up eating stone crabs from Placida Fish Market near Boca Grande, Florida; squeezing the cracker as hard as I could with both hands to get at the meat inside; extracting the black-tipped claw slowly, so it came out in one piece; and dunking the flesh in my grandmother’s famous mustard sauce. Before my visit to Joe’s, I hadn’t eaten stone crabs for at least ten years—before my grandmother sold “the Beach House” on Gasparilla Island. Sharing my order of Joe’s claws with someone who had never eaten them before, I realized that, although stone crabs are delicious, they basically taste like other crabs. Unless they are infused with nostalgia. Then they are untouchable.