Soft-shell savants
Written by Clay Bonnyman Evans
Photographed by Michael Hrizuk
Here’s a fun fact about “soft-shell” crabs, a spring delicacy on Lowcountry seafood menus: They’re hard-shell crabs in the process of molting, when they shed and replace their hard, protective, outgrown carapaces.
Here’s another: To get the perfect texture, flavor and consistency in a soft-shell crab, you’d best have round-the-clock “crabsitters” from roughly late March to early June.
When it comes to soft-shell crabs, timing is everything. Get it wrong, and “you have a papery consistency, sort of like a wet piece of loose-leaf paper,” says Andrew Carmines, owner of Hudson’s on the Docks, the only restaurant on Hilton Head Island with its own soft-shell “shedding” operation.
The shedding process begins when local water temperatures rise above 50 degrees. Crabs initially release enzymes to begin “molting their old exoskeleton and remain ‘soft’ until their shells begin to harden over the coming days,” according to restaurant’s website. They later ingest seawater, which helps to loosen and shed the old shell. It’s critical to remove them from the brine quickly, to prevent the new shells from hardening.
Hudson’s was built originally in 1912 as an oyster factory by J.B. Hudson, Sr.; Brian and Gloria Carmines bought the restaurant in 1975. When Andrew assumed management from his parents in 2013, he began to hear complaints from some customers about the texture of soft-shell crabs, which he was buying from a supplier on Lady’s Island near Beaufort.
The problem, the supplier explained, was that crabs were removed from saltwater, boxed up, and didn’t reach the restaurant for many hours. Picking up the crabs every day would solve the problem, he said.
“So, I did that. I drove to Lady’s Island and back every day for the whole season. The complaints went away,” Carmines says, “but it was a real pain in the neck.”
Grousing that he was “damned if I do, and damned if I don’t,” he and his stone-crab supplier Rob Rowe decided to build their own shedding tanks and monitor the process themselves. They built and set up two tables from plywood and 2-by-4s with fiberglass seams on Lemon Island, then used standard pool pumps and PVC pipe to circulate saltwater from nearby waters. They each took a 12-hour shift, starting from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., every day, checking the crabs constantly and pulling them about 10 minutes after shedding.
They managed to “shed out” 3,000 crabs that first season, but it wasn’t easy. Crabs had a habit of escaping the rickety tanks and the grueling schedule left them exhausted.
“At the end of the season, we were just like, done,” Carmines says. “We recognized that to be more successful, we would have to have a lot more tanks … so we could afford to pay other people to keep watch 24/7.”
For their third season, Carmines had new fiberglass tanks built and the operation was moved to Hudson’s docks on Skull Creek. Today, the restaurant runs 14 tables and pays an employee to “crab-sit” overnight.
“If we shed out between 50 and 60 crabs, we can break even in a day,” Carmines says.
Having the operation on-site has the side benefit of giving customers a glimpse into Hudson’s “old-fashioned” way of doing business, Carmines says, which includes running a sustainable oyster farm off the northern tip of Pinckney Island, a clam farm, and fishing boats delivering right to the dock.
“We do a lot of things the right way, in my eyes. But that’s hard to share with people; they can’t go out and see the oyster farm; the shrimp boats don’t come in when guests are at the restaurant… The soft-shell operation gives our customers a look at the dedication we put in every day,” Carmines says. “They know that quality and freshness is going to be there. Our phone rings off the hook for weeks before the season starts.”
Carmines, who eats at the restaurant six days a week, relishes how one season rolls right into the next, from soft-shell to stone-crab, to oysters, to shrimp: “It’s really exciting to have these little treasures happen at different times of the year.”
He’s also grateful for Hudson’s stellar reputation and the devotion of its customers, particularly locals: There are “Thursday guys” and “Sunday guys” and “Monday guys” who show up every week like clockwork. And one recent weekend morning, Carmines looked around and realized he knew somebody at every table, inside and out.
“It wasn’t like that when we started,” he says. “We’ve worked hard to get here.”
