20 Restaurants Support a Town : Calabash: An Economy That’s Hooked on Fish

This southernmost coastal town in North Carolina is so tiny that it doesn’t show up on a lot of maps. But thousands of people from all over the Carolinas flock here each week to feast on Calabash-style fish.

That’s enough to keep 20 seafood restaurants in Calabash busy nearly all year long. And that’s a good thing for the 180 citizens of Calabash, because, besides the restaurants, there isn’t much else here.

The restaurants of Calabash, which together have annual sales estimated at about $6 million, all have virtually the same menu and charge practically the same prices. Each restaurant seats 100 to 250 diners at one sitting. Some even have similar names: There’s a Capt. John’s, a Capt. Nance’s and a Capt. Jerry’s.

Despite the abundance of places to choose from--there are 12 more fish restaurants within a 10-mile radius--it’s not necessarily a diners’ market. Waiting time for a table is almost always at least an hour. But, customers swear, the food is worth standing in line for.

Calabash’s restaurants daily feature specialties like Fishhead Annie’s crab casserole, Carolina Shore’s oyster fritters and Fat Bessie’s shrimp etouffee .

Sumptuous helpings of fresh crab, croaker, shad, oysters, shrimp, scallops, flounder, bluefish, pompano, king mackerel and other local catch are fried and baked in light batter.

Prices range from $5.50 for perch to $13.50 for lobster tails.

“Just about everybody in town works at a seafood house, and just about everybody in town is related,” says Calabash Mayor Sonia Stevens, 32.

She, like nearly everybody else, has worked in several of the restaurants, cooking or waiting on tables. Everybody moving from place to place helps explain why so many restaurants can exist side by side without apparent competition.

It was two sisters, Lucy Coleman and Ruth Beck, and their husbands who started Calabash on its seafood cooking spree back in the late 1930s when they each opened a restaurant specializing in fish dinners. The sisters and their restaurants, the Calabash Original and Beck’s, are still going strong today.

Lockwood Folly River

Calabash’s dependence on the restaurant trade is also felt by the fishermen 10 miles up the coast in Varnam Town, population 300, who provide the bulk of the fresh catch for Calabash’s restaurants.

“They do the cooking down there in Calabash. We do the catching up here in Varnam Town,” explains Varnam Town’s Methodist minister, 63-year-old Tracie Varnam, who preaches on Sundays and clams the rest of the week.

Ernie Galloway, 40, will rake up 750 to 1,000 clams on a good day on the Lockwood Folly River (named for a local man in the 1800s who built a boat on the river so big that it was impossible to move it once it was completed).

3 Oyster-Shucking Houses

“I’ll put in a good four hours clammin’,” he says. “Honey (Garland Varnam, who runs a Varnam Town fish market) pays me 8 cents a clam, or $80 for 1,000 of them buggers.”

There are also three oyster-shucking houses in Varnam Town, each employing 10 women who shuck an average of 1,500 oysters apiece every day.

The resulting mountains of oyster shells outside the shucking houses are even a profitable byproduct. North Carolina pays shucker-house owners like Carson Varnam 17 cents a bushel for the oyster shells, which are crushed for roadbeds or placed back in local rivers, where oysters can grow on the old shells.