The smell of paprika and car exhaust permeates the bustling parking lot. A scruffy dog wanders through a maze of legs. It’s 3:55 p.m. and the line outside the Crab Market is 15 strong and growing.
If you passed by in the morning, you would think the whitewashed shack along 49th Street South was long abandoned. By late afternoon, the Crab Market sizzles with life.
The Crab Market specializes in blue crabs boiled in a tangy mix of herbs and spices, but also sells sides like corn-on-the-cob and homemade garlic butter. Open Monday through Saturday, its hours are determined by many forces — the whims of its owner, the demands of is customers, and, of course, the crabs.
“Every day is different,” says owner Mike Whaley, 50. “If you have a whole bunch of crabs, you gotta start early, try to sell all the crabs every day.”
On this day, the shop opened just after 4 p.m. But the work began much earlier.
At sunrise, Mike O’Leary, 50, hits the boat. He is one of a handful of local crabbers that deliver to Whaley’s shop. He pulls wire crab traps from the waters in south Tampa Bay.
Once crabs are caught, he sorts them with metal tongs, checking them for size and weight. He tosses the crabs that are too small or too light over the side of the boat. Crabs must measure 5 inches across the widest part of their shell to be legally harvested.
In the afternoon, O’Leary delivers his catch of live crabs to the Crab Market. Today it’s enough to cover the cost of gas and bait, with some left over for the bills.
Whaley’s work begins around 9 a.m. He makes biweekly runs to a farmer’s market in Tampa for fresh vegetables. By noon, he’s at the shop, answering the phone, mixing spices, chopping vegetables.
The light is gray inside the room from which Whaley sells his crabs. By the small take-out window hangs a small tapestry of Bob Marley, woven in threads of black, red, yellow and green. The colors of the Rasta.
Born in Manhattan and raised in Jamaica, Whaley doesn’t believe in self-promotion. He prefers to stay in the shadows. He does not advertise. All of his customers are referred by word of mouth.
A vegetarian who eats seafood, Whaley does not serve meat at his market. People have suggested that he start serving sausage, but for him it’s out of the question.
Whaley looks around and sees too much self-gratification when it comes to eating habits.
“People are bamboozled into thinking they gotta have meat, gotta have sausage, gotta have junk food, period.”
A worker sorts crabs in the back area with long metal clamps, tossing the dead ones into a black bucket. His white rubber gloves are stained crab-red.
The live ones go into white buckets and are sent to the pots for boiling. “I hate to kill ’em,” he says, “but people love to eat ’em.”
The boiling room is stifling on an already hot Florida evening. Pepper floats through air, choking the uninitiated. Faye Jackson, who has worked at the Crab Market for one year, takes off her rubber gloves, showing a rash that looks like pock marks from an allergy to the pepper.
Outside, the line gets longer. Customers new and old wait to get their plastic bags of boiled spicy crabs.
It’s 4:05 p.m. and Herman King, 69, has been standing in line for 30 minutes. His wife, Bettye, waits in the air-conditioned SUV. They drove from Tampa for their weekly fill of crabs.
Whaley’s been in the St. Petersburg crab business for a long time.
“The people I’ve been selling to, some they were little kids when they started coming,” he says. “Now their kids are coming. It makes me feel like an old man,” he pauses, tossing an empty water bottle into an empty crab bucket, “but that’s OK.”
Before opening the Crab Market, Whaley ran Bottom Dollar, another crab shop, on 31st Street. He bought the 49th Street location from a former crabber five years ago and fixed it up. His new location was safer and better for business. Many of his customers followed him.
King’s one of them. He’s been coming to Whaley for crabs for as long as he can remember. Though the wait was long tonight, he leaves satisfied again.
