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All over Hampton Roads, Surf Rider is renowned for its crab cakes, made with so little binder you’d swear they could still swim. The local chain’s lump-filled cakes bested the competition in two consecutive Virginian-Pilot taste tests, not to mention a recent blind-judged crab cake throwdown.
But this year, said its third-generation co-owner, Chris Bennett, he almost had to take them off the menu. The global supply was so tight this spring, he nearly couldn’t get enough blue crab to fill the more than thousand pounds of crab his restaurants turn out in a week.
“Back in March, before the local guys started picking (crabs), there was no crab meat,” Bennett said. “I was almost out. So it came close for us. We almost got where we didn’t have any for a couple of weeks.”
Luckily, he’s been at this for a while. He was able to pull some strings with suppliers in the Philippines until local crab came in. He says friends at other restaurants weren’t so lucky and had to take some crab items off the menu. And though he considers himself fortunate, he’s paying 50% more or even double what he used to pay — and has had to add a $2 surcharge to crab items.
“What I normally paid $25 for, right now it’s between $35 and $40 a pound,” he said.
Get used to surcharges and higher prices on crab at local restaurants, he said. He doubts the price of crab meat is going down anytime soon. It isn’t just the local blue crab: A combination of pandemic-related supply issues and low stocks have caused global prices to skyrocket on crab, whether from southeast Asia or the United States.
“Snow crab, Alaskan king crab, dungeness out of Northern California, they took a really hard hit. And on top of trying to get the local industry back up and running, their supply is low,” Bennett said. “They’re not having a good season. So you know, this is the perfect storm.”
The number of juvenile crabs in the Chesapeake Bay dipped by 30% this year, according to the annual winter dredge survey by Virginia and Maryland Bay — which meant crab limits will not increase this year and may even be limited further, according to state officials.
“We are disappointed and concerned in the low abundance of juveniles,” said Pat Geer, chief of the Fisheries Management Division, speaking to the Daily Press in May. “These juveniles traditionally begin to recruit to the fishery by August, and although the numbers are of concern, they are not without precedent. Juvenile crab recruitment naturally fluctuates from year to year.”
While local fluctuations are expected, the global crab shortage isn’t a sign the worldwide numbers of crab have fallen, said Gavin Gibbons of the McLean-based Crab Council, run by the National Fisheries Institute. His organization tracks global sustainability issues related to crab fishing. He says that while some areas might have cyclical issues with crab supply, the real problem is the links in the supply chain from the water to the table — broken or strained during the pandemic.
“There’s a shortage of crab in the market, both domestically and from an import perspective,” he said. “For a variety of reasons, some of the imports throughout the COVID era have been held up because of port problems and also because of production challenges in those fisheries.”
Gibbons also cites transient fishing restrictions on some fisheries in Asia and on processing plants.
“There’s also a trade war happening. So there are 25% tariffs on crabs that are coming out of China on the red crab,” Gibbons said. “The crab market is experiencing quite a bit of pressure on the trade side and on the production side or the harvesting side.”
When imports are squeezed, even those who use only local products are affected as other restaurants switch their suppliers, said Charles Thain, chef and owner at Blue Seafood and Spirits in Virginia Beach. He said he’s had to improvise to get crab — and raise prices by around 15%.
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“I’ve paid more for soft shells this year than I’ve ever paid for a soft shell crab in 30 years of preparing and serving seafood,” Thain said. “And I only had them for two weeks. I don’t freeze them like some restaurants do.”
He usually waits to stock them until the price drops, he said; restaurants in New York dominate the early crop of peelers. But this year, after he waited and waited, his supplier finally broke the news: The price wasn’t ever going down.
In a story echoed by multiple restaurateurs, Thain said the price hike isn’t limited to crabs. Most seafood his restaurant stocks has gone up in price by significant margins, victim to a combination of factors — advance seafood contracts awarded to grocery stores, watermen and fishermen who’ve switched to other products, and simple delivery issues.
Price hikes and shortages have been a familiar story throughout the pandemic. Recent months have also seen spikes in prices on chicken wings and steak. Virginia Beach’s Dockside Seafood restaurant took king crab off its menu for pricing reasons but also stopped selling wings. At Surf Rider, Bennett said he declined to put snow crab back on — and also delayed adding steak to his post-pandemic menu until the price drops.
But local crab has been difficult to stock at all. At Dockside, co-owner Kevin Seldon says his restaurant and market are among the few who secured contracts with watermen. But even he has had to pay more for his crab and add surcharges to crab dishes at his restaurant. He has to raise what he pays to make it worth it for his crab suppliers to go out on the boats.
“There’s got to be an incentive for them to go. They’re not catching enough. And we’re trying to make sure at least they’re making enough money so they keep going,” he said. “If they don’t go out, we don’t have any crabs at all. ... A lot of restaurants are taking anything with crab off the menu. And those that really can’t, like us, we’re having put a small surcharge on dishes that have it.”
So far, demand for local crab hasn’t dropped as prices have increased, he says — a sentiment echoed by all restaurateurs we’ve consulted. Dockside’s market runs out of crabs every day.
“We have three boats, and usually we would buy what we thought we could sell for the day, and they would take the rest and sell them other markets or the picking houses,” he said. “And this year, they haven’t brought in enough decent crabs. The boats get in by 11 o’clock, and by 3 o’clock, we don’t have anything left.”
As the supply chain rebuilds, even delivery drivers have been hard to come by. At Blue, Thain said he has to personally drive two hours to a supplier he’s long used — a one-woman crab operation on the Eastern Shore.
“Are the crabs worth it? They’re amazing. And she’s gone up in price 20%. And she said, honestly, she may have to go up again,” Thain said. “We have a relationship and I’ve bought crab from her for a really, really long time. But if she’s got to raise her prices, she’s got to raise her prices. Nobody’s doing it for fun.”
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For Thain, and other seafood restaurant owners who can’t simply take crab off the menu, it’s left them with a quandary. Do you charge more? Or make your crab cakes thinner and risk fallout from longtime customers?
“As a business owner, there are three options: Cut back on portion size, cut back on quality or raise your prices. And if you’re not doing those three things, you’re going out of business,” he said. “Cutting back on quality and portion sizes was not an option for me. Normally as a business owner, I struggle with raising prices. It was a no-brainer this year.”
Bennett says the price increases on his menu at Surf Rider don’t cover the increased cost of crab — they just keep him from losing money.
“The attitude I’ve got is, let’s get it on the table and not try to kill him with the price, though obviously, the price is going to be higher,” he said. “It helps us get back to where we’re at least not gonna lose a whole bunch of money. And you know, and if we’re lucky and you have a couple of rum runners with that crab cake, we might break even.”
Thain says he’s been grateful his customers have been willing to bear higher prices and says they’ve come out in force this spring. But he worries about the effects of ongoing supply issues on restaurants that have already been made fragile after a year of pandemic.
“Everybody thought a lot of places weren’t going to make it through last winter. And surprisingly, most people were able to kind of dive and move and figure it out,” he said. “But with all these ripple effects, I think it’s going to be really interesting to see the landscape in January and February of next year. … We take it week by week, almost day by day.”
Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com