Calabash, the world’s most famous seafood town, carries on as an iconic restaurant rebuilds

At a picnic table outside the Calabash Seafood Hut, a breeze travels up the hill from the river and knocks the edge off the mid-summer swelter.

“The seagull bites,” said Seafood Hut manager Donna Morgan of Fred, the so-named gull. “If you don’t feed him, he’ll bite you.”

In a town built by its seafood restaurants, that seems fair enough.

Leroy Brown, a regular, puts some hot sauce on a hushpuppy and tosses it to Fred in an effort to discourage the taste for fried seafood. Though he has wings, Fred waddles away, offended.

The Seafood Hut is a last-of-its-kind restaurant in this most famous of Carolina seafood towns. Owned by the Coleman family, which started the first restaurant in Calabash, Coleman’s Original, The Hut is a stripped-down version of the fried seafood shack that’s brought countless diners to this southernmost corner of North Carolina.

The Hut’s menu is entirely fried with fryers fueled by blocks of lard, serving dishes of escalating larger platters of seafood: combinations of bite-size shrimp, flounder, scallops, deviled crab and so on. Even the hot dogs are fried.

Across the street sits the nearly empty parking lot of what was until last year the oldest original restaurant in Calabash.

Last year, Ella’s, the oldest original restaurant in Calabash , was lost in a devastating fire. For more than a year, Ella’s sat untouched in a tangle of charred wood like an out-of-water shipwreck, until it was hauled away this summer in the first step toward building back.

But as Calabash works to return a piece of its ancient heart, its waterfront is a mix of the old and new, still attracting its devoted diners to its out-of-the-way seafood paradise.

Seafood Capital of the World

Even if you’ve never been there, you know Calabash — a name and a place tied to seafood. From the town’s tiny takeout windows to the Myrtle Beach boardwalk and up and down the East Coast, Calabash is the word for the world’s most famous seafood.

What we know as Calabash-style seafood really started with its boats. Before restaurants lined the riverfront, there were docks and shrimpboats sometimes two or three deep.

Nearly a century ago, a collection of families sent their boats out in the morning and fried the catch when it came in, forming small fish camps under the oak trees along the river.

The Calabash matriarch is Amanda High, whose children went on to start four of the town’s first restaurants. Lucy High Coleman had Coleman’s Original; Ruth High Beck had Beck’s; Lawrence High had Ella’s; Ivey High had Ivey High’s Restaurant; and Kathleen High Moore had a gas station and grocery store.

The first of Calabash’s original seafood restaurants were Coleman’s and Beck’s, followed by Ella’s Restaurant in 1950 and Dockside in 1955. The Seafood Hut, also owned by the Coleman family, came along in the 1960s and Captain Nance’s on the waterfront in 1975.

What is Calabash-style? It’s not a buffet

True Calabash style is seafood thinly coated with corn flour, forming a light batter that crisps rather than covers, letting the sweet shrimp or flounder shine through. The novelty of Calabash was really its immediacy, offering diners the simple trick of seafood as fresh as it could possibly be.

Over time, the term Calabash has evolved and (some might say) been co-opted to broadly mean a massive plate of fried seafood. Restaurants far and wide put Calabash in their name, signaling to diners they can expect seemingly endless heaps of shrimp, flounder and fries. The natives of Calabash largely accept the proliferation of their seafood identity, find flattery in it even, but they do draw a line.

“I’m not trying to be ugly, but Calabash is not a buffet,” said Donna Long, the current mayor of Calabash and a manager at Captain Nance’s . “If you’re going somewhere and it says Calabash and it’s a buffet, run. It should be cooked by the order.”

In the 1940s, a chance drop-in from a celebrity and a mysterious catchphrase helped spread the Calabash gospel far and wide. Accounts differ on the exact restaurant, but radio and TV star Jimmy Durante is said to have stopped in with a traveling entourage one night, dining at Coleman’s and promising to make it famous. Soon after, Durante ended his broadcasts with a wistful farewell , “Goodnight Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.”

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‘Like going to Las Vegas’

That helped jumpstart the Calabash phenomenon and started building on a mythology that continues to this day. Calabash continued to add restaurants and started calling itself the Seafood Capital of the World. At one point there were more than 20 seafood restaurants, eight with their own boat.

“It was like our own little world inside the world,” Donna Morgan said. “It’s not as much like that now, but back then ... grandma’s house was up on the hill, so (all the kids) stayed out in the yard and played and she watched us play while everybody worked in the restaurants. The guys run the boats, and the girls run the restaurants. That’s how it was.”

In those days, restaurants glowed with blinking lights and brightly lit signs. Both Beck’s and Coleman’s declared in high-wattage “This Is It,” with arrows pointing down to their doors. In addition to its fried fish, Calabash was known for its oyster roasts, the streets lined with empty shells.

“As a little kid I can remember coming down here and all the restaurants had flashing lights and signs,” said Forrest King, a town councilman who co-owns Calabash Art & Curios & Wine shop with his wife, Suzy Moore King, whose family owned many of the first restaurants.

“It was like going to Las Vegas,” King said. “The roads were lined with piles of oyster shells. That’s my oldest memory of Calabash, is coming down here and just mountains of oysters shells.”

Today, Calabash continues to mean something specific in North Carolina restaurants. Ricky Moore won a James Beard award in 2022 for Best Chef: Southeast, singing the song of the North Carolina sea through the fryers at his Saltbox Seafood Joint in Durham. Moore uses Calabash as one of the reference points in his cooking.

“It’s hugely important to me as a base,” Moore said. “If I’m having a conversation with a diner and she knows what North Carolina seafood is through Calabash, we have that base. We do something different, but it’s like a mother sauce. It’s a base. I know if I make that traditional dish, folks will recognize it.”

Carrying on Calabash

There’s no obvious or easy reason to go to Calabash, and yet people continue to. They make detours for miles, they leave the beach while the sun is shining, they carve out nights on the only week of vacation they’ll have all year, arriving tank-topped, sun burned, dressed up or just off the golf course, led there by a familiar plate of fish.

Something was set in motion maybe before they were born and it continues with them now. As the cousins and aunts and grandparents meet for a spell in the summer, drawn from Chicago and Los Angeles or the mountains of Virginia.

They carry on Calabash.

“I think families have been coming to Calabash for years and years; there’s not a day that goes by when someone doesn’t come in and say they started coming here in the ‘50s when they were a little boy with their parents,” said Shaun Bellamy, who co-owns Ella’s and Beck’s with her brother, Kurt Hardee. “Then they brought their kids and grandkids. It’s a tradition for their family to come to my restaurant.”

The Foley family from Winston-Salem has been coming to Sunset Beach for 40 years and was the third group through the door at the Seafood Hut when it was unlocked and opened for lunch one Thursday in July. They knew their orders before they sat down — shrimp and flounder.

“We do it every year,” said patriarch C.L. Foley. “It’s good comfort food.”

In some ways, it’s the same for the owners of the restaurants. Many have left Calabash and returned. Many never imagined another life.

Hardee knows how it sounds, like something out of a Nicholas Sparks novel, twee and cliche, but his childhood and those of his siblings and friends were days at the beach, or on the river, or in the yard at his grandmother’s house, bikes in the grass set back from the family’s famous restaurant.

“I remember my grandfather going out on the boat, catching flounder and shrimp and the family preparing them under the oak tree on the water,” Hardee said. “My mom was peeling shrimp and cutting cabbage for the night. Peeling potatoes. My grandfather scaling flounder. They worked the water and cooked what they caught. It was as basic as it could get.”

When Ella’s burned

Bellamy rarely takes vacations, and her family jokes that she never ever wants to leave Calabash. But on April 15, 2023, she was at the Fort Lauderdale airport making her way back home from a cruise. Her brother called and said Ella’s was on fire. After six canceled flights, Bellamy watched her restaurant burn on Facebook.

The fire at Ella’s started in the middle of the Saturday lunch rush. The dining room was full and a line of customers waited outside for tables.

The Brunswick County Fire Marshal’s office determined the blaze was caused by a flare-up in a kitchen broiler. Surveillance footage showed cooks smacking the flames with wet towels while the fryers and the rest of the kitchen continued making lunch orders, turning out platters of fried flounder and heaping mounds of shrimp.

Within minutes, it was out of control, and crews from five different neighboring fire departments responded to Ella’s, blocking the road to the river as neighbors crowded around to watch. The dining room was evacuated, busboys helped carry elderly women out of the bathroom, and a few photos and keepsakes were grabbed from the walls and offices as the restaurant filled with thick, black smoke.

At one point, the fire in the kitchen was subdued and the restaurant seemed spared. But then beams from the ceiling collapsed ablaze into the kitchen and dining room. It was clear the fire had made it to the attic.

The bones of the original 1950s building were made of old pine. On the rafters clung residue from the decades of fryer baskets, a small bit of every flounder, shrimp and oyster sent out to the dining room for generations.

Someone in town described the combination of grease and pine being like a box of dynamite. It burned hot and fast, and quickly, Ella’s was a total loss.

“Your heart sinks,” Mayor Long said. “We didn’t know which restaurant it was, but you could tell it was something bad. You could see the black smoke rolling up into the sky. … It’s a huge loss for Calabash. It takes your soul and stomach. That’s somebody’s whole history and livelihood.”

When the fire was finally extinguished that evening, the dining room at Ella’s was open to the sky, charred beams lay across tables, the ceiling was crumpled like tissue paper, ceiling fans sagged and booths were lifted from the floor, even while some ketchup bottles, plastic hushpuppy baskets and cups of honey butter lay on the ground unmelted.

Just about every restaurant in Calabash has had a fire at some point.

Beck’s burned down in 2012 and was rebuilt a year later. Captain Nance’s had a small fire. Dockside, Captain John’s and Coleman’s Original each had a fire. And two years ago, one of the town’s favorite pizza parlors, Tony’s, also burned down.

Due to a fight with Ella’s insurance company, the restaurant sat untouched for more than a year.

Through the 2023 summer and high season, the legions of Ella’s regulars saw their restaurant in ruins as they went elsewhere for their Calabash pilgrimage. Finally this June, with a settlement reached, Ella’s was torn down and hauled away in pieces. A few of its artifacts lay strewn in the sandy parking lot, including a mounted fish caught by Ella in 1976.

The state of shrimping

In the early days of Calabash, each family had their own dock on the river.

Recently those docks have been stitched together, squares of bright blonde planks amid the older weathered wood, creating something of a skinny boardwalk allowing people to stroll a couple hundred yards of waterfront as the Calabash tide creeps in and out.

There’s only one shrimp boat left in Calabash, the High Roller, captained by twins Jimmy and Tommy Hickman. The Hickmans turn 75 in August and though they’re twins, Jimmy is about 6 inches taller than his brother.

The Hickmans have shrimped most of the East Coast, from the Pamlico Sound to Freeport, Texas, Jimmy said, staying out sometimes nearly a month with tens of thousands of pounds of shrimp on ice in the hull.

He’s seen shrimping become a lonely craft on the Calabash River, where the docks are now lined with party boats and fishing charters, taking vacationers out for a day and back with their take-home catch that afternoon.

These days, Hickman sells his catch on the docks in the afternoon. When the High Roller is docked in town, Hickman says he hears from restaurant owners that sales are better, that his boat carries on a certain Calabash mythology that everything on the plate is from the nearby waters.

Hickman has never grown tired of shrimp. He’ll peel and eat them raw on the dock, he’ll have them for breakfast and dinner.

“When you’ve got salt in your blood, you’ve always got salt in your blood,” Hickman said. “We don’t know nothing else. … Some people are trying to keep up with the Smiths and Joneses. I’m just trying to keep up with the bills in the mailbox.”

Calabash’s most modern restaurant

About seven years ago, the owners of Callahan’s bought the most famous restaurant property in Calabash: Coleman’s Original, the restaurant that helped establish the Calabash-style and helped launch the Mrs. Calabash legend.

Coleman’s Original had burned in 2012, was rebuilt and reopened in 2014 and sold less than three years later.

In the rebuilt restaurant, Clark Callahan and Dean Spatholt opened Oyster Rock, a more modern kind of seafood restaurant, matching the tastes and trends of Myrtle Beach and Wilmington on the Calabash waterfront. There are scallops topped with microgreens, raw oysters, crostini with pork belly and crab meat, while still reserving a slice of the menu for signature platters of fry.

Built on the original Coleman’s foundation, which is said to date back to the 1930s, Oyster Rock looks unlike any other restaurant in Calabash. There’s astroturf fire pits along the ground outside and and a row of bar stools looking out on the river, perches where folks gather until a table opens up.

“Calabash is all about that waterfront and the history of what that was,” Spatholt said. “My uncle Clark Callahan had a passion for Calabash, and with Oyster Rock we had an opportunity to do something a little different. … People come to Calabash for the deep-fried platter, which we do, but we also do grouper. It’s a complement to Calabash.”

Ella’s return

Now the rebuilding begins for Ella’s. All that remains of the iconic restaurant is a sign with a name and a giant fiberglass lobster.

With insurance squared away and plans in the works, Ella’s will be back, Bellamy and Hardee promise. The restaurant will be moved slightly north on River Road, the footprint somewhat shifted and expanded. And for the first time, Ella’s will likely have a bar, Hardee said, meeting the modern demand for beer and wine with a plate of fried seafood.

“We’ll definitely be open by the spring; we don’t want to miss another season,” Hardee said.

From the fire, many of the pictures on the walls were saved, Hardee said, including those of his grandmother and a framed spread in Southern Living magazine. A scrapbook Bellamy had made for her brother was kept in the restaurant safe, Hardee said, spared by the flames but ruined by the water.

As a 74-year-old restaurant is stitched together with new materials, Hardee is thinking about how to recreate what made Ella’s special.

“We’re going to have the same sweet tea, the same fryers, the same oil, same shrimp cooks — but is it going to taste the same?” Hardee said. “There’s the physical aspect of people going there. We have people who have been coming here since the ’60s.

“When we do build back, we’ll need them to make it feel the same.”