FORT LAUDERDALE — This part of Florida is often referred to as New York South, but there is one place you dare not enter wearing a Yankees’ cap…Kelly’s Landing.
On the prowl for stone crab, because we’d never had them, we tracked down this New England-based eatery not far from Port Everglades, the cruise-ship terminal in Fort Lauderdale. It’s walking distance if you’re energetic and a safe haven if you don’t slag on the Red Sox in particular and any sports team from Boston in general.
The walls are papered with sports memorabilia and artifacts, most of them related to the Red Sox – although in this place they are just “the Sox” like there are no others, which wouldn’t go over well in Chicago. On one wall there’s a large, framed collection that says it all about the Red Sox: a photo of Babe Ruth on the left flanked by the front page of a newspaper when Boston won the World Series in 2004. Above the two were the words “Cursed to First.” In case you’re not a baseball fan, in 1919 the Red Sox traded the Babe to New York where Yankee Stadium became the “House That Ruth Built.”
Boston, despite being one of baseball’s most successful franchises at the time, was “cursed.” It was 86 years before the Red Sox won another World Series.
You didn’t have to know that, or to have a New England accent, to get one of the 20-odd tables, but it probably wouldn’t have hurt, because almost all the customers and all the servers seemed to be exchanging stories about something or someone in Massachusetts.
Oh yes, the stone crabs.
Because we’d never had them, we had no idea about the cost. They were advertised outside the restaurant for $30. When we asked, the server said that was for five or six of them, and that a half-order was $15. We decided to split a full order following two bowls of “fish chowdah.”
The “chowdah” was terrific. The stone crabs — why didn’t we know they would be cold? — were also excellent, if a lot of work, like scraping every little bit of lobster from the tentacles. It turns out that “five or six” was really just five, and they were each about six inches long.
So now we know. Stone crab is about a dollar an inch…at least at Kelly’s it is, and that’s where people looking for Boston South go.