|
Seafood Restaurant Town Calabash, a onetime fishing village named for an Indian word for gourds, is a town of just over 200 people with a seafood restaurant for every ten residents. Just who opened the first restaurant in town, the Becks or Colemans, is a matter of dispute. Both families were holding outdoor oyster roasts for people from nearby communities back in the thirties. By 1940, both had moved their oyster roasts indoors and added fried seafoods. As more customers came to eat with the Becks and Colemans, other restaurants, or fish camps, as they came to be called in North Caroling, opened in the small community, and by the sixties Calabash was drawing large crowds from nearby, ever burgeoning Myrtle Beach. By the seventies, Calabash had attracted national attention and Calabash-style cooking, meaning lightly battered seafood briefly fried, was being advertised by restaurants in several Southern states. Once Calabash restaurants featured fresh seafood locally caught, but now most of it is caught elsewhere and frozen. Newer restaurants not only brought gaudy signs, bright lights, and salad bars but also fancy dishes like lobster to Calabash's simple fare, changing the whole character of Calabash. In the forties, a frequent diner at the Colemans' restaurant was entertainer Jimmy Durante. Lucy Coleman remembers that he joked with her and called her Mrs. Calabash. Durante later began closing all of his shows by saying, "Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are," and Lucy Coleman believes he was talking to her. Calabash's restaurants are lined side by side on NC 179, just off US 17, near the South Carolina line, and along a side street leading to the waterfront. Both original restaurants, Beck's and Coleman's Original Calabash, are still operated by their families.
|
