A pilot, a dock, and way too many crabs.

I came to Daytona Beach for Embry-Riddle and graduated in '93. The restaurant work came with me. I carried trays at Red Lobster in '87 and at Steak and Ale in '92, and in between I learned to fly over this coast.

My best crab memory from those years is a place that did all-you-can-eat snow crab for eleven dollars. I went a lot in '92 and '93, back when my half of the rent was two hundred dollars a month. Eleven dollars then is roughly twenty-five now, and it felt like robbing the place.

Here's the funny part. Those snow crabs came from Alaska or Canada, a couple thousand miles away. I never once ate a local crab down there. I didn't even know blue crabs came that far south. They were in the river the whole time, and it took me years to figure that out.

Thirty years and more than twelve thousand hours later, I've eaten at a lot of airports. Some great ones, a lot of vending machines, and one or two I'd fly two hours out of my way for.

What I never found was the one I wanted: a crab shack you could taxi to. Paper on the tables, a mallet at every seat, and nothing on the menu that traveled farther than I'd fly for lunch.

The first version was a hangar. An old corrugated one at a little airport on the coast, the big door rolled open to the ramp, string lights inside and a red crab painted on the door. Tie down out front, walk in, order at the window.

I still love that drawing. But the more I worked on it, the more something bothered me. The crabs don't come in by airplane. They come in by boat.

A crab shack should sit where the crabs come in. Over the water, on pilings, with a dock you can tie a skiff to and a porch where you can watch the boats come back. The waterman ties up out back, the crabs come in the kitchen door, and nobody has to drive anything anywhere.

I go back and forth on the building. Some days it's an old-school fish house with a rusted roof that's been there since before any of us. Other days it's something cleaner, white board and batten, built to take a hurricane and still feel like it's been there forever. Not fancy either way.

Whatever the building looks like, the rules come with it. The staff keeps their tips. All of them. That one is for everybody I worked next to for sixteen years.

The crabs come from down the road, from people we know by name. If the boats didn't go out, we'll tell you. We keep what we catch and cook it the day it lands. Except redfish and snook. Those go back in the water, which is where the name comes from.

Restaurants, then flying, then back to restaurants. I didn't plan it as a full circle, but that's what it turned into. The difference this time is that the flying will be for fun, in my own small airplane on my days off, and the restaurant will sit on the water instead of the ramp.

I'm still flying for a living, and there's family to see through a few more years of school before I move anything. So for now this is a drawing, a menu, and a website. The pictures are concept illustrations, not the real place.

But I'm on this coast as often as I can be, walking docks, eating at the places that already do it right, and asking a lot of questions. When it's real, you'll find it here first.