Calabash Fried Fish and Shrimp

In the 1940s a fish camp style of deep frying fish coated in cornmeal or wet batter in hot lard became popular in North Carolina’s outer banks. In the small fishing port of Calabash on the northern side of the border between North and South Carolina, Lucy High Coleman popularized platters of fried fish, shrimp, and oysters, opening a restaurant (now called “The Seafood Hut”) in 1940. Her sister Ruth followed suit, opening Beck’s Restaurant, shortly thereafter named after her husband Vester Beck, and her brother, noting the success of his siblings, opened Ella’s of Calabash, which in 2020 remains the finest of the three High family eateries that established the style. They are joined by fourteen more restaurants that now line the waterfront and Route 17 around “The Seafood Capital of the World.” In the 1980s there were as many as thirty.