Doc Ford’s Rum Bar & Grill on Sanibel Island is thrilled to be featured in the May 16th edition of the New York Times Magazine.
Shhh! We can give you a sneek peek…
Note that while the article focuses on the Sanibel restaurant, our Fort Myers Beach location uses the same great Yucatan Shrimp recipe.
The Sunshine Plate – Unpeeled Shrimp on Sanibel Island, Florida
by Sam Sifton
Zachary Zavislak for The New York Times; Food Stylist: Brian Preston-Campbell; Prop Stylist: Meghan Guthrie
Here is a late-spring meal to evoke deep summer, when the heat lies heavy even at dusk and humidity wraps you like a blanket: shrimp tossed in garlic butter made fiery with Indonesian sambal and jalapeño, cut by lime, fragrant with cilantro.
It is a kind of scampi for the sun-kissed and sun-desirous alike, a vacation on a plate. Add a mojito and a couple of beers.
The dish comes out of southwest Florida, out of Doc Ford’s Sanibel Rum Bar and Grille, a restaurant that sits off the road that runs slow and sultry along Sanibel Island toward Captiva, past the placid, russet waters of Tarpon Bay. Randy Wayne White, one of the owners, named the place after the fictional protagonist of his mystery novels. The air smells of salt and mangrove there, of tropical rot and fresh-cut grass.
Doc Ford is a former government agent, the sort with a lot of Special Operations work in his past, dark memories and lethal skills. He is a marine biologist on Sanibel now, and longs for the quiet, contemplative life of a scientist. That isn’t going to happen. Since 1990, over the course of 17 best-selling books, there has been no end of trouble. Along with his hippie pal, Tomlinson, who bears some resemblance to the former Red Sox pitcher and mystic Bill Lee, a friend of White’s, Doc Ford has solved crimes up and down the coast of Florida. His latest adventure, “Deep Shadow,” which largely takes place in an underwater cave and involves both vicious criminals and a scary swamp creature, came out at the beginning of March.
Food plays an interesting role in White’s books. Amid the violence and the serial adventuring, between the bedroom conquests and the terrifying boat chases, Ford and Tomlinson often end up at Ford’s home on a stilt house just off the Sanibel shore, cooking and talking — Tomlinson’s moonbeam intensity often trumping Ford’s plain-spoken logic. Cooking, White said in an e-mail message, “not only whets the appetite, it sharpens all our senses, which makes it the best possible time for honest talk, factual or fanciful.”
The proteins the two men share are fresh, generally hauled out of the water only a short boat ride from the house. The garnishes are foraged as well: local limes or feral oranges, coconuts dropped to the sand.
Yours should be, too, to the degree that they can be in the aftermath of the immense BP oil spill that began to pollute the Gulf of Mexico last month. At least for the moment, a sustainable shrimp fishery still crawls along the western side of Florida, where the catch levels for 2010, before the spill, were holding high with recent years, according to the N.O.A.A. Fisheries Service.
“Pink gold,” White called these domestic shrimp in a telephone conversation. They are head and shoulders above the farmed Asian variety for flavor and environmental impact alike.
But of course you can cheat if you can’t find any, in this case, with a flavor-punching sambal, or prepared Indonesian hot sauce, made of peppers, salt and a healthy lash of vinegar.
At best, the sambal is enhancement, a sauce that heightens the sweet, nutty flavor of the real article. But at worst, it is solid insurance against the taste of limp, farmed shrimp; sambal would make a tennis ball palatable.
Greg Nelson is the chef at Doc Ford’s, the fellow whose recipe we are using here. He tosses just-cooked local shrimp in a glaze of butter and a sambal manufactured by Huy Fong Foods in Rosemead, Calif., the same outfit responsible for sriracha, the popular, finely ground and sugar-enhanced hot sauce often available in Vietnamese restaurants. Both sauces are available in Asian markets and online.
At Doc Ford’s, Nelson adds a wisp of green-pepper hot sauce as well, from a company called Amazon Pepper. White said in the telephone interview that he thought it added a floral note to the dish. That is as true as prime numbers, as you’ll learn if you visit Doc Ford’s. Still, I got a similar pop at home from diced fresh jalapeño and an extra shake of cilantro.
You will note that the shrimp are unpeeled. This is a matter of Nelson’s and White’s personal preferences. The communal act of peeling and eating the cooked shrimp leads, White says, to a sharing of the spirit of Sanibel itself, and casual, family-style dining that brings people closer to one another than they might get primly eating with a knife and fork.
“I can imagine people eating this over a pot near a fire on a beach,” White said, “and I think people can feel that when they’re peeling the shrimp at home under a fan.”
I think that is quite right, but if you disagree, peel away.
There is also this business of flash-boiling the shrimp. Nelson takes them to just-pink in hot water before adding them to the bath of butter and hot sauce. This works brilliantly. But those in a hurry can slide the raw shrimp into a sauté pan with the butter sauce and cook them to pink that way as well. It risks burning the butter, and perhaps overcooking the shrimp, though it slightly intensifies their flavor.
Rigorous testing confirms that however you prepare it, you could eat this meal tonight in Des Moines or Brooklyn, in Paris or Jakarta, and imagine yourself on a beach staring south, the moment holding perfect as a soap bubble that might never pop.
Are these shrimp enough for a full dinner? They will be if you double the recipe and lay in some bread to mop up the sauce.
But those who want to follow the finger food with a bit of knife work that would make Doc Ford proud should look to some thin, little pork chops, the sort you see at island supermarkets lying grim under the fluorescent light.
Salt and pepper these aggressively, then cook them fast and hard over a high fire until their edges have gone dark and crunchy but their centers are still pink. Then lay them out beneath a kind of pineapple salsa pungent with fish sauce and slick with sesame oil. Add mint and cilantro, a splash of lime. Serve with white rice, more beer. Endless summer.
Recipe: Yucatan Shrimp
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 large clove garlic, minced
Juice of two large limes
1 tablespoon Indonesian sambal (preferably sambal oelek, by Huy Fong, though sriracha will work as well)
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 pound large, fresh, shell-on shrimp
1 teaspoon jalapeño, seeded and chopped (optional)
2 tablespoons chopped cilantro.
1. In a small saucepan set over low heat, melt 1 tablespoon of butter. Add the garlic and cook, stirring for 2 minutes.
2. Add remaining 3 tablespoons butter to saucepan. When it melts, stir in the lime juice, chili sauce, salt and pepper. Turn off the heat and allow the sauce to rest.
3. Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil. Add the shrimp and cook for 2 minutes or until they are just firm and pink. Do not overcook. Drain into a colander and shake over the sink to remove excess moisture.
4. In a large bowl, toss the shrimp and chili sauce. Add jalapeño, if desired, sprinkle with cilantro and toss again.
Pork Chops with Pineapple Salsa
For the salsa:
1 cup fresh pineapple, peeled and diced
1 tablespoon fresh jalapeño, seeded and diced, or other hot pepper, to taste
2 tablespoons fresh ginger, peeled and diced
2 tablespoons roasted sesame oil
1 to 3 tablespoons Asian fish sauce
Juice of one large lime
For the pork chops:
8 thin pork chops, ½-inch thick or less
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 tablespoon chopped mint
1 tablespoon chopped cilantro.
1. Prepare a charcoal grill or set a gas grill to high.
2. In a large, nonreactive bowl, add the pineapple, jalapeño, ginger, oil, fish sauce and lime juice and stir lightly. Taste and add more fish sauce, if desired.
3. When charcoal is gray and flames have just started to die, or when grill is very hot, season pork chops aggressively with salt and pepper and place on grill. Cook for roughly 3 minutes a side until well seared on the outside and done on the inside.
4. Arrange the pork chops on a warmed platter, spoon salsa in the center of plate, sprinkle with mint and cilantro and serve.
Doc Ford’s Sanibel Rum Bar & Grill
Doc Ford’s Fort Myers Beach
Doc Ford's Fort Myers Beach Rum Bar & Grille 
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