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April 17, 1998
When the waitress delivers the steaming tangle of barbecue crabs and sets the heaping platter before you, there's no doubt where you are:
Sartin's Seafood.
The crabs are fat and full of sweet, rich meat and crusted with a red-pepper spice mix that sets a tenderfoot mouth afire. Barbecued crabs are the best-known menu item, but there are plenty more entrees that aren't as caked with cayenne for those with less palate for picante.
But no matter what you order, you feel the same when you're finished: full and in need of a shower.
Even though paper towels at the table are plentiful, a full roll at each end, it's impossible to be served a platter of anything at Sartin's without just diving in. The restaurant itself is like a brush fire that can't be extinguished, achieving widespread fame in Sabine Pass from 1971 to 1988, then breaking out in Crystal Beach, Beaumont, Santa Fe and Nederland.
Its nomadic existence since its start has been due largely to circumstances out of the Sartin family's control.
But as long as they've been barbecuing crabs and offering the Sure-Death-for-Gluttons platter service ($16.95 for all you can eat of marinated crab claws, barbecued crab, fried shrimp, fried fish, fried oysters, crab balls and crab-stuffed jalapeno peppers—along with fries or baked potato), customers will scour the outermost bayous in Southeast Texas to find a Sartin's location.
At present, there are three Sartin's restaurants: one at 6725 Eastex Freeway (at the Texas 105 exit) in Beaumont, one at 3520 Nederland Ave. in Nederland and one at 5109 South Farm Road 646 in Santa Fe. The original Sartin's in Sabine Pass closed in 1988.
During this relatively slack restaurant time, the Sartin's in Beaumont goes through at least 1,000 dozen fresh crabs a week. The number nearly doubles in the summer.
Out front is a 16-foot-wide, neon-lined red crab that once beckoned beachcombers at the original in Sabine Pass. "They just put that crab sign on a trailer, and off they went," said Jerri Sartin, the crab-packing matriarch de la mer who started the whole Sartin's saga.
Another sign, hand-lettered and nailed on the back of the restaurant where some customers park, says:
"Our family eats here."
"When you go into a restaurant and the family that owns it is eating there, you know you're at a good restaurant," Jerri said.
When she was growing up, her parents ran separate eateries: her mother the Mayflower Cafe on U.S. 90 and her father the Roundhouse Cafe near the MoPac switching yard in downtown Houston. She inherited a love for serving food to customers.
She translated that love into a restaurant after her husband, Charles, took a second job as a commercial fisherman to supplement his pipefitter's paycheck at Texaco, where he worked the 3-11 p.m. shift. He was pulling in so many crabs at his second job in the mornings, earning $15 a day, that it gave Jerri an idea.
In 1971, she opened a little restaurant (four tables inside; four tables outside in good weather) in front of the family's 65-foot trailer house in Sabine Pass and started serving seafood.
It was an instant hit. Pretty soon, Charles was still commercial-fishing, but he unloaded his catch at the family's restaurant instead of his brother-in-law's ice chests. Customers came in so fast that Jerri didn't have time to separate the orders at the table.
"When we would get an order, we'd go out and clean the crabs right then," Jerri said. "I told the waitresses, 'I don't have time to put this food on individual plates—just take out the platters. We'll pretend we're the San Jacinto Inn,' " referring to an erstwhile, elegant Houston-area eatery famous for its platters of seafood. Sartin's platter style of service was born.
In the meantime, Charles was attending classes to become a first-class pipefitter, a position that drew a bigger paycheck. Jerri didn't care about the title or the paycheck; she needed more seafood for the restaurant. She started bugging Charles to quit his refinery job.
It made no sense, Charles argued. He already had more than 15 years with the company, and he was on the verge of a promotion. It was out of the question.
OK, Jerri said, smiling to herself. The next morning, she drove to Texaco and informed her husband's supervisor that he wasn't coming to work anymore. "I need him to get me crabs," she explained. "I can't keep enough in the restaurant to feed my customers."
Shortly thereafter, Charles embarked on career No. 2.
The economy in Texas was booming at that time, and so was the restaurant business. It wasn't long before Sartin's was taking in its share of the action. 
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Carloads of beach-going tourists stopped off before heading home. (This fact probably was the greatest contributor to the "dive-in" approach to Sartin's platters. Folks were already sunburned and salt-coated from the beach—why worry about getting a little soiled or greasy eating?)
It became a destination unto itself to take guests from out of town. While few could take full advantage of the all-you-can-eat platter service, just trying was an experience all its own.
When Charles wasn't out fishing (and teaching his son, Charles Doug Sartin Jr., how to bait crab traps and drag nets for shrimp), he was building additions to the restaurant.
"We added onto that place five or six times, and there still weren't enough tables," he said.
"Every time I turned around, they were adding on another room," Jerri added. The rambling building eventually sat 500, and there was still always a line.
To placate folks who had to wait to be seated, Jerri and Charles set out washtubs of free beer. Out of necessity, Doug and his little sister, Kelli, learned the restaurant business, all the way from fishing, peeling shrimp and washing dishes to busing and waiting tables.
The only thing the Sartins couldn't control was weather. Since nearly all their customers were from elsewhere, the fate of the restaurant hung on the health of U.S. 87, the coast-hugging highway leading in and out of Sabine Pass, the only way in and out of Sabine Pass.
That road between Sabine Pass and High Island was chewed up, first by Hurricane Allen in 1980 and then by Hurricane Alicia in 1983.
Tourists could still maneuver around the bathtub-size potholes and no road at all where the Gulf had taken huge bites of the highway, but patronage was way down. The cavernous restaurant sat almost empty, although the bills (including a $4,000 monthly light bill) kept coming. Financially, the Sartins just barely hung on.
Once highway repair was completed in 1985 and the restaurant tables filled again, two more hurricanes—Gilbert and Jerry—turned U.S. 87 into Highway McNuggets—again.
The loss of business this time, coupled with so much to make up from the time before, finally killed the restaurant in 1988. The rambling building was bulldozed a month ago.
But before the restaurant's sad, last day, Jerri had been advising her children: "Get ready to go into business—we're going down."
The next year, the family opened a successful Crystal Beach restaurant, only to close it because of septic tank system overload. The same year, Doug Sartin opened his own restaurant, Seafood Warehouse, in Beaumont.
In November 1990, Doug and his wife Kim opened a Sartin's Seafood in Nederland, but closed because the building was too small to accommodate all the deep-fat cookers and coolers that a Sartin's restaurant demands. The same year, they opened a Sartin's Seafood restaurant in Beaumont—and took the crab sign with them. Last October, Kim opened another Sartin's Seafood in Nederland.
Doug lost his part in the restaurant business to Kim when they divorced in 1993. Technically, the Sartin's in Beaumont and Nederland aren't even in the Sartin family.
But Kim "is one of my kids," Jerri says. "Just not technically. The restaurant isn't in the family anymore since they got divorced, but no one pays attention to it."
Kim and her ex-husband maintain a friendship and a business relationship that includes his parents, who help out with seafood orders and deliveries. Their 10-year-old son, Charles Doug Sartin III, helps out when he's needed.
The wait staff and cook at the Beaumont restaurant have been with the Sartin family more than 20 years.
Over the years, Sartin's all-you-can-eat platter service has attracted customers who just couldn't help sneaking out food.
"I've seen a woman with a trash-can liner in her purse," Jerri says, along with customers who piled crabs and crab balls in infant bags and pockets or just took whole platters—plate and all.
One customer walked out with two plates of seafood from the Sabine Pass restaurant in 1972. He returned the plates at the Beaumont location two weeks ago.
Kim promptly handed the man an ink marker and had him sign them. Then she and Doug hung the plates on a restaurant wall.
Many times, laughing is the only way to handle the major and minor crises in the restaurant business, Jerri said, from highway devastation and restaurant closings to customers sneaking out food.
"I wish I could do it one more time," she added. "It's been a helluva ride."
Sartin's Seafood is open from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day.
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