Shrimp

America has at least three Shrimp Capital of the Worlds: Brownsville, Texas, Morgan City, Louisiana, and Mayport, Florida. Among Roadfood explorers, Florida is the favorite place to eat them because not only do restaurants in and around St. Augustine, just south of Mayport, serve utterly elegant, butter-rich butterflied fried shrimp, but there’s also Titusville to the south, where rock shrimp rule. With shells as hard as lobsters, rock shrimp were not appreciated until Rodney Thompson and his daughter Laurilee figured out a way to split the shells and broil them. The result was easily edible shrimp as posh as lobster, now the specialty of the Dixie Crossroads restaurant Thompson founded in 1983.