Joe’s Stone Crab

Joe’s Stone Crab is famous for its cuisine and its wait times that often run up to three hours. For their 100th anniversary, a book was published telling the story of the restaurant through the people who built that legacy, the wait staff. The title, Waiting At Joe’s, played on both the line to get in and the waitstaff who run the floor.

At Joe’s, the staff is almost as iconic as the crabs. Some of those servers have been on the floor for 50+ years, with senior staff going back to hires from 1966. I art directed and photographed the staff portraits on site over three days, building a permanent visual record for the anniversary book.

Having full access to the restaurant, on the floor, at the bar, in the kitchen, and through the shipping area, allowed me to shoot the captains and servers in their natural element, doing what they do best. The result was a collection of documentary style portraits built to last.

Waiting At Joe’s was published and distributed nationwide, and is available on Amazon.com. It became the top-selling book in the restaurant’s shop and is still as popular as when it came out in 2013. More recently, one of the head captains asked me for a high-resolution print. That image, the current captains standing in front of a photo of the older ones, now hangs permanently at the restaurant’s entrance, right next to one taken by Helmut Newton.