Seafood restaurant and market offers wide selection of choices
By B.C. Manion
If you want to get Chad Wright all riled up, just ask him if the gator sold at Sabrina’s Seafood Market and Restaurant tastes like chicken.
The longtime alligator trapper and skinner will put it to you straight: “Gator meat tastes like gator.

“Everybody says it tastes like chicken. That’s my biggest pet peeve,” said Wright, who has been skinning gators since he was 8.
If you had gator that tasted like chicken, chances are, it was chicken, he said.
He and his wife, Cortney, opened Sabrina’s Seafood Market and Restaurant in Dade City in March.
Gator items on their menu include Gator gumbo ($3.75 a bowl and $1.75 a cup), a Gator Nugget Basket with fried gator nuggets, cole slaw and fries or hush puppies ($6.99), a gator sampler ($4.99) and gator burger ($6.99).
The menu also includes a wide selection of seafood baskets as well as all sorts of sandwiches and entrees; wings, side dishes, appetizers, sandwiches and a couple of salads. It has a kid’s menu at both lunch and dinner.
The restaurant bears the name of the couple’s daughter Sabrina, who sold her Grand Champion-prize winning hog, Oreo, to invest in the family’s business.
Before opening for business, the family did a lot of work to make it a comfortable place to eat. The cleaned up the interior and repainted the exterior. The 26-seat restaurant has a cozy feel.
There’s also a colorful sign, featuring a gator wearing an apron, to draw attention to the business, located at 14748 US 98 Bypass.
The restaurant is a family affair. The couple’s daughter, Rachael, helps out. She’s experimented with some stuffed fish dishes.
Some are a hit, Chad Wright said. Others? Not so much. The tasty ones may be offered to patrons; the others, won’t.
The couple’s son, Chad Jr., also helps out by running all sorts of errands, Cortney said.
Another important player at the restaurant is Lori Carter, who manages the restaurant and is Cortney’s dear friend.
Initially, the restaurant and seafood market enjoyed big crowds, but that was before the northerners headed home for the summer, Cortney Wright said. Now, the business has scaled back its hours for the summer months.
The family gets the fresh seafood that it serves and sells directly from boat captains, in places like Tarpon Springs, Weeki Wachee and Anna Maria. That cuts out the middlemen and allows the seafood market and restaurant to offer better prices to its patrons, Chad Wright said.
The gator meat the restaurant serves comes from Chad Wright’s processing plant, which the trapper opened after tiring of selling so many of his gators to other processing plants.
He has been hunting gators since he was 8 years old and is a contract trapper for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
In the not too distant future, some of the restaurant’s floor space will give way to a display case for seafood, Chad said.
“Some people come here and they don’t see a display case and it kind of turns them off. We’re going to get a display case,” he said.
Seafood patrons can order fresh seafood before 5 p.m. and pick up the next business day. Available seafood includes blue crabs, gulf shrimp, oysters, mullet, grouper, snapper, catfish, tilapia.
The market also can provide Alaskan show crab, salmon, lobster and clams, but that may take up to a week to receive.
The seafood market is only running two days a week at the moment, now that northerners have headed home for the summer, Cortney said.
The restaurant has cut back its hours, too. It is closed on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. It is open 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Wednesday and Thursday and from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.
Sabrina’s Seafood Market and Restaurant
14748 US 98 Bypass, Dade City
(352) 518-4280
Restaurant: 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday-Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday-Saturday
Market: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday-Saturday
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