Chef Paul Menta is passionate about fish and rum — the subjects of colorful stories over the years in his adopted home, the Florida Keys. Menta is executive chef at The Stoned Crab, a sprawling seafood restaurant in Key West. The Philadelphia native also co-owns a distillery that last year produced about 18,000 bottles of rum, or Key West coffee, as Menta likes to call it. The boyish, 50-something Menta wears a lot of other hats, too, not to mention a bunch of tattoos and a couple of shark bites. He’s a pro kiteboarder, cookbook author and proud officer of the so-called Conch Republic, which “seceded” from the U.S. in the early ’80s to protest the federal government’s border patrol checks in the Keys.
