Hooked: Residents say seafood van ‘shrimply the best’

Justin Ekelman sits on a small folding chair, huddled next to a freezer chest inside a white van.

The van is covered in handmade signs pitching shrimp from Rocky Point, Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, alongside a menu of other seafood delicacies.

Who would think this humble, dirt-lot setting off State Route 347 at West Riggs Road would be a decades-old culinary institution?

The van on the Gila River Indian Community is a mobile family business that many Maricopans frequent on their commutes to and from work. Others simply make a seafood run about 15 miles north of the city limit, sometimes fighting traffic all the way.

As a measure of its popularity, one-third of voters in a recent InMaricopa poll named the roadside shrimp van their favorite food source.

How did this family decide to sell seafood in the middle of the desert?

“I didn’t come up with this idea. My father started this over 30 years ago,” says Ekelman, a fast-talking fishmonger, quick to suggest the best way to pan fry or grill a customer’s fine ocean-sourced purchase. “Dad had a friend who owned boats down there in the Sea of Cortez. My dad would just take us down as a family, and they got together, and he started bringing [shellfish] over the border, and he started selling it.”

Carrying on his father’s legacy, Eckleman today sells six sizes of shrimp from his freezer stuffed with product and powered by a gas generator at the end of a long extension cord. Other products picked up over the years include Caribbean lobsters, East Coast scallops, Chilean black mussels, wild Alaskan sockeye salmon and wild-caught American catfish.

Ekelman has sold seafood off SR 347 for 12 years after he took over for his father, who sold there for 15 years before him.

Under the business name Shrimply the Best, Ekelman has a Gila River Indian Community business license posted in a conspicuous place near his sales chair.

The same distributor his father first connected with in Mexico years ago now has a seafood distribution business that ships product in from several international and domestic locations. This allows Ekelman to buy directly, bypassing the international permitting process, including in Mexico.

Ekelman sells at a handful of other locations as well. Longtime repeat customers have allowed the business to serve all around the Phoenix area, including Queen Creek, San Tan Valley, East Mesa and beyond, he said. His seafoods for sale vary, depending on the time of year.

“I have multiple spots around the Valley,” Ekelman says. “I go down into Casa Grande, Arizona City, I’m up in Rio Verde, I’m all over.”

He’s at the SR 347 and Riggs Road location Wednesdays through Fridays and every other Saturday.

“I use this spot more in the wintertime because there’s more snowbirds in town,” he says.
“I sell a ton of shrimp,” the Chandler resident says, when asked what product sells the best at Riggs Road.

He says depending on the time of year, the Riggs location, which is just inside Maricopa County, can sell the most with almost all its customers coming from Maricopa. He says the location is normally in the top three for sales year-round.

What other products do Maricopans buy?

“On Mother’s Day, I sell a ton of lobster tails,” he says of the crustacean he buys from as far northeast as Maine, and south to the Bahamas.