Congratulations to Po’Boys on six years in business!

The Stewarts opened a small Cajun restaurant, Po’ Boys Creole & Fresh Catch, around the corner from a dollar store in the summer of 2009. The restaurant become an improbable success, voted as the town’s best restaurant by readers of one publication. After four and a half years of daily preparations of gumbo, jambalaya and crawfish, the Stewarts were selling the place.

The Stewarts announced Po’ Boys was for sale over the summer of 2016, a development that made locals who’d gotten used to the taste of their uncommon dishes – fried crawfish tails, oyster and shrimp po’ boy sandwiches, beignets for Sunday brunch – very, very nervous. “You are one of the reasons for us returning to Milton for vacation,” a Po’ Boys Facebook follower sighed.

“They established a foothold with cuisine they did very well,” said Ellen Passman, a Milton resident and frequent consumer of Po’ Boys gumbo. “It was a cross-cultural restaurant. Everybody met everybody in there.”

The owners embarked on a search for someone who would take over the business without swatting all the Creole meals off the menu. They turned down some suitors. Then an advisor at the University of Delaware’s Small Business Development Center connected the Stewarts to Michael Clampitt, 45, executive chef at Baywood Greens, a ritzy golf course near Millsboro. Clampitt was interested in owning his own restaurant.

“I flat out told him, you’d be an idiot to change the concept,” Amy Stewart said, and Clampitt agreed. He and the Stewarts soon sealed the deal. “Everything they’ve done has been spot-on,” Clampitt said. “That’s why I want to keep it.”