‘He had friends everywhere’: Roger Duarte, Miami’s ‘Stone Crab King,’ dies at 42

Long before he started his wildly successful business of selling stone crabs, Roger Duarte was an entrepreneur.

Read more Miami marina redevelopment will remain on ballot, but legal battle isn’t over

As a kid of 9 or 10, he decided he wasn’t using his Nintendo anymore and promptly sold it — to whom or how, his family didn’t know. Shortly after getting his driver’s license as a teen, he overheard a family friend say she needed to sell her car. He asked how much she wanted for it, and she told him. He asked her if he sold it for more than the asking price, could he keep the extra money?

She said yes.

He got more.

And as a young investment banker, he was heading to a friend’s place with takeout stone crabs, riding in the elevator when a man got in and asked what he was holding. “Stone crabs,” Duarte said promptly. “I sell them.” He didn’t. The man asked the name of his company. “George Stone Crab,” he said without hesitation.

There was no George Stone Crab, though there would be. George was his dog, and, apparently, the first name that came to him. And when the man asked him for a card, he said he didn’t have one but asked for the man’s phone number instead.

“He was a natural entrepreneur,” Duarte’s sister Michelle Duarte Gonzalez said. “That’s who he was.”

Duarte, 42, died Wednesday in a helicopter crash during a tour of Mt. Ololokwe in Samburu County in northeastern Kenya. Also killed were Telemundo/NBC executive José Alberto Suarez, pilot Josh Outra and passengers Adam Hlavaty, Henry Parra, Michele Sensi-Contugi and Stephany Hollihan.

‘He had friends everywhere’

Duarte was the youngest child of Roger Duarte Rodriguez and Denise Ortega de Duarte, brother to sisters Stephanie and Michelle. He was raised in Miami until the age of 11, when the family moved to Monterrey, Mexico. He returned for high school in 1999, attending Gulliver Preparatory School in Pinecrest.

His friends, though, were spread all across Miami-Dade County.

“Even though he went to Gulliver, his extended friends went beyond that,” Michelle Duarte said. “He had friends everywhere. . . . He always treated his friends like family. Everyone he met, he’d say ‘He’s my best friend.’ There isn’t one person who didn’t make him feel that way.”

Duarte attended Barry University and went into investment banking after college. Toward the end of the pandemic, he met Nicole Valls, vice president of operations of Valls Group and one of company founder Felipe Valls’ granddaughters, and they were married in 2021. The Valls family owns Versailles and La Carreta restaurants.

When their son Roger Felipe — almost 2 and named for both grandfathers — was born, Duarte’s heart “grew exponentially,” Duarte Gonzalez said.

“When they had the baby, he said, ‘Now I have a best friend.’ Granted, he had 200 best friends, but he kept saying, ‘This is my buddy,’ ” she said. “There was so much he wanted to teach and share with him. He was still the same person, but now he had this little boy that just filled his cup, and it overflowed.”

The start of a stone crab legend

As a young investment banker working on mergers and acquisitions, Duarte started to grow frustrated with his career and began to think about starting a new one. In the financially cataclysmic 2008, he launched a business around one of his (and Miami’s) favorite foods: stone crabs. George Stone Crab allowed customers around Miami to order stone crabs online and have them delivered straight to their homes.

Duarte, of course, made most of the deliveries himself, in a Mini Cooper decorated with crab claws.

He went on to work with local partners in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela for home delivery. A Bloomberg profile nicknamed him the “Stone Crab King” of Miami.

“It’s definitely a roller coaster — you don’t have a constant cash flow or a bonus at the end of the year,” he told the Miami Herald in 2009. “But this is my baby.”

Lee Schrager, founder of the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, was so impressed with Duarte’s entrepreneurial energy that he nominated him for Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in 2016.

“He impressed me from the day I met him,” he said. “I recognized his passion and his commitment. And whenever I asked him to do something for a charity event, he would. He never, ever said no. He was just always committed. I nominated him because he was doing something different with stone crabs, delivering them fresh to your house and giving people an option besides going to Joe’s or Monty’s.”

Read more Hit-and-run driver who killed scooter rider has been arrested, BSO says

Duarte, he said, was also never one to shirk a challenge. Earlier this year, Schrager was holding a charity event at his home for The YES Institute, a suicide prevention organization, and he mistakenly gave the caterer the wrong date. When he hadn’t heard from the caterer as the day wore on, he realized his mistake.

“I called Roger and I said, ‘Listen, I’m having 80 people here, can you send me 15 dozen cracked crab legs in the next hour?’ ” he recalled.

Learning that Duarte was out of the country in Spain, Schrager was immediately apologetic.

“I told him not to worry about it,” he said. An hour later, the crabs showed up anyway.

‘We had a fantastic run’

Sam Gorenstein, co-owner of the Mediterranean restaurant Abbale in Miami Beach and Aventura, met Duarte at a launch party for George Stone Crab at The Betsy Hotel on Miami Beach. Duarte, who lived on the Beach then, kept returning to The Betsy, and he and Gorenstein, who was working at BLT Steak (now LT Steak) at the hotel, struck up a friendship.

In 2012, they launched the fast-casual takeout spot My Ceviche in the tiny kitchen of a hostel on Washington Avenue about a block from Joe’s Stone Crab. It didn’t exactly have seating, but customers could take their ceviche (or burritos or tacos) to the tables in the hostel’s lobby or eat on the beach.

“Roger thought we could do it out of his apartment,” Gorenstein said. “He had no knowledge of food and beverage then. But one day we found that great spot, with a 220-square-foot kitchen. Luckily that kitchen had an exterior door facing Washington so we could operate separately from the hostel.”

The business took off, and Gorenstein left his job at The Betsy to eventually open more locations with Duarte.

“I felt we were really changing the game,” he said. “Roger was always a visionary and a go-getter, and he had an extreme drive to get things done.”

The pair went on to open Zuuk Mediterranean Kitchen in Brickell. But eventually their business relationship fell apart.

“We had to part ways,” Gorenstein said. “It didn’t work out, but we had a fantastic run. We were both really proud of the things we were accomplishing. I’ll always remember him and those life lessons I kept from knowing him. It was a sour experience in the end, and I was heartbroken by it, but it hurts that we didn’t get the opportunity to put that behind us and work on the friendship we had before. We had so many positive experiences. I’ll keep those forever and cherish them.”

‘The happiest person you would ever meet’

Despite his passion for business, Duarte Gonzalez says for her brother, family came first — and friends were always family.

“He was the happiest person you would ever meet, and generous not only with his money but also with his time and his heart,” she said. “He was someone who wanted to make sure everyone felt heard. I know, because I’m his sister, and we were thick as thieves.”

She is six years older than her brother, while sister Stephanie is eight years older, and yet she felt that family dynamic started to shift.

“As time passed, it was like there was no age difference, and at a certain point in our life it’s almost been role reversal, almost like he was the big brother instead of the baby brother,” she said. “It was his nature. He always wanted to make sure everybody was OK.”

Read more ‘He had friends everywhere’: Roger Duarte, Miami’s ‘Stone Crab King,’ dies at 42

This story was originally published August 21, 2026 at 3:40 PM.