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seriously soulful soul food such as pigs’ feet or chitterlings, but unless you are a feet aficionado already, we suggest you begin with more familiar things to eat—spare ribs, for example, glazed with breathless hot sauce, rugged and satisfying. These are not yuppie baby back ribs; they are food that makes you work, and when you do, they deliver tidal waves of flavor. Pork chops are like that, too: highly seasoned, meaty, and substantial. For a tender meal, how about meat loaf? This meat loaf, particularly with a side of mashed potatoes and a heap of pungent collard greens, is one of the kitchen’s unexpected triumphs, its coarse-textured meat shot through with brilliant spices. True to Southern custom, there are lots of vegetables to accompany the entrees: candied sweet potatoes, rich macaroni and cheese, lavish potato salad, rice, beans, peas, and always sweet corn bread for mopping up a plate.

For many devotees of the Florida Avenue Grill, the best meal of the day is breakfast. That’s when you can have stacks of pancakes, onionlaced corned beef hash, cornmeal muffins, squares of scrapple, crusty fried potatoes, stewed spiced apples, buttermilk biscuits, and grits and gravy.

This humble restaurant with its sprung-spring booths, pink counter, and red plastic stools is cheap, fast, and satisfying. Its motherly waitresses make even us strangers feel right at home.

Maryland

Bear Creek Open Pit BBQ

21030 Point Lookout Rd.

301–994–1030

Callaway, MD

LD | $

Callaway is way south in Maryland, and while the Chesapeake Bay is best known (and rightfully so) for its excellent seafood, it is also a place where you’ll find fine true-South barbecue. One of several smokehouses in the region, Bear Creek is unique for its huge open pit. You’ll see it on the left as you walk in the door. Here, pitmaster Curtis Shreve cooks pork and beef so tender that if you look at it hard, it falls apart. We are especially fond of the pork, either hand-pulled into shreds or sliced into pieces soft as velvet. It has a fine smoky flavor and a piggy richness that defies description. It is, in fact, so good that we like it without any sauce whatsoever, all the better to savor the flavor of the meat. (Mr. Shreve’s sauce, we should say, is excellent: sweet and a wee bit hot.)

Beyond barbecue and the St. Mary’s County specialty, ham stuffed with spiced greens, you can expect Bear Creek to have interesting game on the menu. Curtis Shreve is a hunter, and while he cannot serve what he kills (health department regulations forbid it), he does have a fondness for such meats as venison, alligator, and frog legs. When we stopped in, the day’s special was rabbit stew—a hearty meal that included big hunks of carrot and potato and easy-to-eat pieces of breaded and fried rabbit. On the side of the stew we had a block of homemade corn bread.

Mr. Shreve originally hails from the Louisiana-Texas borderland, so his cooking reflects Southwest roots, too. The kids’ menu contains corn dogs reminiscent of those at the Texas State Fair, and here also is that miraculous Texas twist on chili known as Fritos pie: a bed of crisp corn chips topped with chili and spangled with cheese. Shreve remembered, “When I was a kid years ago, they used to take a scoop of chili and put it right in the bag of Fritos and you ate it just like that. Now the bags are made of plastic that does not withstand the heat. So we serve our Fritos pie in a dish.”

Captain’s Galley

1021 W. Main St.

866–576–6412

Crisfield, MD

LD | $$$

Dining at the Captain’s Galley can be expensive by Roadfood standards. An order of rockfish is $14. Broiled lump crabmeat is $18. And while there are some very nice-looking sandwiches in the under-$10 range, including oyster fritters on a hoagie roll and fried soft-shell crabs, the dish we recommend will set you back $20. That’s a pair of crab cakes, available fried or broiled. Many Mid-Atlantic seafood aficionados think these are the best. They are creamy-sweet and fresh as ocean spray, tender but with a nice little snap to their golden crust, even