Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [43]
The Crab Claw
Route 33 West
410–745–2900
St. Michaels, MD
LD (closed in winter) | $$
The great meal of Maryland’s shore is a crab feast. Hard-shelled blue crabs, steamed in spice, are served in a great heap upon the table along with pick, mallet, piles of napkins, and plenty of beer. It is a royal mess, and crab-eating novices will expend nearly as many calories as they consume pulling and prying meat from the crustaceans’ shells. But oh, what delicious meat it is! Soft and sweet yet laced with spice, it is as addictive as food can be.
Perched high on a pier overlooking the Miles River, the Crab Claw of St. Michaels opened for business about a half a century ago as a wholesale crab business. It is now one of the top places to indulge in such a feast, and it has customers who arrive by boat as well as by car. Some come to take away bushels full of crabs for waterside picnics; many come to sit at the Crab Claw tables with rolled-up sleeves and dig in. The dining room clatters with the sounds of hammering, cracking, and slurping that are a crab feast’s happy tune. Written instructions are provided telling exactly how to extract meat from a cooked hard-shelled crab, but if you find all that work a little daunting, the kitchen here has a full roster of other crab-centric meals to offer, including crab cakes, soft-shell crabs, crab claws, crab soup, and crab cocktail.
Oysters, clams, shrimp, and scallops are also available on the Crab Claw menu, as are filet mignon and chicken for crustacean-frowners. But if you don’t like crabs, this is the wrong part of the world for you to be in.
Crisfield
8012 Georgia Ave.
301–589–1306
Silver Spring, MD
LD | $$$
Crisfield’s is expensive, but no-frills. The room you enter is like a bar, with a long counter running along both sides and stools where people sit to eat and drink. The adjoining dining room has walls covered with white tile and cinder blocks, with all the charm of a locker room. Service is brusque and efficient and a full dinner can run over $20; even “light fare” meals are close to $15 and sandwiches are just under $10.
We’ll happily pay these prices because some of the food served here is top-drawer. Crisfield’s is a fish house with regional specialties you simply don’t find many places anymore. For example, seafood Norfolk–style(i.e., swimming in butter), and huge filets of flounder, broiled or fried or heaped with mountains of fresh lump crabmeat, as well as oysters and soft-shell crabs in season.
We have found the Crisfield special (lump crabmeat mixed with a bit of mayo and baked until golden brown) to be erratic: one time fresh and sweet, another kinda tired, but the crab-stuffed flounder has never been a disappointment. It is a gigantic, milky-white fillet covered with a full-flavored crown of crab. We also liked the Combination Norfolk—hunks of crab, whole shrimp, and pieces of lobster all crowded into a skillet up to their waistlines in melted butter. It’s a simple preparation, but unbeatable.
(A second, more stylish Crisfield is located at Lee Plaza, 8606 Colesville Rd., in Silver Spring. The number there is 301–588–1572.)
Jerry’s Seafood
9364 Lanham-Severn Rd.
302–645–6611
Seabrook, MD
L Mon–Fri, D Tues–Sat | $$$
Surefire tipster Joe Heflin described Jerry’s Seafood to us as the “best overall Maryland seafood restaurant without a view.” He warned that the ambience is nondescript—Jerry’s is located in a strip mall—and we should expect long lines any evening, especially on weekends.
No problem. We’ll gladly wait for this extraordinary DC-area seafood treasure. Nor do we need to be soaking up ambience when we have one of Jerry’s crab bombs on a plate in front of us. This is a fairly gigantic (ten ounce) and very expensive ($34) crab cake that is nothing more than fresh jumbo lump meat, Old Bay seasoning, and enough mayonnaise to make it cling together, baked until a painfully fragile crust develops all around the edges but the inside is still moist