For as long as I can remember, Chesapeake Bay was the home of the nation’s finest crabs – big ones, filled with delicious meat for cocktails or cakes; small ones with soft shells (actually no shells) ready for sautéing or frying; giant hard-shells for steaming, piling on tables covered with newspapers and attacking with hammer and paring knife to remove the succulent flesh.
I was fortunate in having relatives in Baltimore, so several trips a year brought lessons in buying and eating, either in home kitchens, back yards or restaurants. I spent two years in the Army at Fort Lee, Va., a straight shot up U.S. Highway 301 to Baltimore and its wonderful crop.
As the p.r. director for the Football Cardinals, I worked several games in Baltimore Given those years of treats, the St. Louis crab cake experience has been rocky. In the beginning, there were some good ones at a seafood restaurant named Edmond’s, on the south side, or at Nantucket Cove, at Kingshighway and West Pine boulevards. There also have been hundreds of poor relatives, filled with claw meat, or with filler, or even worse, the plastic faux crab that is made from extruded fish.
’s Memorial Stadium. The Colts hammered the Big Red on both occasions, but the good memory was the crab cakes, thick and juicy and served piping hot on saltine crackers. Losing was easier when one was filled with delicious crab cakes.
And so, as we neared Chesapeake Bay on a recent trip, primed for dinner in Annapolis with former Post-Dispatch photographer Scott Dine and his wife, I sensed crab cake in every part of my dinner antenna.
I was right. O’Leary’s, a white-tablecloth Annapolis restaurant, a block off the Bay, provided delightful cakes – almost as big as a baseball, and filled with nothing but lump crab meat, along with a perfect amount of salt and pepper. Good tartar sauce came alongside but was an unnecessary gilding of the lily.
And the next day, at the end of a delightful sail in Scott’s 25-foot boat, there was a dockside joint called Thursday’s, with beer signs everywhere and well-weathered woodwork barely holding the place together. Again, perfect crab cakes, fresh and delicious, with just a touch more spicing than the previous day.
A real crab cake fan is never satiated, and the next day, while enjoying breakfast at the Eastern Market, a few blocks from the Capitol in Washington, D. C., I thought – What the Heck!! – and ordered a crab cake sandwich as a side dish to breakfast. Once again, a large crab cake, not quite as large as a baseball, but perfectly cooked and absolutely delicious.
I can return to St. Louis happy, ready to face more years of second-rate crab cakes – or no crab cakes except for those at Busch’s Grove and Ruth’s Chris, where recent expeditions have passed muster with my taste buds, if not my accountant.
– Joe
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My grandparents were the managers for years at Nantucket Cove. I wish we had more seafood options in St. Louis. Surprisingly, I did find some really good crabcakes recently at Primo, a bar/restaurant at West County Mall.