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Marylanders take their crab cakes seriously. Good thing, then, that many
Bethesda-area restaurants do as well
By Jody Jaffe
Marylanders take their crabs seriously. In 1989, the Maryland Blue Crab was
anointed the official state crustacean, 27 years after jousting was appointed
our official state sport.
The crab’s designation makes a whole lot more sense than jousting’s elevated
status, since each year the seafood industry contributes about $400 million
to Maryland’s economy. Our crab’s scientific name is Callinectes sapidus,
which translates—unfortunately for it and fortunately for us—as “beautiful
swimmer that is savory.”
Never more savory than when it’s made into crab cakes. That was the quest
for me and my fellow taste testers, Lydia Schlosser and Susan Watterson, to
find savory crab cakes in the Bethesda area. As luck would have
it, Schlosser is almost a native Marylander (we’ll excuse her a few early
years in New York) who grew up with a crab cracker in her hand, just about
literally.
“My birthdays were always at crab feasts,” says Schlosser,
a pastry chef who is the registrar at L’Academie de
Cuisine in Bethesda. “I have pictures of me and my girlfriends
holding crabs.” Watterson is the former chef at Café
Bethesda and now teaches cooking at L’Academie. Though
she’s from Connecticut, Watterson’s crab cakes, according
to Schlosser, are difficult to beat.
Our first stop was Rock Creek, the upscale Bethesda “mindful eating” restaurant
where you can walk out well fed for under 600 calories—and
know it. Nutritional information is printed on the menu.
Rock Creek offers crab cakes (260 calories with side
slaw) as an entree for $27.50 or an appetizer for $14.50.
Chef Fred Przyborowski says the secret to a good crab
cake is “lots of good crabmeat and no shells.”
“We do use a little filler,” Przyborowski says. “Panko bread crumbs. It’s
a very simple recipe. Dijon mustard, a little mayonnaise, eggs, crab, crumbs.”
In fact, the recipe for crab cakes has changed little since Colonial days,
though they were called crab croquettes back then. It wasn’t until the 1930s
that the term crab cake seems to first have appeared in print, in the New
York World’s Fair Cook Book’s “Baltimore crab cakes.”
While we wait for our Rock Creek crab cakes, Schlosser and Watterson give
me a lesson in crab and the economics of using it. Because the Maryland crab
season runs from April 1 through Nov. 30, restaurants buy crab from other
places such as Louisiana if they want to serve crab year-round. The meat comes
in different grades, according to Watterson, starting from the most expensive:
jumbo lump, lump, special, back fin and claw (the shredded meat that doesn’t
bind to anything, so it goes in soup). The good stuff—jumbo lump—can run anywhere
from $16 to $20-plus a pound. At those kinds of prices, crab cakes made from
fresh jumbo lump are close to a loss leader for restaurants, says Watterson.
“That’s why you also serve chicken,” she says.
Our crab cake arrives and the presentation is a spa-food study of Zen simplicity,
as is the crab cake itself. An oval mound of white crab, flecked with bits
of golden crust, sits next to spiraled strands of white and green celeriac-apple
coleslaw and a carefully poured puddle of yellow, lemon-chervil aioli. I like
the side dish and sauce; Watterson and Schlosser think they’re a little too
bright to be paired with the subtle crab.
We take our forks and flake the crab, looking to see if it’s jumbo lump.
So far, so good. We see the telltale pillows of white
crabmeat. Then we taste. It’s as good as it looks. At
its best, jumbo lump crab is sweet. At its worst, it’s
either bland or smacks of iodine.
This is crab at its best. “It’s creamy, sweet and lumpy,” says Watterson.
“And a generous portion. If I came here and ordered these crab cakes, I’d
be happy.”
Schlosser agrees, though she says she likes her crab cakes a little crispier.
When Przyborowski said he used little filler, he wasn’t exaggerating. These
crab cakes are almost pure crab, to the point where they’re not as cakey as
the others we will try. Fillers not only stretch the expensive crabmeat, but
bind the crab into a cake.
“With no filler,” Schlosser says, “you can’t get the crab cake to stick together.”
Rock Creek’s are more crab lumps than crab cakes, but with crab as sweet as
this, who’s complaining?
At McCormick and Schmick’s, Chef Tony Marciante tells us his crab cakes ($21.75
for entree; $12.70 for appetizer) are “very simple, very straightforward.”
“Eggs, mayonnaise, white bread, parsley, salt, pepper, Old Bay,” he says.
Watterson doesn’t flinch, but I know she wants to. She’s already told us
she’s no fan of Maryland’s favorite, yet unofficially designated, spice. “I
just don’t get the whole Old Bay thing,” she says later.
McCormick and Schmick’s, with its cavernous rooms, heavy wood paneling and
jumbo Tiffany lamps, looks like a steakhouse. It turns out, it cooks like
one too, meaning the food is big, mild and safe—perfect to bring a client
or your mother-in-law.
“A steakhouse with fins,” Watterson says after the
first bite of a McCormick and Schmick’s crab cake that’s
big, mild and safe.
Because this restaurant serves 600 to 1,000 crab cakes
a week year-round, availability and consistency of crabmeat
is essential, Chef Marciante says. That means, he says,
they use pasteurized crabmeat, which has been hermetically
sealed to kill microorganisms and extend shelf life.
It also can mean a less flavorful crab cake. To this
taster, pasteurized crab is to fresh crab what canned
peaches are to fresh peaches.
“Pasteurized crab loses its crabbiness,” says Schlosser.
She’s right. There’s just no way a crab cake made from
pasteurized crab is going to have that sweet crab flavor.
At least not the ones we tried here.
But the portions are large, the crab cakes are crispy on the outside and
creamy on the inside, and you can choose between deep-fried and broiled. Go
for the broiled; the deep-fried ones smell and taste of oil.
“This is what you’d expect,” says Watterson. “Old Bay, a little more filler.
It’s safe and dependable. It’s comfort food. And you get a lot of food for
your money.”
There’s no getting around the Old Bay at Black’s Bar and Kitchen in Bethesda.
Chef Mallory Buford says it’s an essential ingredient in crab cakes. “You
have to have it,” he says, with a laugh. “It’s Maryland.”
But he shakes the can with a very light touch. There’s barely a hint of Old
Bay in his tasty crab cakes, which are made from fresh crabmeat and offered
as a dinner entree for $28. He amps up the flavor with Creole and Dijon mustards
and a little jalapeño.
“It has a good crab flavor,” Schlosser says. “And I like the little bits
of other stuff. It’s crispy on the outside and creamy
inside. But it doesn’t have the big lumps that Rock
Creek’s had.”
Also, the mustard cream sauce—which Schlosser finds overpowers the delicate
flavor of crab—is unavoidable since the crab cake is served on top of it.
The other restaurants serve their sauces on the side.
At Persimmon Restaurant in Bethesda, Chef Damian Salvatore serves up a delicious,
complex crab cake as a dinner entree for $24.
“This is more like Susan’s crab cake,” says Schlosser. “It has something
else in it besides crab. It’s for a more adventuresome eater. It’s more peppery
than Black’s. I like the flavor combination and the crisp outside, soft inside.”
This is also the prettiest of the crab cakes, with its dots and dashes of
red pepper and caramelized onions, served next to a mound of bright yellow
corn hash and matching corn sauce. “I like the sauce,” says Schlosser, “it
brings out the sweet flavor of the crab.” And the side dish especially pleases
her.
“I’m a Marylander. So I like the combination of crab cakes with corn.”
Much better than I expected,” says Watterson as we bite into our puffy crab
cake at the Bethesda Crab House which serves them individually for $10.95,
as a crab cake sandwich for $12.95 and as a platter for $22.95. “The crab
is very sweet. That could be the coleslaw dressing.”
Coleslaw dressing, it turns out, is the secret ingredient of these crab cakes,
according to Yen Lee, manager of the restaurant, which has been in business
for 44 years. He’s not the chef, but he says he’s in charge of making the
crab cakes. He uses only fresh crab, adds Italian bread crumbs, mayonnaise
and the secret ingredient.
“It’s really darned good,” says Watterson. Except for a faint taste of oregano
from the Italian bread crumbs. “I get distracted by
it. It takes away from the flavor of the crab. It hits
your tongue first. But if you’ve been eating this for
44 years, then a crab cake without dried oregano would
taste funny.”
Tower Oaks Lodge in Rockville is worth the trip, even if you don’t like the
crab cakes. With its gargantuan (almost 20,000 square feet) Adirondack-on-steroids
style lodge, four themed dining rooms, enough saddles, canoes and boats on
display to run a thriving summer camp and a twinkly-light hallway that patrons
have asked to be married in, this place is a sensory smorgasbord.
As for the crab cakes ($14.95 for lunch, $23.95 for dinner), think McCormick
and Schmick’s. At first, one of the chefs told us they
use mostly pasteurized crabmeat because of the “handling
issues.” She came back after we’d tasted it—and found
it to have the same muted flavor of the McCormick and
Schmick’s crab cake—to revise her statement. She said
they only use pasteurized crab when the cakes are on
special (which they were not). Whatever it was, these cakes didn’t taste as sweet as the other crab cakes.
Still, Watterson liked the crust and pretty golden color.
“And it’s moist, which is always good,” Watterson says.
Jody wrote the novels Thief of Words and Shenandoah Summer,
and teaches journalism at Georgetown University.
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