Here’s part 2 of my DC-area trip… the part in which this Kansas-born inlander attempts to develop a greater appreciation for the seafood Marylanders grow up eating.

We had one day in Baltimore. Plan was, take the kids to the aquarium, afterwards my wife would feed them at something kid-friendly in aquarium area (I believe they went to Potbelly), I would hike over to the Lexington Market to try Faidley’s.

Faidley’s, here I come. Oh boy, this is going to be good. But wait, it’s strangely quiet at the fried foods counter…

All the rest of Faidley’s, raw bar and seafood counter and so on, is operational. But the part why someone would come there during August which is, you might notice, a prominent tourism month… it’s closed. Without a word on the website, which I had visited the night before.

Thanks a lot, Faidley’s.

Avoid.

The rest of the market doesn’t look that great but I decide, hell, I have to eat something. I get a crab cake from another stand, foreboding hanging over me. If I knew my crabcakes, if I loved crabcakes, I could rail against the pathetic thing I was given in artful literary fashion. Let’s just say, it tasted like a ball of Stove Top Stuffing, deep-fried.

I found another stand and ordered another one, just to complete my humiliation. It was all right, actually. It actually had crab in it, for one thing.

Given more time, I could have done better than this, I’m sure, but I had to meet up with the family again, so this was all I could do, and hope for gelato or something to wash away the taste of betrayal.

* * *

I also had dreams of a day spent toodling around the Maryland countryside. The reality proved to be racing across it as fast as we could to spend a day at Rehoboth Beach, where most food seems to come in $15 tubs. (Grotto pizza isn’t bad at all NY-style; the much-heralded French fries taste exactly like Five Guys.) So my ideal of the little, rickety crab shack in the middle of nowhere eluded me. We did manage to visit picturesque, just-interesting-enough-for-half-a-day Annapolis and hit the popular, by no means small and untouristed, but still reasonably authentic and reliable Cantler’s:

This still seems a stranger way to eat than we experienced at Queen Makeda’s, and by the end of it I had a long gash in my thumb full of Old Bay Seasoning, but I guess once a decade, this is fun and reasonably tasty.

Cantler’s Riverside Inn
458 Forest Beach Road
Annapolis, MD 21409-5912
(410) 757-1467