Certain foods have mystiques with me, kind of like planets or public figures. Yet I was told never to meet my heroes. I was told I’d always be disappointed. That’s why I never regretted not meeting Wilt Chamberlain or Hunter S. Thompson.
However, all my life I’ve wanted to eat Maryland crab cakes.
I’ve had crab cakes before. I saw Wilt play on TV and read all of Thompson’s books too, but it’s just not the same. Neither is eating just normal crab cakes. I’ve seen them on menus in every beach dive, seafood restaurant and crab shack within a mile of any shoreline.
Inevitably, the crab cakes taste about as much like crab as I write like Thompson. The slacker dude in the kitchen always packs the already dubious crab meat with too much mustard, mayonnaise, onions and — who knows? — Wheaties.
Then they’ll throw it in a tiny hamburger bun, and I might as well be eating a slider in a college bar in Lincoln, Neb.
But two weeks ago I found myself at the mother ship of crab cakes: Maryland. The Air Force-Navy football game not only introduced me to one of the most underrated college towns in America — Annapolis — but also put me within a crab crawl of the best crab cakes on planet Earth.
I stayed by the Baltimore airport, but I had no desire to prowl the city’s Inner Harbor. I was afraid one of the city’s lone tourist attractions would mass produce crab cakes and be as awful as Orioles baseball.
Instead, some Navy personnel told me to visit Cantler’s Riverside Inn in Annapolis. If you can’t trust Navy personnel for reliable intelligence, who can you trust?
Cantler’s is at the end of a gravel road that empties out into Mill Creek. Flowing into Chesapeake Bay, Mill Creek is so dark I thought I was about to dine at the setting for “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” When I walked into the sprawling shack, I was hit by the aromas of salt and butter and crab and onions.
I saw couples furiously discarding crab legs into piles a foot high. I’ve seen shark feeds that were less vicious.
I took a seat outside next to a heating lamp on the pleasant 60-degree night and looked down. In Mill Creek was a huge wire cage with crabs crawling around unaware of their fate.
They are all doomed. The Cantler family has had a homestead on this point of land since the 1800s, and Friday they celebrate the restaurant’s 35th anniversary. Every day during the high season — May through September — Cantler’s goes through 60-65 bushels of crab.
Using its formula of six to eight dozen a bushel, Cantler’s sells from 4,300 to 6,240 crabs a day. Placed end to end, the crabs would stretch more than three-quarters of the way around Washington Park in Denver and make for one weird science fiction movie.
Crab cakes come in basically two forms: Regular crab cake is the shredded meat that Cantler’s mixes with just a little mayo, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, Old Bay seafood seasoning and Japanese bread crumbs then lightly fried.
I ordered lump crab cake. This is for purists. It’s the pure lump meat in the back fin of the crab. It’s the same ingredients minus the bread crumbs and is broiled. Remember the best crab legs you’ve ever had in your life? Triple the taste, eliminate the manual labor and you have Cantler’s lump crab cakes.
It’s not cheap. Lump crab cake is $24.99, with regular crab going for $19.99. But there’s a reason.
“We use only Maryland crab meat,” co-owner Dan Donnelly said. “A lot don’t. They bring them from Indochina, Mexico, Venezuela. Crab comes from brackish waters. Chesapeake Bay is very brackish.”
Unfortunately, Maryland crab meat is becoming rarer. Overfishing and pollution have depleted the numbers, and the cheaper crab companies outside Maryland are moving into the U.S. market.
Too bad. Maryland crab is worth worshiping.
John Henderson: 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com
Note: “Brackish” water occurs in estuaries and other locations where seawater and fresh water mingle. It is more salty than fresh water but less salty than salt water. Chesapeake Bay is a classic example.
If you go
Cantler’s Riverside Inn, 458 Forest Beach Road, Annapolis, Md., 410-757-1311.
