Seaside Restaurant & Crab House

Crabs come to the table too hot to handle, stuck with a peppery, salty spice mix. Grab your knife to pry away the outer shell, pick up the mallet to start pounding, and soon you will be rewarded with fat nuggets of sweet meat. Toss shells into paper bags on the floor and hoist an ice cold beer to quench the thirst that spicy crabs inevitably provoke: this is a true finger-licking feast, a royal mess, and tons of fun.

Beyond blue crabs, the Seaside Restaurant has a menu of other local specialties, well worth sampling, especially if crabmeat-extraction is too daunting a task (it IS hard work!). There are broiled shrimp, scallops, and flounder, and zesty crab cakes, plus as good a crab soup as we’ve had anywhere along the Chesapeake Bay.

A busy place, especially on weekends. Expect to wait at meal time. The restaurant is all set up to overnight-ship crab cakes, crab meat, and whole crabs. Beware of that last one, though. A kindly friend once tried to surprise us with a blue crab shipment from Maryland. We weren’t home when the Fedex man arrived, so he left the precious gift just outside our front door. By the time we got back, late that night, neighborhood cats had enjoyed their own kind of crab feast, the debris from which was scattered all across the front lawn.