Visiting the Local Watering Hole

For this week’s review, I decided to visit one of my favorite local watering holes. Located at 145 Mayo Road in Edgewater, MD, Waterman’s Tavern is a small restaurant in an unassuming building. Half liquore store, half restaurant, Waterman’s is a local secret. Great food at fantastic prices, it’s a place where the wait staff will know your name and have your drink ready for you upon entrance.

Waterman’s opened last summer, shortly before I moved down here. My roommates are huge fans of this place and convinced me to go one day. Needless to say, I’ve been going back ever since. In the past year that Waterman’s has been open, their menu has expanded to include more seafood items and their restaurant has recently expanded to include booth seating. When I frequent Waterman’s, I typically get a burger, which in this critic’s humble opinion is one of their top menu items. This time, I decided to order a cup of their Waterman’s Crab Soup and an order of their Maryland Crab Cake Sliders. 

Waterman's Crab Soup

First, let’s talk about the soup. For only $3.95 for a cup of soup, you can expect a large coffee mug filled with delicious, spicy tomato broth and fresh vegetables with oyster crackers served on the side. I had expected a small cup for the price and had thought they had mixed up my order and given me a bowl instead. Come to find out, they just serve large portions for reasonable prices.

Rustic in appearance and clearly homemade, the soup is filled with peas, corn, lima beans, carrots and onions. Backfin crab is also present in the soup (hence it’s name), but in all honesty although I could see pieces of the crab, the taste was missing. The soup had a great spicy heat to it, and this ended up being the dominating flavor. A nice aesthetic touch is the crab claw that is included in the soup. While this looks nice and is a fun presentation, here’s my issue: how do you expect me to eat the claw? With no mallet or other claw cracking devices provided to me, I simply couldn’t eat the claw and it sat there in my soup…taunting me. 

Maryland Crab Cake Sliders

Next up was my order of Maryland Crab Cake Sliders. The order comes with two sliders and a side of homemade potato chips. Made with jumbo lump crab meat, folded with house made imperial and pan seared golden brown, the cakes are then topped with a house made tartar, lettuce and tomato and nestled in between two butter toasted slider rolls. My initial thoughts were “wow, those are some small crab cakes.” I understand that the premise of sliders is to be a miniature version of the larger sandwich, but for $10.95 I was expecting them to be slightly bigger, a little fuller.

While small in appearance, the cakes were big on flavor. More meat and less filler, with a light citrus taste and fresh herbs throughout, the pan searing of the cakes gave them a great, crunchy crust. The buttery rolls were a nice complement to the cakes, although at times I felt the bread swallowed up the cake and left it nowhere to be found. The home made tartar provided a great creamy contrast to the crispness of the cake’s crust. While the outside of the crab cake was crunchy, the inside remained tender and moist.

  

Four Claws Decision:  

Waterman’s Crab Soup
Crab Meat Quality:
Taste:
Texture:
Value:
Overall: 

Maryland Crab Cake Sliders
Crab Meat Quality:
Taste:
Texture:
Value:
Overall:

I love Waterman’s Tavern. It’s comfy, it’s cozy and it’s where everybody knows your name. I just don’t completely love their crab soup and sliders. While they were good, they weren’t the best and I don’t think I’ll get either again. I certainly will be back to Waterman’s, but I think I’ll stick to my Sunday brunches and burgers from here on out.

So Where Can a Girl Get a Good Crab Cake, Anyway?

Portsmouth, NH

Approximately eleven months ago I uprooted my life in Boston for a change of pace and a new adventure. I’m a New England native, born and raised. A boater’s daughter from Norwalk, CT, we moved to Portsmouth, NH, a fantastic little seacoast town situated on the thirteen miles of seacoast New Hampshire has to claim, when I was only three. From there on I was hooked on the ocean. I spent five summers through high school and college working at the local yacht club, learning how to drive boats and receiving tips from fishermen in lobster. The yacht club was next to a lobsterman’s house where his wife sold fresh lobster rolls daily. Salt water ran through my veins.

I went off to college in the suburbs of Boston to learn about business. After I graduated, I moved closer to the city to get a “real” job and become a “real” contributing person to society. By the time I was twenty-five, I had had it with New England winters. These are winters that start as early as October and last as late as April. We don’t get spring; sometimes we barely get a fall. We have summer and winter essentially, and since I didn’t ski or snowboard, summer was way too short for me.

So one especially chilly, snowy morning in March of 2009 while I was getting ready for work, I caught a glimpse of the cherry blossoms in bloom in D.C. on the TV. That was enough for me. A few months later I had quit my job, started working for the family firm and moved to Annapolis to embark on a fresh start.

Upon my arrival I knew I had to sample some of the famous crab cakes that Maryland was known for. I had some friends in the area so I asked them their opinions. Well, wouldn’t you know it, every person I asked had a different idea of where I could find the best crab cake. Eventually I gave up asking people and tried to find a review site that had a list of local restaurants known for their crab dishes and reviews on them. I couldn’t find one site that did this consistently either. Becoming frustrated, I ventured out on my own.

While in pursuit of that perfect crab cake, I’ve decided to create Four Claws Reviews. This is my answer to the lack of resources there appear to be for tourists, locals and newbies, like me, to find out where they can get a decent crab cake. Four Claws Reviews is more than just the name of this site. It’s the standards by which we judge the crab dishes we try and the highest rating a restaurant’s dish can receive. We look for quality crab meat, a good value, a pleasant taste and texture in our dishes. Our reviews cannot be bought. Eventually, advertising may pop up on this site for restaurants, but please know that even though a restaurant may have an advertisement here; it does not mean that this will influence our evaluation of their dish.

I’m looking forward to eating my way through the Chesapeake Bay region, sampling the various ways crabs can be prepared. If you think you know where I can find the best crab cake, the best dip, soup, steamed crab, imperial, etc – let me know! You never know, perhaps your favorite joint could end up in my blog!