Your Maryland crab cake, crabby fries, crab pizza and crab cake egg roll all have one thing in common.
More often than not, they are made with crab meat from Venezuela.
Restaurants aren’t eager to bring this up. One local chef I interviewed would speak only on the condition I not identify him or his eatery, for fear of turning off customers.
The reason mostly comes down to availability and price: Maryland crab meat can be harder to find, and it’s typically more than twice the cost of the Venezuelan stuff.
Maryland officials, charged with promoting the state’s seafood industry, understand.
“It’s not practical for every single Maryland restaurant to have a Maryland lump crabmeat crab cake on their menu,” said Kristin Hanna, director of special projects at the state’s Department of Agriculture.
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“We don’t have that supply in the Chesapeake Bay” to keep up with the high demand for crab here, said Matthew Scales, the agriculture department’s seafood marketing director.
So they are pitching blue crab as a luxury item: the caviar of the Chesapeake. They are also reimagining the True Blue program, which for over a decade has promoted restaurants that use mainly Maryland blue crab. Eateries that qualify get bragging rights and are listed on the state’s website.
As of now, there are just a few True Blue restaurants within Baltimore city limits. Among them: True Chesapeake Oyster Co. in Hampden and Silver Queen Cafe on Harford Road. Maryland blue crab “frankly tastes better,” said Nicole Evanshaw, co-owner of Silver Queen Cafe, which features it in pizza, dip and fritters made with other locally sourced fare. “To us, it’s more than worth the cost.”
But Scales and Hanna want to see more eateries on the True Blue list. Maryland will now allow even restaurants that use primarily nonlocal crab to participate in the program by adding some form of local crabmeat to their menus dishes.
One is Jimmy’s Famous Seafood. The restaurant is working with waterman and TikTok star Luke McFadden to create a True Blue crab cake that they will unveil at Baltimore magazine’s Best of Baltimore event this week. The item could find its way onto the regular menu at Jimmy’s, which has a huge social media presence and has stalls at the city’s stadiums.
For everyday consumption, though, “it’s difficult to rely solely on Maryland crab meat,” said Mike Cornblatt, Jimmy’s director of business development.
Part of the scarcity of blue crabs in the Bay is thanks to those pesky invasive blue catfish, which gobble them up in the estuary and beyond, Scales said.
The agriculture department, newly invigorated under the administration of Gov. Wes Moore, is on a mission to promote eating blue catfish and other invasive species in local waterways.
To that end, Hanna and Scales have been leading chefs on boat tours of the Chesapeake Bay, with blue catfish served for lunch. This Thursday, they will unveil a web-based platform that allows diners to rack up points for eating certain dishes that contain Maryland catfish and “Chesapeake channa,” the fish formerly known as snakehead.
Eat enough and you can score a T-shirt that says in all caps, “Shuck Yeah, I ate some Maryland Seafood!!!!”
Other changes to the True Blue program are already underway: It now includes not just restaurants, but seafood markets and grocery stores that source primarily local crab. In the Baltimore area, you can get Maryland crabmeat at Graul’s Market and Conrad’s Crab and Seafood Market.
Ultimately, the goal is about creating transparency for consumers. “We want them to understand that most crab cakes aren’t [made with] Maryland crabmeat,” Hanna said.
Then again, that’s not a fact most restaurant owners are excited to highlight.
The anonymous chef I spoke to — whose Maryland restaurant is known for its crab cakes — worried that offering a True Blue crab cake on the menu would just draw diners’ attention to the fact that the other dishes are made with Venezuelan meat.
He’s worried they’d ask: “What do you mean? It’s not all Maryland crab meat?”
