Fresh Seafood

Whether you're craving seafood or steak, Pelican Cove Seafood Bar and Grill Restaurant in Abingdon has a diverse menu with items such as fresh oysters and mussels, Porter House steak and Key Largo Seafood Marinara, served with lump crabmeat, sautéed shrimp and scallops. “Our fresh rock fish is our number-one entrée,” says Jay Mottley, general manager of Pelican Cove. Guests can order the fish blackened, baked or char-grilled. “The food quality speaks for itself. This is not a chain restaurant.

The weekend is so close you can taste it. If you're headed east to the Atlantic, take a look at our guide to 100 Best Beach Eats , which covers Ocean City, West Ocean City and Delaware towns stretching from Fenwick Island to Lewes. It might be hard to get to on a busy weekend, when the Ocean Gateway (Route 50) is bumper to bumper, but sometime this summer make sure you stop by the Shrimp Boat on Stephen Decatur Highway. This 23-year-old roadside shack is the real deal, where the locals have always come to buy fresh seafood and steamed-while-you-wait shrimp.

Serving up home-cooking and hospitality, Darlene and Ricky Parker's Fresh Fresh Seafood feels Southern to me. Or maybe my own version of the South pieced together partly from real life, Eudora Welty stories and Mayberry. Because I liked it so much, I'd rather you knew before heading there that the pace of a meal at Fresh Fresh Seafood is very relaxed. I mean it's slow. And your friends might be finishing their scallop dinner and mixed seafood before you ever see your crab cake. But I bet that you won't end up minding very much.

Bill Sexton has been appointed the Executive Chef of Phillips Seafood Baltimore. Sexton, according to a news release, has served in several leadership positions with Phillips Foods and Seafood Restaurant. He started his career at Phillips Crab House in Ocean City and has been Phillips Director of research and development. "My Grandfather was a fisherman off Cobb Island, Maryland and I grew up loving the fresh seafood right from our Southern and Eastern Shores," Sexton said in the statement.

How do you get from Saigon to Baltimore? For me, it was through sushi. Yes, sushi. I was born in Vietnam, an unlikely place for the career of a sushi chef to begin. When I was a small child, I moved to America and became interested in cooking. I watched my parents prepare all types of traditional Asian dishes and by the time I was 11, I was cooking rice and eggs. Yet while I loved cooking, I didn't think it was a career option. All I knew was that I had to make a living somehow. So I did whatever was necessary; I mean I have done everything.

Seafood lovers can stop searching the seven seas for fresh fare, skillfully prepared. Atlantis Seafood & Grill opened Jan. 31 in Harper's Choice Village Center in Columbia. Owner Bobbi Aliapanah has transformed the space, formerly occupied by the Gringada Mexican restaurant, into a tranquil, upscale eating place. The 135-seat restaurant -- decorated with wooden model ships and other nautical memorabilia -- has a private banquet room and cocktail bar. The extensive menu offers an array of appetizers, including hot crab dip Aliapanah, described as a house specialty; clams casino; crab imperial stuffed mushroom caps; and raw bar selections.

People from across the state gather on the beach at Sandy Point State Park to enjoy the bay's best eating at the annual Maryland Seafood Festival. In addition to the fresh seafood, festival-goers enjoyed watching local craftspeople, bay workboats, and displays on the ecology of the Chesapeake.

The weekend is so close you can taste it. If you're headed east to the Atlantic, take a look at our guide to 100 Best Beach Eats , which covers Ocean City, West Ocean City and Delaware towns stretching from Fenwick Island to Lewes. It might be hard to get to on a busy weekend, when the Ocean Gateway (Route 50) is bumper to bumper, but sometime this summer make sure you stop by the Shrimp Boat on Stephen Decatur Highway. This 23-year-old roadside shack is the real deal, where the locals have always come to buy fresh seafood and steamed-while-you-wait shrimp.

Bill Sexton has been appointed the Executive Chef of Phillips Seafood Baltimore. Sexton, according to a news release, has served in several leadership positions with Phillips Foods and Seafood Restaurant. He started his career at Phillips Crab House in Ocean City and has been Phillips Director of research and development. "My Grandfather was a fisherman off Cobb Island, Maryland and I grew up loving the fresh seafood right from our Southern and Eastern Shores," Sexton said in the statement.

Dinner at Grillfire, a new contemporary restaurant in the Arundel Preserve development, is not an intrinsically satisfying experience. The food is almost uniformly over-seasoned and entirely uninspired, and there is not a single moment, on or off the plate, that feels like it comes from a genuine creative impulse. Grillfire is an interesting restaurant to sit back and observe, with a skeptic's eye. Every detail feels like it's the result of consumer testing. When, you think, did edamame achieve permanent menu status in America, and what's with all the mango?

Whether you're craving seafood or steak, Pelican Cove Seafood Bar and Grill Restaurant in Abingdon has a diverse menu with items such as fresh oysters and mussels, Porter House steak and Key Largo Seafood Marinara, served with lump crabmeat, sautéed shrimp and scallops. “Our fresh rock fish is our number-one entrée,” says Jay Mottley, general manager of Pelican Cove. Guests can order the fish blackened, baked or char-grilled. “The food quality speaks for itself. This is not a chain restaurant.

Perfection would be nice, but life, and bargain dining, seldom are. Often, it takes a happy-go-lucky outlook to find the true value in an evening out. It can be discovered sometimes in the specialty of the house, that one great thing that keeps diners coming back, but just as often in the ambience, the service and the management. I think of them as "grace notes," those small but essential things that made an average outing very good and a very good one exceptional. Here are some examples from six months of inexpensive dining.

Serving up home-cooking and hospitality, Darlene and Ricky Parker's Fresh Fresh Seafood feels Southern to me. Or maybe my own version of the South pieced together partly from real life, Eudora Welty stories and Mayberry. Because I liked it so much, I'd rather you knew before heading there that the pace of a meal at Fresh Fresh Seafood is very relaxed. I mean it's slow. And your friends might be finishing their scallop dinner and mixed seafood before you ever see your crab cake. But I bet that you won't end up minding very much.

Oceanaire Seafood Room is a restaurant you want to love the minute you step in the door. It's a good dining room, a new millennium interpretation of a '40s ocean liner, with polished cherry paneling, curved red leather banquettes, fresh white linens, huge mounted fish and a handsome brushed-steel bar. The room is comfortable, luxurious even, but not elegant. It's the sort of place that has a bottle of ketchup on the table to let you know, wink, wink, that this is just another casual seafood house - although one where the fish dishes start at 20 bucks and work their way up to an astounding $75.95 for a surf and turf.

Eating at Fresh Fresh Seafood is an unusual experience. The restaurant, on York Road in Towson, is small, and the food is slow to arrive, but everything is made from scratch by owners Darlene and Ricky Parker. As Darlene explains, "We just can't let food go out any old way." It has to be just right. Darlene greets you at the door and escorts you to one of several small tables already decked out with plastic utensils and foam cups. You can bring your own wine or beer, and she'll provide extra foam cups for them.

Early in our meal at the Yin Yankee Cafe, we had an oyster appetizer that put yin and yankee together to glorious effect and sent our taste buds dancing. Two oysters, each the size of a fist, had been dredged in Japanese bread crumbs, called panko, flash-fried and served with a creamy dab of habanero-cilantro-watercress sauce. These were fried oysters with serious flair. Yin Yankee serves fresh seafood with creative Asian flavors and a dollop of humor. It's a good thing the food at the Annapolis restaurant is so good, because the prices are high and the service can be sporadic.

How do you get from Saigon to Baltimore? For me, it was through sushi. Yes, sushi. I was born in Vietnam, an unlikely place for the career of a sushi chef to begin. When I was a small child, I moved to America and became interested in cooking. I watched my parents prepare all types of traditional Asian dishes and by the time I was 11, I was cooking rice and eggs. Yet while I loved cooking, I didn't think it was a career option. All I knew was that I had to make a living somehow. So I did whatever was necessary; I mean I have done everything.