Seafood Platter

A schooner is a multimasted ship, so Schooners is an apt name for the multifaceted restaurant and lounge in Ocean City's beautiful new Princess Royale hotel. The oceanfront eatery -- which is open for three meals a day -- offers an extensive and varied menu that for dinner includes steak, chicken, seafood, Italian and Mexican specialties.A schooner can also be a pint-sized beer glass, and the restaurant offers about a dozen imported beers as well as "Schooners' Original Lager Beer" ($2.25)

Even though Connolly's Pier 5 Pratt Street seafood house served up its last crab cake platter in 1991, Baltimoreans near and far still fondly recall the old, no-frills restaurant and wish that such a place still existed. In the week since my Connolly's column was published, my phone has rung off the hook, and my e-mail basket went into meltdown. Folks anxious to talk about the loss of the rattletrap seafood venue that defied the march of time and Inner Harbor development were more than willing to share a few memories of long-ago meals there.

Here I am having dinner at Pappas Restaurant on a weeknight in summer, supposedly a dead time for restaurants, and every table is filled. This Parkville institution must be doing something right, but I'm not sure what it is. Sometimes the reasons for a restaurant's success are obvious. Not this time. True, the staff couldn't be nicer, harder-working or more professional. But that doesn't make up for the fact that there were too few of them. Even with reservations, we had a long wait before a busboy was available to clear and set a table for us. We waited even longer for the waitress to get free to take our order.

What you see is not necessarily what you get at Hummer's Olde Bay Restaurant.What you see is a low, plain brick building hard by Pulaski Highway with randomly parked vehicles in the lot and electric beer signs in the windows.But what you get is good food, skillfully prepared and nicely served in a comfortable, unpretentious dining room.There are, in fact, no pretensions at the Olde Bay. But, then, there don't need to be. The food is so good that it would stand out in much showier surroundings.

Some enchanted evenings -- that's what we were looking for. They didn't have to include strangers or crowded rooms, but they did have to represent the night ne plus ultra in Baltimore.What is it that puts the charm in Charm City for night owls, we wondered.The local folks we caught up with had some grand ideas -- from gourmet dinners and dancing to bowling and 3-D double features.Don O'Brien, WMAR-TV weekend weatherman and 92 Star morning show personality, would start his night of nights with a limo, a good plate of ribs and Sen. Barbara Mikulski.

The piped-in music and the decor at Gunning's Seafood Restaurant aren't great, but then Carnegie Hall probably serves a lousy crab cake.Me? I'll take the crab cake at Gunning's. And the rockfish stuffed with crab. And the soft crab sandwich. And the eclair.There are two Gunning's, the original on South Hanover Street in Baltimore that was sold at a foreclosure auction five years ago and one in Hanover, owned by the son of the original Eddie Gunning.Gunning's, the West County version, is the restaurant that progress paved around.

I was astounded to read Chris Erskine's "On the Olympics" column in which he took Jill Biden to task for having a seafood platter for dinner and then went on to imply that the Bidens were personally responsible for Peggy Fleming's injury in an auto accident following a luncheon ("Fleming flap puts Biden on thin ice," Feb. 17). How can you waste valuable column inches on such irrelevant and mean-spirited commentary? Are preposterous cheap shots like this all that Mr. Erskine can produce?

GIBBY'S SEAFOOD 2318 York Road, Timonium. Open 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays to Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 10 a.m. to 8 p.m Sundays. Call 561-5225. Mention crab cakes and the first word that comes to mind is pricey. Not so at Gibby's Seafood, a carryout on York Road a few blocks from the Timonium Fairgrounds.Two crab cakes, heavy with crab, cost you $7.95, and with that you get your choice of two side dishes, among them tomato-cucumber salad, macaroni shrimp salad, potato salad or cole slaw.

You could go to the Venetian Palace for an Italian cold cut submarine or a delicious broiled seafood platter, or maybe even lasagna with meat sauce. But most folks go there for the pizza, which is terrific. The pizza is so good, it's worth getting dressed, hopping in the car and driving to the palace. It's much better than any delivered pizza. It's cheaper, too.The thick, fresh dough oozes with fragrant herbs and cheeses. My favorite combination is pepperoni and mushrooms. A large 14-inch pizza is $6.50 -- with two toppings the price goes to $8.50.

Olde Philadlphia InnOlde Philadelphia Inn, 9510 Philadelphia Road, White Marsh, 687-5757. There is nothing old or inn-like about the Olde Philadelphia Inn. It is, instead, a large informal shopping center restaurant with a varied menu. The appetizers are strong, but the entrees weak in taste and quality. The homemade onion rings and fried cheese were delicious. The salads that came with dinner were unusually ambitious, but the entrees were uneven. The seafood platter, for instance, featured great scallops, but only a mediocre crab cake and scampi and an unpleasant shrimp salad.