Baltimore, Harbored

On a century-old pier in Fells Point, blue crabs, Maryland rye and a night at the Pendry reveal a city shaped by what arrives, what stays and what becomes local.

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Lifestyle

Baltimore is pretty close if we measure the distance in miles and not traffic. Under an hour if the gods are with us. Double that if someone changes a tire on the parkway. Today, the gods are clearly still on vacation.

We reach Fells Point with enough afternoon light left to see the harbor before dinner. Thames Street comes to a halt at Recreation Pier, where The Pendry Baltimore occupies a long brick-and-steel building reaching straight into the water. It has been reaching since 1914.

The pier was built for business and recreation in the same breath. Steamers came and went. Fells Pointers danced and roller-skated. Children played. Immigrants learned English here. Decades later, Detective Munch came here to work cases.

Boats came. Dancers came. TV cops came. We have come for crabs.

First, we check in. Our room ensures we remember where we stand. One entire wall is glass and draws the harbor inside: Sails, runners, strollers, the last sunlight off the water.

We unpack in front of the city. Hello Baltimore. The show goes both directions.

The Pendry holds enough of the old pier’s masonry and metal and heft that the structure itself remembers its origin story without letting the last century show. An infinity pool sits at the end of the pier, a whiskey room juts off the main bar, a vending machine in the courtyard dispenses Champagne. Progress takes many forms.

By 6:30, brown paper covers our table on the pool deck. Beyond it five feet, Baltimore Harbor. Steamed blue crabs arrive with oysters, shrimp to peel, corn, a mallet, and impeccable fries.

Luxury hotels are generally very good at separating us from the places we have traveled to see. Thick glass. Quiet elevators. Bedding with inconceivable thread counts. Netflix. A big pile of steamed crabs does the opposite. It offers a wrastlin’ match with Charm City. 

And wrastle we did. We’ve eaten crabs before. We enjoy crabs. Apparently these are not the same as knowing how to eat crabs. We pick. We pry. We bend and twist. We turn little wooden hammers into instruments of indiscriminate destruction. Pieces of shell travel far.

Our struggle is audible enough to entertain Greg and Michele, a local couple behind us who may or may not have been victims of flying shell. “Crab is not a food you get full on,” Greg tells us. “It’s a social thing.” Thank goodness.

I do eventually luck into a few good hunks of leg. We pick. Crack. Get a morsel. Talk. Repeat. By the time we stop, the brown paper is wrecked. Our fingers are now part Old Bay seasoning at a cellular level.

Beside the carnage sits an Orange Crush. Our server grew up around Baltimore and remembers Crushes simply being everywhere. The drink, a mix of fresh orange juice, orange vodka, triple sec and lemon-lime soda was born “downy ocean,” in Ocean City, then worked its way west until Baltimore adopted it as an emblem of summer. 

We walk off the Crush and the warm memory of Howie vs. crab. For a spell, this means not looking at water. Fells Point makes different sense from the interior. Cobblestones and rowhouses have their own gravity. Yet masts peek around corners and bar crowds spill toward the water. Every few blocks, the city runs out and the harbor starts again.

Another pier. Another marina. Another crab on a sign. And another. They’re following me after my dinner performance. It is an amazing thing to flail at something an entire city regards as muscle memory.

By the time we turn back toward Recreation Pier, seafood wreckage, and Old Bay, a good walk and a damn fine sunset have brought Baltimore into clearer focus. This focus has a smooth jazz soundtrack with a singer in the lobby lounge as we amble through.

Off the lobby is the Cannon Room. Beneath glass in the floor lies one of three cannons found in the harbor during the renovation. The other two stand out back defending the pool. Sean keeps bar. He grew up around here, too. I ask him about the Orange Crush. I’m an hour down the road for half my life, give or take, and I’d never heard of the drink. 

“I’ve lived here all my life, I’ve never questioned it,” he says of the drink’s nativity, “like tap water or crabs.” There are worse definitions of regional food. I can also attest the tap water here is very, very good. Then we get to whiskey.

The room is low and warm. Bourbons, ryes, scotches, other potent, clear amber liquids glow along the back wall. Baltimore has gone dark outside. Inside, it’s the first thing lit up on the menu of whisky tastings. The Baltimore Flight. 

Sagamore Signature 93. Epoch Rye. The menu calls for Old Line as the third. Tonight Sean swaps in Bootjack Rye from Frederick, one of his favorites. 

Three Maryland whiskeys settle into three glasses. The Sagamore is the polished one. The Epoch improves with one drop of very good Baltimore tap water. The Bootjack is the closest thing to rustic I’ll have today and yet perfect.

Sean offers a version of Maryland whiskey history considerably less restrained than anything likely to appear in a city guide or museum placard. “Because we’re snooty,” he says, “people here like to say we are the grandfathers of bourbon.” His version is simple: Maryland was using corn mash in whiskey well before Kentucky. We are not volunteering to carry that message south. 

The man beside us then begins trying to convince Sean of something involving the French finishing Scotch whisky in Champagne casks. Sean listens with extraordinary patience. We decide this conversation might get somebody arrested in Scotland.

We play gin rummy through the last sips, then head upstairs and leave the curtains open. An occasional boat cuts the black harbor with light and wake. Darkness and stillness close behind it.

We walk early for coffee. Runners trace the waterfront. Crabs keep following us through the neighborhood. One sailboat moves slowly in the distance. One man is already kayaking. Go-getter.

At Cafe Dear Leon in Canton, only six people fit inside at once, so a line gathers quickly. The coffee is excellent. Behind the glass sits a crab-and-corn-stuffed bagel that looks suitable as an appetizer for six. Curiosity will win another day.

Back at the Pendry, the pool is almost ours. From the infinity edge, shoulders just under the surface, pool and harbor briefly become one. Poetry, probably. Not practice.

The water taxis have not started. The kayaker is still kayaking. Baltimore, for early birds, is barely audible. By late morning, the hotel begins making noise again. A barback scoops ice for service. A blender whirs into action. A family plants a flag by the pool. Inside, a saxophonist has taken the spot where last night’s jazz singer stood. Brunch is coming.

Your typical hotel brunch should present certain difficulties when one half of our duo prefers his proteins aquatic rather than pastoral. Baltimore, apparently, says, “Hold my Orange Crush.”

I drift toward the water side of the menu. We start with more oysters. Always welcome. Crab-stuffed deviled eggs. No mallet. We also order the blueberry baked French toast to appease the brunch gods (no relation to the traffic gods). Thick brioche, vanilla butter, good maple syrup. When that syrup falls over the top, brunch briefly becomes a photo shoot. 

Then the crab cake Benedict arrives. The kicker lies at the base. The kitchen flattens the English muffin halves against the griddle until they develop a real crust. They hold under crab, poached egg, and hollandaise instead of surrendering to them. Structural engineering is everywhere. Crunch where brunch usually goes soft.

Then executive chef Mike Grande joins us. He’s been at the Pendry nearly two years. He grew up on Long Island, spent years cooking across the country, and came here from Seattle. Seattle to Baltimore makes more sense than it sounds. Both are port cities facing working water. In both, seafood is not merely a section of the menu. It is geography.

Grande makes no claim to Baltimore authority. “I’m the outsider here,” he says. So he listens. To seafood suppliers, fishermen, cooks who grew up nearby. Years in Northern California taught him to think in farms and seasons. Baltimore gives him a new map.

Pennsylvania above. Northern Virginia below. Maryland around him. The Chesapeake at the door. Natural growing seasons. Grande talks to suppliers about what’s fresh out of the Atlantic, what’s coming out of the bay. What is in season. What is good now. What should wait.

On Fridays for the Blue Crab Social, Grande gets the star of the show from a local crabber. One Friday evening a while back, they sell out. Grande calls his crabber Saturday morning. The crabber gets into a boat with his wife and child, motors to Recreation Pier, and unloads another three bushels.  “You can’t get any fresher than that,” Grande tells us. At a hotel built on a pier, locality has a dock. 

We ask him to define Baltimore cuisine. He thinks. “Soulful but eclectic.”

Then he starts talking about people and movement. Southern foodways moving north during the Great Migration. Pennsylvania Dutch traditions moving down. People arriving in a port city carrying their own ideas about what dinner ought to taste like. Younger cooks recovering old Baltimore traditions and rearranging them.

What he is describing feels familiar. Brick. Water. Pier. City. Pier again. Baltimore was built to receive things. The Orange Crush came from Ocean City. Grande came from Seattle. Maryland whiskey carries its own history of crops, people and ideas in motion. Even the crabs travel.

The Pendry feels connected to Baltimore, but not because everything inside it was invented here. That would be a strange expectation of a port. Ports receive things. Cities decide what to keep.

The Pendry is, of course, a luxury hotel. Nobody mistakes the infinity pool or Rec Pier’s vaulted dining room for a neighborhood crab shack. Nor should they. A place does not have to be rougher or older than it is to belong where it stands. It just has to know what not to polish away.

The old pier is still underfoot. Crab shells still pile up on brown paper. Maryland whiskey still gets its due. The harbor still fills the room. And sometimes dinner still arrives by boat.

By early afternoon, we are back in the car. Recreation Pier disappears behind us. Baltimore becomes interstate signs, a milkshake for the road, then parkway, then the familiar run toward Alexandria.

The traffic gods are finally back from vacation. We make it home in under an hour. The crabber still had the better commute.

Disclosure: Pendry Baltimore provided support to the author for this reporting. All opinions and observations are his own.

Howie Southworth is a seasoned denizen of Old Town Alexandria and the best-selling author behind "A Taste of Alexandria: Modern Restaurant Recipes That Echo Our City's Past," published by Alexandria Living Magazine.

Southworth is also the author of a new book, Hemingway’s Spanish Table (Insight Editions), released March 17. 

Past works include "Chinese Street Food," "One Pan to Rule Them All," "Kiss My Casserole!" and "How to Cook Anything in Your Dutch Oven." Howie is also a regular essayist for Salon.com.

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