Dining Review: 6 Crabs (Williamsburg, VA)

Whether you hate golf or think spas are overly decadent, in a destination town like Williamsburg, one thing everyone can agree on is going out to eat. As a town so reliant on visitors, having unique and delicious restaurants is a necessity, especially when surrounded by the bevy of standard chain restaurants like a gantry of British soldiers.

Our motel offered suggestions and deals for over thirty local haunts, which we found not only overwhelming but off-putting. (Sorry, but offering $15 off the cost of a meal doesn’t sound like a bargain - it tells us that you’re gouging the tourists!) Local flavor should be able to be summed up in a handful of restaurants, not enough to overflow the food court at the Mall of America.

6 Crabs stands out because it is not a fancy place. It is a humble and modest family-run restaurant, so nondescript that if you blink, you might miss it. There’s no neon sign out on Interstate 64 for it, flashing and screaming “FOOD. FIVE MILES.” It is a brick square on a quiet road, and it just happens to serve some incredible food.

It does not need elegance, pomp, or marketing tactics to get you in the door. It oozes charm at first sight, with its wood-paneled dining room boasting only four tiny cafe-style tables. Yet it remains one the the simplest, most authentic seafood experiences we have ever had.

This should be written into the Virginia Declaration of Rights.

 The pitfall of many seafood joints is they take the food too seriously. Seafood, provided that it is fresh, needs only a little lemon, maybe a touch of salt and pepper. That’s all it needs, in the same way a good steak is complimented by just a dash of pepper. Any more is just ridiculous and, frankly, it lets us know that your mahi-mahi has been sitting in the fridge for a few too many days.

6 Crabs is simple and unrefined, but that is because it knows that it sells great, fresh seafood and doesn’t need to compete with high-end seafood restaurants that boast they serve pan-seared salmon accompanied by pickled radishes, yellow teardrop tomatoes, and a yuca puree in a pinot noir reduction. If the title of the dish is longer than four words, they’re doing it wrong.

We picked the crab cake dinner and a combination platter that included oysters, scallops, flounder, and shrimp. Each dish was served with hush puppies, a Southern staple of fried corn meal nuggets. In our time reviewing restaurants, not to mention our lives as seafood lovers, we have both sampled our share of crab cakes. While our past experiences included everything from over-fried patties with too much breading to over-the-top concoctions where the crab disappeared under a zillion spices and they probably could have been serving you chicken, 6 Crabs’ version of this classic dish was outstanding!

They were perfectly seasoned, with the right amount of kick and filled with fresh crab meat. The combination platter, a simple meeting of seafood and golden batter, was scrumptious. The light, crispy crust accentuated the flavor of each different item. As people who rarely eat anything fried, this was a complete departure for us. We ate every single bite.

The beauty is that their dishes don’t need any extra condiments. Maybe a dash of ketchup for the fries, maybe cocktail sauce or Sriracha if you’re feeling spicy, but the fish-meat itself was perfect. Aside from insanely good grub, which you can take to go if you’re the kind of diner who likes to stretch out with his or her food, 6 Crabs offers the option to purchase raw seafood and take it home to cook as you like, including croaker, a delicious, mild-tasting fish that is common to the region. And, in line with the namesake, 6 Crabs offers a variety of crabs, including soft-shell and snow, for patrons to steam at home.

6 Crabs
118 Second Street, Williamsburg, VA

757-258-7757

Journey Through The Past: Colonial Williamsburg, VA

Friendly locals.

America’s relatively young age, especially in comparison to nearly the entire rest of the world, affords people the ability to visit the intact remnants of one of its first commercial and cultural capitals. Unlike the historic sites of other countries, Colonial Williamsburg is still essentially a livable, functioning town, provided you’re cool to give up the comfy stuff like internet and toilets. 

We are both huge fans of most forms of entertainment dealing with time travel, and visiting the dirt roads of Colonial Williamsburg is probably the closest we will get until the flux capacitor becomes available on the retail market. While laden with history lessons and authenticity, Williamsburg retains its charm amidst its pristine appearance (we were sure there’d be more horse poop on the streets) and talented period actors. They all spoke like they were witnessing the birth of a nation. It is their version of Groundhog Day, proclaiming to every tourist that TODAY is the day the Virginia Declaration of Rights is being debated at the Capitol Building, every single day. 

One tavern proprietor on Duke of Gloucester Street tried to entice us to visit her establishment pub for the town’s best “wild game pye.” When Alex mentioned the guard at the Governor’s Mansion recommended it, the restauranteur told us in a slightly hushed aside that the pye’s meat is the most tender in town because she gets her supply from the native Cherokees, who sneak up on their prey, which keeps them from tensing up. When she heard Alex’s hoarse voice and deep cough from a week-long sinus infection, she demanded we instead go to the apothecary for horehound drops. He responded with a quip that he hoped he would be bled with leeches as treatment. She gave a hearty laugh and wished us both a good day and for better health soon.

Everyone in modern garb looks like a tourist here, but that is not a bad thing. However, everyone’s a tourist in a place no one lives, against what the friendly tavern keeper and other honest Colonial folk want you to believe. Neither of us have any shame in saying that we looked and acted like tourists the whole day, snapping photos at every turn, including the obligatory photo in the pillories for counts of buggery and making winds on the Sabbath.

Arrested, tried, and convicted for breaking ye olde wyndes on ye Lord's day.

Clearly, arrested, tried, and convicted (within 20 minutes!) for buggery. 

Some people are Disney obsessives, and they go to one of the parks every single year. For others, a pilgrimage to Graceland is necessary while passing through Memphis. For two history geeks like us, it’s a place like Colonial Williamsburg that does it for us. We kept cracking each other up by prefacing every possible noun with “ye olde.” Ye olde cheese shop. Ye olde iPhone. Ye olde hydroelectric power generator.

As a country obsessed with progress and modernity, it is astounding to visit a place in America so diligently preserved for the sake of its history, a subtle and often unseen wink to the radicals who made it possible for a government such as ours to exist. While visiting the Capitol Building, our lively guide kept referring to the brewing conflict between the colonies and the Crown as one that could either be a massive victory for personal freedom, or an embarrassing defeat. The austere pages of a history book tell a rather flat story, but hearing a description of the American Revolution from a person playing a character from that period, reminded us that these familiar faces from marble sculptures, coins, and dollar bills were far more than just recognizable oil paintings. Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and George Washington were all regarded as local noblemen, holders of property (a true symbol of status), owners of slaves (an even bigger symbol of status), and friends of the loyalist colonial governor until the time of the conflict.

The Capitol Building 

With that perspective in mind, it was slightly unsettling to think that our founding fathers, had they lost the conflict they had waged, would have been executed for treason, never mind that we would be driving on the left side of the road, eating boiled beef for Sunday joints, and calling cookies “biscuits.” What codswallop! 

We truly have come a long way from being a population with essentially no rights. While there is still work to be done - women’s rights, gay rights, religious tolerance, to name a few - it is easy to forget where we have come from. At the end of the Capitol tour, we felt something we had both been without for years: national pride. The tour guide looked towards the future of what would become democracy and referred to it as “the great experiment, one that could change the face of the entire world.” 

Our guide speaking in the very courtroom where we were tried for our respective crimes.

His profound optimism, though delivered in character, struck both of us and we couldn’t help but smile. Walking back to our motel from the grounds of Colonial Williamsburg, we talked the whole time about how inspired we were. Perhaps if people today considered themselves subjects within this “great experiment,” we could fill the gaps that divide us as a nation on both cultural and political fronts.