Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay - Smitty's Clam Bar, Somers Point, NJ

A ten-minute drive from the tourist traps along the Jersey shore boardwalks, Somers Point, a sleepy and oft-overlooked marina village on the bay, is home to one of the greatest seafood dives on the East Coast - Smitty’s Clam Bar. While it might seem obvious that you can get great seafood near the coast, palatable dining on the Jersey shore is surprisingly hard to come by. Restaurants seem to come and go with each summer season, aside from a few classics that withstand the yearly ebb and flow of visitors. Throughout most of my childhood, my family spent many steamy summer nights at Smitty’s, filling up on fresh fish and fried clams on our way from Atlantic City to ride the rides at Wonderland Pier in Ocean City.

Smitty’s is universally beloved by a loyal following of diners. Come Memorial Day, chowderheads line up snarling to fight for first-come bar seating or brave the hour-long wait for a table inside, pacifying their children with cartons of french fries. The food is just that good. Arriving just before Memorial Day, we luckily missed the sideshow.

We each ordered a cup of the red clam chowder, served spilling over the side with a packet of saltines. The tomato stock is rich, and well-seasoned, thick with potatoes, carrots and giant, meaty pieces of clam. For addicts, Smitty’s sells quarts of the stuff that you can take home, freeze, and eat in the dead of winter when you’re aching for summer.

The tuna.

The fish is gratuitously sauced in simple elements like garlic, lemon, and olive oil. It’s broiled in a ceramic dish which gives the fish the ultimate balance of a crispy exterior and delicate inside. We picked the mako shark and the tuna, both sizzling in a soy, ginger, and wasabi blend. It’s a powerful feeling to consume something with the capability of eating you. The food is not about revisionism, it’s about freshness and flavor, the way great seafood should be.

The mako shark.

The elderly couple that sat down next to us were clearly regulars, greeted with everything short of a kiss from the entire staff. Their adorable waitress knew their order by heart, including the gentleman’s birch beer. It’s Cheers in real life, for the Jersey shore set.

The place is not by any means fancy, with plastic chairs, specials scribbled on a white board, and their menus designed in crayon by the youngest patrons. But sitting dockside, twenty feet from where your dinner was plucked, makes for one of the most authentic dining experiences on Earth.

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