After a nice day at Cape Henlopen swimming at the beach and riding loaner bikes around, we decided that it was time for an early dinner. Since Carol had never experienced Maryland-style crabs before (somehow, our attempts at this on previous visits kept getting thwarted), so this time we made it a point to go find a crab place.
Which is actually a bit hard to do, if you were in the situation we were: returning from the beach, looking for some decent crabs and beer without spending a lot of money. After reading a bunch of reviews, we ended up at Lazy Susan’s on the Coastal Highway in Lewes.
Well, Lazy Susan’s is definitely a “crab joint”, one of those places that’s primarily decorated with random seashore kitsch, with picnic tables (inside even) covered with paper for the inevitable mess. The beer list isn’t terribly impressive, but the beers were cheap ($2 each), and the waitress quite friendly, so we grabbed a nice table by the window and looked over the offerings.
Lazy Susan’s does have a fairly big menu, but it’s pretty obvious from the get-go that the main thing going here is the crabs. After hearing a couple of the options, we opted for the crabs and shrimp special, with a half dozen crabs and a pound of shrimp, with some hush puppies on the side.
Well, they did rather well. The crabs themselves were done up in the familiar manner of many a Maryland crab shack, with copious amounts of Old Bay (I kept expecting to see a truck drive up and deliver 55 gallon drums of the stuff). But despite all that, the crabs themselves were decently cleaned up and nicely cooked, and made for an enjoyable meal. The shrimp was done nicely as well, not overcooked, although the cleaning job on the shrimp was a little sub-par (with the occasional badly-butchered shrimp encountered). The hushpuppies were spot on, however, with a soft interior, a good crisp exterior, and cooked in fresh oil without a lot of excess grease.
Have I had better crabs? Yes, but these were still quite good, at a reasonable price (heck, they threw in a few extras on our platter), and served up with some decent shrimp and hushpuppies on the side. I’m sure we could do better in the area, but this wasn’t a bad place to stop for a post-beach stuff-yourself-silly-with-crabs meal, even it is obviously is a bit of a tourist trap. I certainly wouldn’t be afraid to come back.
