Plump lump-blue-crab cakes bound with the lightest possible mayo-and-cracker mixture and finished with Old Bay, the Chesapeake region's defining DC restaurant plate.

The Chesapeake blue crab (Callinectes sapidus) has been the regional shellfish from Maryland to Virginia since pre-colonial times. The modern crab cake template, mostly meat with a near-invisible binder, dates from the 1930s Chesapeake Bay seafood houses; the Old Bay seasoning that finishes the cakes was invented in Baltimore in 1939 by German-immigrant Gustav Brunn. In DC, the high-end crab cake became a power-lunch dish in the postwar Capitol Hill steakhouses and seafood rooms. Today the Old Ebbitt Grill, founded 1856 and the city's oldest saloon, serves more than 1000 crab cakes a week, and the dish appears on every Chesapeake-leaning menu from The Salt Line to BlackSalt to Hank's Oyster Bar. A standard order is two cakes broiled, never fried; the test of a kitchen is how invisible the binder is.

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