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[Heath Roberts <htroberts AT gmail.com>]

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 8:18 AM, Tarus Balog <tarus AT opennms.org> wrote:

Anyone have recommendations for places in the triangle to get good crab
(please hold the STD jokes, please).

Somewhere on the Carrboro/Chapel Hill side of things is preferred, but
anywhere in the Triangle will work. The nearest Joe's Crab Shack appears
to be Fayetteville.

 

There are not a lot of decent seafood places around here...

I know you asked for the southwest part of the Triangle, and I don't know specifically about their crabs, but I'll second the recommendation for Squid's in Chapel Hill. It's been open a long time, and has varied over its lifetime between excellent and mediocre, but I think they're in the top half of that curve right now.

With that said,

A buddy of mine moved to Baltimore for several years, and I visited every few months and developed a taste for Chesapeake crabcakes. A Chesapeake crabcake is softball-shaped and -sized, and is mostly crab, with just enough other stuff to hold it together in the oven, and no overpowering flavors to compete with the crab. Anyway, I loved 'em. I've tried all kinds of places back here at home, but no matter how much the waiter swears that a local restaurant's owner just got off a boat from Maryland, and their crabcakes are 'just like' Chesapeake, they're inevitably flat, with too much breading and too much spice, and usually greasy. 

Until recently. 

For my birthday, my sister took me to a place I've been wanting to try for a year or so, Backfin's. It's in Wake Forest, which was a hike from home (near Southpoint mall).

I had, of course, the crabcake platter, but we also tried blue and snow crabs and oysters, and they were all excellent. It wasn't cheap ($20-30 per person, closer to $40 for the all-you-can-eat crabs and a few beers), but it was worth the trip and the price.

-- 
Heath Roberts
htroberts AT gmail.com