Crab season in Maryland is supposed to officially open on April 1. But in 2022, cold waters kept the crabs dormant and delayed the harvest by a few weeks. Travis Todd, owner of Ocean Odyssey Restaurant in Cambridge, Maryland, says, “For the first time in history, we didn’t even have crab cakes on the menu because we didn’t think we could get the meat because the crabs weren’t here yet.”
On the Road
Bryan Roof Sets Out to Find True Maryland Crab Cakes
Hint: They’re all about the crab.
By Published Mar. 5, 2024.
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Apart from those challenges, he adds that a shortage of seasonal workers hired to pick crabmeat through a limited number of H-2B visas also threatened production in many of the local packing houses. Add to that the rising cost of diesel fuel, which powers most crab boats and transport trucks, plus the increased price of wood used to make crab baskets, and the strain on the Maryland crab industry has been relentless in recent years.
But Travis’s family has seen the industry through its ups and downs for three generations. In 1947, his grandfather, Bradye P. Todd, opened a successful seafood processing and wholesale business with his wife, Mary Blanche (later referred to as “Nanny”). In 1986, Travis’s parents, Roy and Barbara, along with Nanny, opened Ocean Odyssey on Sunburst Highway.
Travis says the original mission behind Ocean Odyssey was “mainly to continue to pick crabmeat and be a seafood wholesaler. It really wasn’t a restaurant at first.” Travis started working there when he was 10 years old, “dumping chum and hauling crabs.”
Like many seafood markets in the Chesapeake Bay area, Ocean Odyssey sold a handful of prepared food items too. “It was just some sandwiches, and Nanny would make pies and that kind of stuff. So we were a small carry-out that would also produce crabmeat and sell fish, clams, and oysters. And Nanny would just cook.”
Over the next 30 years, Travis says the business evolved for different reasons. “Sometimes you change because you have to; sometimes you change because you want to.” For Ocean Odyssey, it was both.
When Travis returned to the restaurant after college in 2003, he says, “it was still very much a family business.” Eventually, he started talking to local chef Ian Campbell about partnering at the restaurant. (At the time, Campbell owned and operated an upscale French‑inspired restaurant called Bistro Poplar in Cambridge.) The duo teamed up and officially took over the business from Roy in 2019.
Though Campbell came to Ocean Odyssey with years of culinary experience under his belt, including stints at Thomas Keller’s restaurants in California’s Napa Valley, he says he didn’t set out to change the menu, much of which is based on Nanny’s old recipes. “The recipes more or less stayed the same,” Campbell says. “They’re 30 years old and that’s what people come back to eat.”
When it comes to crab cakes, Campbell says, “Simplicity is always best. Don’t use a whole lot of filler. We use mostly jumbo lump crabmeat, and our filler is actually the lump and backfin crabmeat. And, you know, a couple of bread crumbs to hold it together.”
The crab cake recipe calls for only a handful of ingredients: mayonnaise, egg, parsley, Old Bay Seasoning, cayenne pepper, panko bread crumbs, and crabmeat. They opt for panko because, as Campbell explains, “they’re basically flavorless” and don’t compete with the crab.
Travis says, “If you have the right ratio, the bread crumbs basically disappear” and adds that after shaping the cakes, it’s important to let them set for an hour or two before broiling them so that they don’t fall apart.
Maryland-Style Crab Cakes
Keeping a Chesapeake legacy alive.After we’ve shared a lunch of crab cakes, Travis talks about another threat facing the Maryland crab industry, one he’s seen grow over the years: the influx of less expensive imported crabmeat. The cost to produce Maryland crabmeat is very high, and the price it can fetch at the market is consistently undercut by imported alternatives. Truth-in-advertising advocates have pushed for designating crab cakes made with imported crabmeat as “Maryland-style” but with limited effect.
“A true Maryland crab cake is from Maryland,” Travis says. “And the meat is from here. A Maryland crab cake actually supports the Maryland crab industry. And that’s the crabbers, that’s the producers, that’s the restaurants who choose to use it, the folks who choose to serve it. And not only that, but it’s a symbol of the state, a neat identifying part of what Maryland is. Maryland crab cakes should be caught, picked, produced, and eaten in the state of Maryland. And that’s my take on it.”