12 minute read
A Seaside Arcadia - Phillips Crab House: Richard W. Walker
A Seaside Arcadia: Phillips Crab House
by Richard W. Walker
In May 1968, I began working as a cook at Phillips Crab House, a rambling faux-Tudor pile occupying an entire block in Ocean City. Opened in 1956 by Shirley and Brice Phillips, whose father owned a seafood-packing plant on Hoopers Island, the crab house expanded like a haphazard Lego project over the next decade as the Phillipses stitched new dining rooms and kitchens onto the original structure. Shirley decorated the restaurant’s dining rooms to her taste, creating a curiously unnautical, dark-wood Victorian interior highlighted by Tiffany-style lamps and repurposed antique sewing machine tables. Somehow, it worked.
The year 1968 was truly an annus horribilis. America was reeling. Revolution hung in the air like a cloud of tear gas. The Vietnam war was raging with no end in sight, the surging antiwar movement had taken to the streets and parts of America’s riot-torn cities were in ruins following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in early April. Eight weeks later, antiwar presidential candidate
Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated while campaigning in Los Angeles. As the youth-driven counterculture burgeoned, social and cultural norms were jettisoned.
For many young people in the tumultuous summer of ’68 ~ especially for young men of military-draft age ~ life had become like a movie shot in a single take, a continuum where there was only the present. The past didn’t matter, the future didn’t exist. I was 21, and my fate was in the hands of my draft board. I was Saul Bellow’s dangling man.
Still, life went on. At Phillips that summer, I worked in the highstatus front kitchen, which served the carryout as well as the main dining room, making it the busiest and most important kitchen in the restaurant. There were no professional cooks at Phillips, except for the head chef, a bald, rotund man called Semore who had worked for Brice and Shirley for years. The cooks were mostly male college students or dropouts perpetually
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Phillips Crab House group’s wise-cracking leader. The rest of the crew included Hondo, planning to return to school. Willy-T and others whose names or
In the front kitchen, I worked nicknames are lost to the ravages with a bunch of lacrosse players of time. I remember that they had from north Baltimore who lived to been in and out of various colleges. party, drink beer and meet girls. Willy-T had an impeccable lacrosse I didn’t play lacrosse, but I had pedigree, coming from a legendary my own sport: surfing. While the Towson lacrosse family. lacrosse boys were sleeping off For all their bravado, the lax their hangovers, I was up and in boys were good guys and a gas to the ocean early, seeking morning work with. They were free spirited, glass. mischievous and funny and had a
As a result, they clapped me with pronounced disdain for authority, a nickname: “Surf Rat.” I was okay just like surfers. To blow off steam, with it, though; I knew Surf Rat they would sometimes play imwas, counter-intuitively, a term of promptu games of lacrosse in the respect from the boys. I think they kitchen with big metal spoons or appreciated the skill and nerve it brooms for sticks, balled-up alumitook to paddle a 30-pound, nine- num foil and a traditional wooden foot plank into cruel seas and come crab basket serving as the goal. back alive. It took a team of five cooks to run
The lacrosse players were Phil- the front kitchen at Phillips. Each lips Crab House veterans, re- position had a title and a job deturning for another summer and scription. Jimbo was “the pusher,” primed for a new crop of pretty the captain of the ship. He would waitresses in red aprons and white read the orders ~ or “tickets” ~ and short-shorts. The boys all shared call them out when the waitresses the same cocky self-confidence, a clipped them with clothespins to a trait most manifest in “Jimbo,” the wire line that stretched across the top of a large stainless-steel counter. After the “setter” collected the entrees from the cooks and garnished the plate with lettuce and tomato, potato salad or cole slaw, he would slide it over to Jimbo, who would tidy up the presentation and push it toward the waitress as he called out her name. The “fryer” cooked crab cakes, floun-
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der, soft-shell crabs, French fries, stuffed shrimp, clams and chicken in deep hot-oil vats. The “broiler” heated crab cakes and Crab Imperial, Clams Casino and broiled Maine lobsters in a big, heavy-duty oven; and the “flat top” cook was responsible for preparing the more sophisticated crab dishes on a gasheated iron stove.
Naturally, many customers came to Phillips for the Maryland crabs, which would be piled in front them like a small mountain on a table covered with brown paper. Steamed crabs were encrusted with Phillips’ zesty crab seasoning, which stings the palate and necessitates plenty of cold beer. But Phillips had no bar in those days; diners who wanted to drink brought their own beer, sometimes by the case. Once served, they would happily set about dismantling their crabs and picking out the delicate white meat, a highly focused, solipsistic activity disturbed only by the thwack-thwack-thwack of the
wooden mallets used to crack the hard shell of the crab’s claws.
We often referred to the restaurant as “Phillips Mad House.” The place could seat 1,400 customers in the upstairs and downstairs dining rooms, which were served by four kitchens. In high season at dinner time, lines a block long formed as people waited for tables. Evening “rushes” were nuts. The kitchen grew oppressively hot, and our faces and arms glistened with sweat and grease. We tied white towels around our heads like bandanas to keep sweat from dripping onto the food-laden plates. Getting burned went with the job, especially for the fryer, broiler and flattop cooks. After a few weeks, we had burn marks and blisters on our arms, hands and fingers.
The ambient noise of rush hours in the kitchen was deafening: the
Phillips Crab House the weeds.” Sometimes, it seemed, there was no hope of catching up, persistent hiss from the crab steam- but somehow we always did. Howers, the clatter of dishes and pans ever, a much-needed lull as we apand silverware, the gurgle of hot oil proached closing time would be from the deep fryers, the drone of brief as customers back from Ocean big kitchen fans, the shouts of the Downs, the harness-racing track in cooks, the panicky cries of the wait- West Ocean City, stormed the carresses. ryout and lashed us with orders for
Once a rush was underway, Jimbo soft-crab sandwiches. would sort through the tickets, bark The lacrosse players seemed to orders to the cooks and squawk, relish this work ~ I think they saw “Come on, pickup!” at the wait- the sweat-drenched battles in the resses, who took the plates to their viciously hot kitchen as a game, a tables through a swinging door to physically demanding test of enthe main dining room. Large orders durance. At the end of the night, the were piled precariously on trays for boys would emerge giddily from the busboys to take to the tables. the kitchen wars with an ironic
Dinner rushes lasted hours with- sense of victory, no matter how out any letup as dozens of tickets rough it had been. Afterward, they backed up on the dreaded wire. In would party all night, sleep in the kitchen vernacular, we were “in next day, maybe hit the beach in
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Phillips Crab House would spoon the sauce from a large stainless-steel bucket into an oval the afternoon and then blithely go dish, heat it for a few minutes and back to work at Phillips at 4, once pass it to the setter. more into the breach. This cycle I was still learning the ropes repeated itself all summer long, when, one night after closing, Seseven days a week, because there more was nosing around the kitchwere no days off. ens, checking on things. He took a
Most of that summer, I worked spoon, stirred what was left in my the flat top. I cooked Crab Norfolk, buckets of Newburg and Thermicrab lumps sautéed in white wine dor sauce and turned to me with a and butter; Crab Smithfield, sau- puzzled look, “There’s no crab meat téed lump crabmeat with a thin in this.” Blast! I’d been serving slice of Smithfield ham on top; Crab crabmeat-less Newberg and TherNewburg, lump crab in a rich sherry midor all night. I should have been sauce; and Crab Thermidor, lump adding lump crab to the sauce. “But crab served in a thick cream sauce no one complained, Semore!” I said. topped with cheese. When I got an He, too, was astonished that not a order for Newburg or Thermidor, I single diner who had ordered Crab
Phillips Crab House at an East Coast women’s college. For would-be Phillips waitresses, Newburg or Thermidor that night pursuing a job there ~ certainly had noticed the absence of crab the most prestigious place to work meat in their dishes. The normally in Ocean City ~ was like applyirritable Semore managed a slight smile as he rolled his eyes, shook his head and walked away.
In the final analysis, Phillips Crab House in 1968 was like college. The lax boys had their nightly matches on the kitchen playingfield and a large contingent of attractive, bright co-eds to impress with their swagger, invite to afterwork parties and ask out on dates. Moreover, Shirley Phillips, who was in charge of the waitresses, ran that side of the business like the imperious admissions officer
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Phillips Crab House
ing to Goucher or Hollins all over again.
I once happened to be on an errand in the Phillips’ apartment at the top of the restaurant when Shirley was conducting formal interviews with prospective waitresses. The girls, looking smart in their pearls and summery dresses, sat stiffly on the living-room sofa while Shirley grilled them one at a time on college life, their career aspirations and why they wanted to work at Phillips. Looks and personality counted a lot at Miss Phillips’ College for Young Ladies.
On balance, for young people working at Phillips Crab House in the chaotic summer of ’68, Ocean City became a refuge from the horrors of the war and the political and social turmoil upending the real world. It was a fleeting arcadia of parties, sun-tanned girls and boys and summer romances, our revelries playing out against the backdrop of the eternal sea.
Richard Walker is a longtime journalist and freelance writer living in Oxford. He started his career at the Salisbury Daily Times and went on to work for the Washington Post, the New York Times, TimesMirror Magazines, ARTnews magazine, and Post-Newsweek Tech Media, among others.
