Choptank is for lubbers
Looks like the Choptank burger is making a name for itself. Today Time Out New York wrote a glowing review of the burger at the Chesapeake Bay-style fish shack (not so much the rest of the menu). As counter-intuitive as this sounds, we can believe it. While we’ve only sampled the seafood offerings there (based on the old “thing to get” adage, but apparently the thing to get is the burger. Whodathunkit?) and, of course, the bartender’s spin on the Dark and Stormy, called here, The Light and Mildly Inclement and made with 12-yr-old Jamaican Appleton Estate rum in place of the traditional Goslings (and the change will do you good).
We’d sidle up to the bar, either the actual one or the raw one, and pick and choose and drink through the menu, in lieu of sitting in the nondescript dining room, which still has not exorcised the blandness of its previous resident, Bar-Q. And when we return, as found as we are fine old Mid-Atlantic cuisine, we are going to have to try this burger.
“Needless to say, there’s a signature hamburger,” says TONY, because it is apparently impossible to even open a seafood restaurant without one these days (another menu staple that is not overlooked is fried chicken — which also gets high marks). TONY didn’t think much of the seafood, though it sounds as if they caught the kitchen on a bad night, and pays its highest praise to the aforementioned burger, calling it “thick and juicy with aged cheddar, pickled pepper mayo, sweet onion marmalade and an outstanding buttered sesame-seed bun.” Ahoy.
Sam Sifton rates the place in tomorrow’s New York Times, so we shall follow the developing story of the burger by the bay then. Eater predicts a solid onespot, but points out that Robert Sietsema “loved it.”
