Courtesy of Phillips Seafood
*Full Disclosure, I was contacted by Phillips Seafood to try a new product, all the thoughts, words, commentary in regards to the experience are my own and not in anyways connected to Phillips Seafood*
Phillips Seafood has been apart of the Maryland/Chesapeake Food scene now for over 50 years, during that time they’ve grown from a small family owned business that specialized in providing seafood to local restaurants in the area. But eventually, with the surplus seafood that they had left over, they created their own restaurant called Phillips Seafood Restaurant, in Ocean City, MD.
From there Phillips Seafood took off and ever since the company/restaurant has become a mainstay in Maryland food. I always use their pre-packaged crab meat to make all my crab dishes at home, because let me tell you picking through crabs for purpose of cooking is not fun. I once spent an entire Labor Day in my garage picking crabs for literally 8 hours just so I would have enough crab meat for about 4 crab cakes. So the decision for me is simple, I buy the crab meat from Phillips =).
Phillips Seafood Restaurant has been down at the Inner Harbor in Baltimore for quite sometime, they’ve moved from their old location to where ESPN Zone used to be. At this new location, Phillips has also created what they call the “Crab Deck” which is a tented deck with picnic table style seating. If you look around the deck you’ll think that you’re in a traditional crab house, the picnic tables lend themselves to feasting on crabs because they can lay out rosin paper and then you can chow down on as much shell fish as you want.
With said Crab Deck comes their latest concoction which is their Bloody Mary shareable feasts. What exactly is a Bloody Mary shareable feast? Basically it’s a huge pitcher of said Bloody Mary faceted with crabs, shrimp, chicken wings, and potatoes OR it’s faceted with fried chicken sliders, corn on the cob, and shrimp. Either way, you’re going to be feastin’.
I’ll be honest, when I was approached by the Phillips team to try this out I was a little skeptical. One, I usually don’t eat down at the Inner Harbor because it tends to be a tourist bonanza of meh and I don’t usually go to the bigger restaurants anymore (I have a reputation to uphold! haha ). But closing yourself off to options/opportunities based off your beliefs can prevent you from experiencing some truly enjoyable things in life. So with that philosophical undertaking, I decided to partake in Phillips’ offer to try their Bloody Mary feast, because how many times in my life am I going to be able to have a Bloody Mary literally faceted with about nine crabs, plus wings, plus shrimp?!
Courtesy of Phillips Seafood
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, back to the feast. I brought Poppa Unmanly Chef to be my taste tester because he’s a Bloody Mary aficionado and I am not. We had a two pronged approach to the feast, he would take on the drinks and I would test the food. I know, tough life. #firstworldproblems.
We sit down and after a little while the absolute gargantuan tower of food and drink was brought to our table, this was so big that the faceted food was making it top heavy and we had to literally hold the pitcher from preventing a catastrophe. So our server quickly taught us how to take on this marvel of engineering, by using the decorative netting as a pseudo glove to lift all of the food out of the pitcher and on to our table. With our structural engineering woes now behind us, we were able to enjoy what I can honestly describe as a literal feast.
We then dug into the feast, the fried chicken wings were delicious (because lets be real that’s really hard to screw up), the shrimp juicy & satisfying, and the potatoes were a welcome starchy cushion to soften the acidic blow that we were delivering to our stomachs via seafood and cocktail sauce. The crabs were well seasoned and fresh, piping hot we had to let them cool so as to not burn ourselves. Meanwhile, the Bloody Mary per Poppa Unmanly Chef was good although a little lacking in the alcohol department, but that’s probably better because with the amount of food you’re given I’m not sure if a super strong stiff drink is great idea for your lower intestine. The way Phillips prepared it was just enough to compliment the food well and not overpower the experience.
The seafood tower of power and booze as I like to call it can run a little pricey, it’s about $100.00, but it’s really enough food for at least 3 people, between the shrimp, the fried chicken, the potatoes, AND the crabs (plus the booze) it’s a lot of food.
Phillips Seafood has been around for a long time, and for good reason they know what they do well, that’s seafood. They don’t attempt to emulate something they’re not, which is commendable. Instead, they delivered a really delicious product and a one of a kind dining experience.
