A few random bites: February Edition

Just a few things I've missed saying...

1) In doing research for my next "Back to the Beltway" post (coming up at some point in the next few weeks, just with the gas prices and expense and all), I was surprised, shocked and dismayed at all the eateries in Linthicum that have seemingly shut down. One hot dog place, Duncan's Famous, hasn't been there for a while. Granted, they once gave me the creamiest hot dog that I have had in ages, not since the Soda Pop Shop near Baltimore Highlands, late 80's.

2) Lunch on Friday was at the House of India in Columbia. I had to get in and out, which I did with ease. It was quite good: some of the least bony chunks of goat I have eaten in a while. plus tasty and toothsome ras malai and various chicken, chickpea and rice dishes. One dish I was not so hot on was the dhabha chicken, which tasted and had a texture like warmed over day-old Chinese takeout, and I don't mean from a good place. And yet there it is smack dab in the middle, piled up as if to say "Taaaaaake meeeeeee. You KNOW you waaaaaant meeeeee." Next time I go back I'll just get everything else. Though at $12 for the weekday buffet, it is a wee pricier than some other buffets that are just as good. I guess you're paying for the "Columbia" experience.

3) The latest beer tasting I did at the Wine Source was of R.J. Rockers out of Spartanburg, South Carolina. Most of their beers were lovely though I was particularly captivated by their winter seasonal, The First Snow Ale. Billed as a "malt beverage brewed with honey and spices", the beer's nicest quality is its gingery punch. I rarely leave with a whole six pack ($9) but I did this time.

4) A gas station in Glen Burnie sells Pepsi from Mexico, made with actual cane sugar. Not as sweet as the HFCS stuff.

5) Along those lines, I have been quite good at drinking less soda. I've been averaging 1.5 cans a day - down from about 3. Let's see how much more I can cut back.

6) Try and figure out why I spent the past week making doro wot (Ethiopian chicken stew), GamJa salad (Korean potato salad) and curtido (Salvadoran cole slaw) - and ate it all at once. Go on.

It just hit me...

Getting the Junior Bacon Cheeseburger value meal at Wendy's - even with a bottle of water - costs about half as much as the cheapest featured "value meal" also at Wendy's. Add a hot fudge sundae from the McDonald's across the street (so conveniently located across from each other on Nursery Road in Linthicum) adds a mere $1.06. not exactly good eating, but it is cheap eating.

Exit 8 - Hammonds Ferry Rd (to MD-168 - Nursery Rd)

I am all too familiar with the intersection of Nursery and Hammonds Ferry Roads. I have eaten at most of the places around it. And I have written about most of them, too: Szechuan Hot Wok, G&M, Philadelphia Style Pizza and Subs, Little Grove, John's Italian Deli (twice; note also that it's actually closer to Exit 9).

I've also eaten a few times at Snyder's Willow Grove (map), which is literally right off the Beltway. My coworkers even went there once for happy hour. Hell, I even went here after my junior prom! But before the other day, I had not eaten there for at least ten years - so of course, I haven't written about it at all. So it seemed that this project would be the perfect reason to revisit.

Snyder's was all but destroyed a few times - actually, it's kind of surprising it's still around! Fire in 1944, Hurricanes Agnes and Eloise in the early 1970's. But that only made 'em remodel, creating the Snyder's I became familiar with. And it's very posh in the main dining room. Which is why it's so jarring to see folks eating in just street attire - T shirts and shorts, jeans, etc. Business meetings, club meetings, and just regular lunches and dinners go on there. The place is divided into the main dining room and a separate lounge (which is their smoking section until 2008). But I assume the prices are the same in both places. And the dinner and banquet prices are a lot more expensive than their lunch prices.

It was this last factor that made me stop by Snyder's for lunch and not dinner. I went into the lounge, where the barmaid went out of her way to tell me, in a voice much deeper than mine, "You probably want the non-smoking section. You look too healthy to be in here!" Not that all the patrons looked like they belonged in the ICU, but it was just comical.

The main dining room is as lovely as I remember it, and was about halfway full. One waitress gave me a menu before another told her she had the wrong table! But each was as congenial as the other. She asked me what I wanted to drink, and I asked for a Diet Coke. She misunderstood and brought out a Coke, but she replaced it quickly when I told her.

As I said, lunch is cheaper than dinner. Lunch items run about $8 to $14, while dinner items easily run double that. Snyder's serves everything from hamburgers and hot roast beef to lobster, surf and turf, fried Chesapeake Bay oysters and "Chicken Chesapeake" - chicken with generous portions of crab imperial stuffed inside. The cheapest things on the lunch menu are the sandwiches and burgers. I wanted a burger, and went for the Bleu Burger ($8), which I figured was a burger with bleu cheese. With that, I ordered a side of Oriental chicken soup, their soup of the day ($3 for a small cup; doesn't come with the burger). I got the soup a little while later - they were pretty busy. It was tasty enough. It had those crunchy noodles on top that you usually find in the Chung King chop suey packages. Not much chicken, but truly, there was not much soup either.

The burger came out about 10 minutes after I was done with the soup - again, they were pretty busy, so really I don't fault them. I was wrong about the concept of the burger. It was a hamburger with bleu cheese dressing on top, and there was a lot of it. And it was weak as far as dressings go. To that I asked them to add onions (raw, red) and mushrooms (fried). The burger itself was good, but the bleu cheese really was just a mostly flavorless layer of fat and cream, nothing more. However, the fries that came with it were very good, and the pickle was a standard pickle. I even lucked out and got a brand new, never-been-opened bottle of ketchup, which I quickly used on the burger. I eventually had to cut it up and eat it in pieces, as it fell apart. I hate it when that happens.

All told, for a burger, small soup and a Diet Coke (free refill - and the waitress just brought out a new soda while I was still finishing the last one) came to about $16.50. I left $20, leaving the difference as a tip.

So Snyder's was as good as I remember. It cost more than I remember. But I guess that's because somebody else usually paid!

Places I visited:

Snyder's Willow Grove Restaurant (American / Chesapeake cuisine) - 841 N Hammonds Ferry Rd, Linthicum, MD, 21090; Phone: (410) 789-1149

• Would I eat there again? Sure, but only for lunch - dinner's too expensive
• Would I go out of my way to eat there again? Sure, not that I have to, I mean I pass by it all the time
  

Other photos:

Snyder's is, literally, next to the Beltway. Here is the Beltway...



...and here is Snyder's.

Exits 7A-B - MD-295 North (to Baltimore) and South (to Washington)

Is the Baltimore-Washington Parkway a culinary wasteland? Well, no. But I have found so many different freeways in this southwest corner of the Beltway that just interconnect to each other that I have finally found an exit that only leads to either:

1. one of the other freeways or exits I have visited, or will soon be visiting; or
2. nonstop chain restaurants and fast-food outlets

On my way down to Arundel Mills yesterday I tried to find an exit that led to somewhere new. Going south to Washington, all I found was the Nursery Road exit, whose restaurants I have pretty much reviewed the hell out of.

Okay, I set out for the next interconnecting freeway - I-195, which leads off on the right to Catonsville - a section of which includes UMBC and CCBC, neither of which are known for their delicious food, and Relay, which is pretty much just residential. It leads off on the left to BWI. Now I go to the airport often enough, but I'm not going to go through the hell of paying for parking just to talk about the lousy, overpriced food in the airport. Anyone who's eaten the food at BWI knows what I'm talking about.

To continue down 295 takes you to MD-100, which takes you to Ellicott City (eventually) or Glen Burnie, and more immediately, Arundel Mills.

So what about the other direction? Well, MD-295 isn't anything to write home about going to Baltimore either. You basically pass by the I-895 exit - another exit off 695 that I will be looking at, soon - before seeing the backsides of Lansdowne and Baltimore Highlands. You then drive past the Westport section of town and the exit for I-95 before driving right by Ravens Stadium and Camden Yards. And despite their recent resurgence, I'm not going to buy an Orioles ticket just for the overpriced food (it's not like they're worth watching these days, anyway). And true, there are other restaurants near the stadiums I could write about. But this whole project is about finding what's close to the Beltway. Arundel Mills, Westport and Camden Yards are not.

So I am writing off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway altogether. But there should definitely be something worth writing about off Exit 8, right?

G & M

I don't have a whole lot of money, but I decided to celebrate the beginning of our spring break and my vacation with a reminder of what delicious Maryland cuisine I'd be leaving behind for the next week in SoCal. The destination? G & M, that fabled restaurant by BWI with the oft-celebrated G & M crab cake.

Yep, that's what I had.

I've only had it once, and I guess it was on an off-day for them. Today I was far more impressed by the delicious, so-much-more-crab-than-breading crab cake. And I never hear anyone comment on the roll, but it has to be the softest sandwich roll I've eaten, almost like white sliced bread made into a sandwich roll!

The fries, I must admit, did not impress me. Maybe the would've been better with ketchup (ooh, snap, shouda asked for ketchup). But at least I found a pickle wedge underneath.

But the reason I went was for the crab, which I ate with a fork. I ate the roll separately. And no, $11 for lunch is not my idea of cheap or reasonable, unless I'm in Vegas. But the fries were part of that price, and it is a wonderful crabcake.

Little Grove Lunch Buffet

I occasionally go to the Little Grove in Linthicum for lunch - though I have been making a better effort to bag my lunch, which is cheaper. I had their hot buffet today. It was good. Not very good, but good. The cajun catfish was a little dry in some places, moist in others. There was also this Mediterranean chicken stir fry thing, and actual stir fry. Both were tasty, with delicious red peppers, red onions, green peppers, etc., etc. Little Grove also regularly has some plain steamed veggies - eh - and some rice. I just wish I could get there on a day that they offer their spanikopita. I love spanikopita.

Philadelphia Style Pizza & Subs

Decided against Chinese for lunch the other day, and passed up Szechuan Hot Wok for the Philly Style Pizza & Subs, in the same mini strip mall. This is your standard pizza and sub shop, with filling (though, again, standard) subs and sandwiches. I ordered a corned beef reuben (their California reuben was turkey instead of pastrami or corned beef - thanks but no thanks). When I took it back to work I found a big open-faced sandwich - difficult to put together, mind you. The reuben was slathered in sauerkraut, Swiss cheese and salad dressing (I think it was Thousand Island). Much as I like the nearby Little Grove Carryout, this one had much better corned beef to give - not nearly as dry. But, of course, I never order much on my corned beef sandwich when I go to Olive Grove. Also came with fries covered in some kind of semi-crispy coating. This was pretty good. Think I will go back sometime soon.

Szechuan Hot Wok

Many people say that the best crab cake in town these days is the G&M in Linthicum, near the corner of Nursery Road and Hammonds Ferry. This is near the airport, so it's not an unreasonable stop on your trip into Baltimore - for about twice as much as an airport hotdog, you can get a wonderful, tasty crab cake!

Well, across the street from it - diagonally across the intersection - is a teensy little strip mall filled with hole-in-the-wall establishments: a dry cleaners, a Philadelphia Subs & Pizza, and a Chinese restaurant called Szechuan Hot Wok.

I don't know what it is about Szecuan Hot Wok, but everybody starts out with a good dining experience but me (but I). The folks at work go there all the time and have a lovely meal. I went there, and got sick. Dreadfully, awfully sick! Maybe I shouldn't have ordered the double fried pork, but it did not agree with me. Same with the shrimp dish I got the second time there. Now I should have known better than to order anything with shrimp at a mom-and-pop Chinese take-out, because it always makes me ill. Whatever I order - chicken, beef, veggie, even pork (usually) - it always agrees with me. But I usually get horribly ill when I eat shrimp. Most stomachs aren't so reactive to "greasy-wok shrimp" but mine is. After that last experience, I finally just learned to avoid it.

So imagine my fortitude - or stupidity - when I tried it a third time. "Really, you get sick there? I never have. Hmm, I don't know what it is!" my coworkers said to me as I decided to dial up the SHW and order what for me is a critical dish - the orange chicken. Most Chinese places do well enough by orange chicken for my tastes. The true mark of a Chinese restaurant to-be-avoided is one that screws up its orange chicken!

So I ordered the orange chicken, with white rice and egg roll, and drove over to pick it up.

They had it waiting for me (usually the wait is a little longer). I grabbed a 20 oz Diet Coke and gave the woman my card, and stared for a couple of minutes at a Tupperware container on their counter that had a turtle family in it! In the back of my minid, a little voice told me, "No, they're not going to eat them. But do you really want to order food from a place that has live animals crawling on their counter?" They were adorable, though, the little baby turtles that waved their heads around at me as I looked down in their container, as if to say, "I don't know what that big thing is, but it's sooooo hypnotic!" I think baby anythings are cute.

I got back to work, sat down in front of my computer (yes, I eat and work at the same time - and occasionally check out the NPR website), and opened the stapled-shut styrofoam container. Out wafted the aroma of orange chicken! With my spork (forgot to ask about the chopsticks), I dug into the chicken. It was tangy and a little spicy- a very good start, I thought. Then I found little fried bits of orange peel mixed in. When I find that, I know the cooks did something right! The orange peel pieces were slightly gummy, slightly crispy and very intense - tasty! The white rice was nothing special, just simple, white sticky rice, but there was a lot of it. My only complaint thus far really isn't even that big - there was only a little broccoli in with the dish. I say that's a little thing, because I have never had vegetables mixed in with my orange chicken before, so it was a nice little surprise.

Before long I had consumed about half of my lunch, and was already stuffed. I at least wanted to try the egg roll (not a spring roll, with a thin rice paper wrapping, but a fried wonton wrapping, which I like better anyway). It had delicious veggies and - aaaugh! - shrimp. I was a bit flummoxed, but what's done is done. I put my lunch in the fridge, and went back to work.

I noticed that I was still not sick by the end of the day. Great, I thought, I guess the third time was the charm after all! So I went back, got the General Tso's chicken, and again did not get sick.

Next time, maybe I should try the shrimp...? Um, no.