The first time I went into Faidley's, it was late in the afternoon, well after the lunch rush. It was made clear tot me that I was breaking local custom, I was wearing seersucker after Labor Day, but that as I was clearly an auslander, I would be indulged. The young woman under the counter had better than a half dozen piercings in her face of the type I am used to seeing on South of Market bears--heavy gauge chrome hoops and horseshoes and barbells in her septum and lower lip and ears--and thick blue-black tattoos barely decipherable on the brown-black skin of her neck and arms and face. "Hey. Can I have a crabcake, please?" I say to her, moving up to the counter.
"You want our best crabcake?" She says, with a little suspicion, certain she is talking to a person who hasn't a clue as to the best crabcake, graciously, though, giving me entre to her expertise.
"Well, yeah." I say, knowing how to take a cue, if nothing else.
"One lump." She says to the guy at the fryer, who drops one of the fist-sized balls of lump crabmeat and little else (something else, surely, something that holds it together and gets crispy, but no bullshit, no breadcrumb, no celery...) into the oil. And then when she hands it to me she says "We have tartar sauce, but I wouldn't recommend it."
I don't use tartar sauce anyway, but I said "If you don't recommend it..." in an attempt at being funny, but she is already ignoring me, had already finished her job with me and was no longer listening.
That was almost a year ago. I have been back to Baltimore, and therefore Faidley's, twice since, most recently at a little past one in the afternoon, in time to see the lunch rush, workers enjoying the delicious lump crab cake with a short plastic cup of draft beer.
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