Food & Drink
Review: Emmert’s Seafood is a Waterman’s Dream Crab House
Jimmy Emmert—who comes from a long line of Chesapeake Bay watermen—and his wife, Lori, took over the former Floyd’s Crossroads Pub in Dayton two years ago.
Lori and Jimmy Emmert’s seafood and crab house, sitting by the side of a country road in Dayton, about 25 miles southwest of Baltimore, is a decidedly old-school version of the beloved Maryland genre.
Emmert’s Seafood encompasses a pale butter-yellow clapboard house, an attached covered outdoor patio, and, for good measure (not to mention historical significance and a bit of roadside advertising), the long firehouse-red custom seafood-steaming trailer where the business officially began.
Inside the restaurant, old family photographs (Jimmy culling oysters on the South River; Jimmy on another boat with his grandfather), nautical maps, and newspaper clippings (a Waterman’s Gazette story on the family) line the cornflower-blue paneled walls of the cozy dining room. A boxy bar stands just inside the door, where the bartender can be seen squeezing fresh citrus for crushes.
Past an open door to the steam room, through which you can see huge metal pots cooking two-bushels worth of crabs, a corridor leads to the patio dining room. There, picnic-style tables are arranged in formation, topped with brown paper tablecloths weighted down by baskets of condiments, crab mallets, and rolls of paper towels, as if acknowledging that weather is always coming. Heat lamps stand at attention.
Locals and visitors, tourists and regulars all sit, gathered around plates of hush puppies and crab dip, bowls of crab soup, mandatory mounded trays of spice-dusted steamed crabs, and, eventually, maybe a slice of Smith Island cake. Imagine an Old Line State iteration of some Norman Rockwell painting.
The origins of Emmert’s, as well as the Emmerts themselves, began long before the advent of that seafood trailer. Both Lori and Jimmy grew up on the same road in Shady Side and have known each other since childhood. They married in 1987. Jimmy is the fourth generation of watermen in his family and the pair have spent their lives on Chesapeake Bay boats.
“Jimmy started working on the water when he was 15”—when he got his first work boat—“but he’s been on the water forever,” says Lori, sporting an Emmert’s shirt, a blonde ponytail, and a gold crab necklace.
She narrates the history of the framed photo of Jimmy on Parish Creek alongside his grandfather, Capt. Vernon “Whitey” Wilde, who himself came from a long line of Chesapeake Bay commercial watermen and who taught Jimmy how to fish, clam, oyster, and, of course, crab. Once people found out that he was a local waterman, Jimmy began selling his catch to restaurants and eventually the couple decided to start steaming their own seafood.
The Emmerts formed an LLC in 2003, bought the trailer in 2014, and took over the former Floyd’s Crossroads Pub in 2024. When they first started the trailer business, Lori still had a full-time job with an accounting firm but Jimmy stopped crabbing because, he says, “you can’t be two places at once.” These days, Lori works at Emmert’s too, though she still takes time off during tax season.
It is a decidedly family operation, with Lori baking many of the pies and cooking family-recipe dishes (the cream of crab soup is a recipe “that’s like 200 years old,” says Lori) while Jimmy unloads bushels of crabs outside the steam room.
Brendan Floyd, who is both bartender and manager, has worked at the restaurant for years: The Emmerts bought the place from his parents. “I kinda came with the building,” he says as he juices more citrus.
In the two years since the Emmerts began cooking for their brick-and-mortar spot—the trailer has been retired—the menu has expanded to include all the appetizers, soups, sandwiches, and fish platters you’d expect from a traditional crab house.
There are also frogs legs on the menu, something one usually finds in classical French restaurants. When they were still working out of the trailer, says Lori, “We got them for a customer who wanted them, actually his mother, who lived in West Virginia or something.” They sold them raw, as the trailer didn’t have a fryer, and customers kept asking for them. And so when they moved into the restaurant with its fryer, the frog legs, which are now breaded and fried, came with them.
And then there are the crabs, dredged in a proprietary blend of Halethorpe’s J.O. Spice, and delivered to those brown-papered tables hot from the steamer. Emmert’s serves crabs year-round, so they’re Maryland crabs during the season, then sourced from Texas and Louisiana.
After a lifetime of living and working on the water, the Emmerts source their local catch from friends and neighbors, and their wholesalers are often former colleagues who have gotten off the water.
Behind the restaurant, Jimmy unloads more bushels of the crabs that have defined both his family and his own lifetime.
“It’s a social thing when you eat seafood,” he says, remembering his grandparents’ porch parties. “We really bought this because our customers at the trailer said, ‘Won’t y’all just buy a brick-and-mortar so we can come and eat your crabs and drink beer.’”
Done and done.
EMMERT’S SEAFOOD: 4809 Ten Oaks Road, Dayton, 301-490 4423. HOURS: Wed.-Thurs., 3:30-9 p.m.; Fri., 3:30-10 p.m.; Sat. 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m., Sun. 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m. PRICES: Apps, $6.95-$23.95; sandwiches, $13.95-MP; entrees and steamed crabs, $21.95-MP; desserts, $5.99-$7.99 AMBIANCE: Old-timey crab house.