April 1, 2015 — Three years ago, I did a little experiment to find out how often restaurants that advertise "Maryland crab cakes" on their menus really serve Maryland crab.
At P.J. Clarke's, I asked a server about the origin of its "Maryland crab cake," and he assured me it was "all local." But when I later asked the then-chef the same question, he told me the bulk of the seafood actually came from Indonesia and the restaurant sometimes gets “a few pounds” of Maryland crab and blends it in.
Busboys and Poets likewise advertised "Maryland crab cakes" at the time. (It no longer does.) "It says it’s from Maryland, but it’s from China,” the server told me when I inquired about its origin. The restaurant's Director of Operations, however, later countered that it actually came from Venezuela.
Needless to say, it's hard to know where your crab is really coming from, no matter how it's labeled.
Oceana has only confirmed this with a new study released today that found 38 percent of Chesapeake Bay crab cakes tested in this region were mislabeled. The ocean conservation and advocacy organization was inspired by my story on "Maryland Crab Fakes" and decided to repeat the investigation on a much larger scale with the help of actual DNA testing. "You did a whole mislabeling story without submitting one test and I thought, 'That's brilliant,'" says Oceana senior scientist Kimberly Warner, the report's author.
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