Eats and Drinks
Best Raw Bar
Nick’s Inner Harbor Seafood
Cross Street Market, 1065 S. Charles St., (410) 685-2020
With increasing motorized dredging and a dwindling population, oysters seem to have it rough. It’s not their fault they’re such briny, slippery, hideously delicious aphrodisiacs. But we’re willing to reckon that it is their fault they got caught and put on ice at Nick’s, because we’re not going to stop slurping them down for $1 a piece. The venerable Cross Street Market raw bar serves up such fat, tasty bivalves that we like to slowly savor each one with just a squirt of lemon and horseradish-heavy cocktail sauce. Nick’s closed this summer to expand and is set to reopen this fall with plenty of new items to choose from including seafood pizza, year-round crabs, and additional sushi-bar offerings, as well as a new fresh-fish display and giant steamer. Fifty stools will now line each side of the self-proclaimed “only concrete bar in Baltimore.” The daytime crowd, hopefully, will stay the same—a varying mix of executives, dock workers, students, laborers, and lawyers, all stopping in for a snack on the half shell and Nick’s monster $4 draft (which, we’re overjoyed to hear, will still be offered). And the extra seating should help alleviate the weekend crush. Not that we’re above elbowing a few frat boys to suck down those succulent oysters.
