Seafood in Bowie Maryland

Malls don’t have to be homogeneous. In the outdoor Town Center mall in Bowie, Maryland, mixed among the Macy’s and the Bath & Body Works, I came upon the Overdue Recognition Art Gallery. It was a large place, with natural light coming in from two directions, with dozens of pieces of art by African American artists. Paintings in a variety of styles, sculptures, etchings. Also a good collection of books about art. A couple doors down from Victoria’s Secret was Yvonne Ex African Closet full of dressy African print clothes.

I had gone to the mall looking for dinner, which I found at The Twisted Crab. It’s a small chain with a dozen locations, most of them in eastern Virginia. The food comes in a plastic bag inside a bucket. You choose your seafood (mussels, clams, crawfish,crab, shrimp, scallops), the quantity (1/2 lb or a pound), your sauce (Creole, Cajun Original, Garlic Butter, Lemon Pepper, or Twisted Sauce, which is all the sauces combined), and the spice level (from not spicy to extra hot). It comes with an ear of corn and a potato.

I ordered a 1/2 lb of shrimp with heads, medium spicy. While I waited for my food I watched three women across the way enjoying their bags of seafood. I learned there are plastic gloves to keep your hands clean while you eat the juicy mess. I learned you put your shells and other discards into the bucket. And I learned that you relish every bite, unlike so much mindless eating we do these days.

Bowie was my stop for the first night on my drive to the Kissimmee River in Florida. After a late start I didn’t have the energy to drive through Washington DC in rush hour. I was approaching from the east because Waze had sent me across the Delmarva peninsula after crossing the Delaware River.

Wikipedia tells me that Bowie grew up around the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad in the 1880s. A land speculator plotted out 500 residential lots, making for a tidy town. William Levitt continued this theme in the 1960s, building 7,500 houses on a former plantation. If I hadn’t planned a very early start for the next morning to miss DC traffic I would have gone looking for it.