Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Dreaming of food

Well, I can't do much while the plumber is working, so I'll do some more beach blogging. Man, I wish I were still at the beach.

I gained four pounds, which is not bad considering how much I ate, and what I ate...

My favorite restaurant in Ocean City is Weitzel's, a family place on 51st Street. I referred to it earlier as "mom-n-pop," which it was in 1977 when I started eating there, but the mom-n-pop have retired and it is run by the next generation. We eat there, I dunno, almost once a day. Walking distance to Weitzel's is the main requirement for where we stay.

Weitzel's doesn't have a web page (it would be a bit out of character if they did) so I can't pull up the menu online and reflect on meals gone by...don't laugh. I do that, especially in, say, February, when I need a vacation. Anyway, I don't need a web page to remember Weitzel's, because I have been eating the same thing for 26 years. Fried chicken. Steak & cheese with onion rings. The "Big G" burger. Breakfast...eggs, or maybe an omelette, with fried potatoes and escalloped apples. (I don't eat either, but at Weitzel's you can get both scrapple and grits! It's where the scrapple-grits lines meet!) Maybe an ice cream sundae in the evening.

A few years ago I found a runner-up to Weitzel's (which will, no matter what, always be my favorite OC restaurant for sentimental reasons): the Shark on 46th Street. The reason: "An 8 oz. grilled tenderloin filet of Certified Angus beef topped with a walnut & bleu cheese blend & caramelized Granny Smith apples & sweet onions." Oh, man. Carmelized onion and blue cheese are two of my favorite things. Walnuts are good. Filet is good.

I'm now drooling like Homer all over my lap top.

This year (in an effort to find places without kids...not that I don't love my niece and nephews dearly, but sometimes it is nice to eat someplace without sippy cups and crayons) we went to The Hobbit. When I was a kid (past the sippy cups but not well into food beyond cheeseburgers and fries) I remember the Hobbit being advertised as "proper dress required." I never throught I'd want to dress up for dinner on vacation (although I think that "proper dress" thing is long gone), but looking at the menu I decided we needed to go there this year. I was really glad. I expected it to be good...they opened the same year I started going to OC annually, and any place that stays around that long can't suck. I wasn't disappointed. We ate in a room overlooking the bay, the courses came out at a civilized, relaxed pace, and the food was wonderful. I had tuna "topped with asparagus tips, hearts of palm, shiitake mushrooms, shallots, garlic and grape tomatoes in a a white wine, caper, lemon butter sauce."

(Pause to clean up drool.)

Ah, one funny thing. The first couple nights the family all ate together (i.e., with the kids), so we got dinner first from Weitzel's and then went to Dumser's, another family-style place that actually started as an ice cream stand in 1939. So again, it doesn't suck. Anyway, I was trying to eat vegetables when I could, to keep the weight gain to a minimum, and not just french fries and onion rings. Both nights I had green beans. I like green beans fine. At the Shark on Monday night, though, I was hoping for something different...but the vegetable of the day was green beans. So the night we went to the Hobbit I was pretty excited to see broccoli on peoples' plates. Then when our food came out...green beans. (Ah, well. Maryland farms grow 4462 acres of green beans, second only to corn in terms of vegetable farm land use, so I guess it makes sense. And that's a real statistic.)

Anyway, we also ate at Macky's on 54th Street. Their menu is heavily seafood I'm allergic to, and since the fresh vegetable was green beans, I went with salad and pasta. And all food is better when you get to eat it watching the sun set over the water.

Then there's the junk. The Boardwalk. This may account for 3.75 of my four pounds, frankly...I must have my Thrasher's fries (covered in vinegar) and a polish [sausage] with the works from Polock Johnny's. And what the hell, a funnel cake to share with the seagulls.

This is Victor's lunch...but substitute the polish for the corn dog and it'd be mine. (I didn't get a chance to take a picture of it; I had chili sauce on my fingers and the camera slipped.)

The plumber is still here. As soon as he leaves...I can be down there in, oh, four hours if the traffic is good...

Posted by Nic at August 13, 2003 10:37 AM