Gettin' Crabby at the Ballard Seafood Festival

No blood-thirsty Vikings pillaged the Ballard Seafood festival. But I valiantly, and artfully, skirted lumbering hoards of urban serfs bearing whiny children in tow. And it was hot. The opaque heat seared the blue sky gray. Bright hot, cranial-throbbing hot.

I've lived in the deep tropics. The kind of place that hits you with the smell of exotic molds, frying coconut oil, and food rubbish braising in heaps in the gutter. So with some authority, I can claim that when it's hot in Seattle, it feels hotter than anywhere on earth. Probably because it's Seattle.

So I developed a strategy of retreat and eat. Along the sunny Market Street corridor of food vendors, make a purchase, and scurry over to the shady sidewalk to eat. Right at the corner, I found Anita's Crepes. Young women poured the crepe batter onto a round griddle top, black and infernally hot like a wheel on Satan's chariot. How I thanked my lucky stars that, within minutes, I would be back in the shade. How did these women do it?

I quickly discovered, in my very hands, my very own smoked salmon crepe, with spinich and tzatziki sauce, a one-dish food orgy. Within the crepe's warm embrace, the sauce and the salmon got down and dirty. The dill in the tzatziki rested comfortably up front. The spinach hid in the background, where it belonged. Damn, this was good.

The crab cakes, from "Crab Cakes and Seafood Specialties" let me down. They were starchy, like a faintly fishy falafel, with middling flecks of crab meat. In their defense, my last crab cake was arguably the best America has to offer. Faidley's Seafood has been crafting crab cakes in Baltimore's Lexington Market since 1886. Faidley's crab cakes are pillows of near-perfection; lump blue crab meat gracefully held together by a light binder. Big as a baseball, no breading or heavy filler stands between the customer and the crab. Next to these, all others are judged unworthy. Most anyways.

After this, I needed a beer in a shady anonymous bar. After all, I came here to experience what Ballard does best.