Bill Hogan

Thompson’s Sea Girt House occupies a storied place in American culinary history, for it was there, in Baltimore’s southeastern waterfront district, that crab imperial was invented sometime in the late 19th century.

In 1885 George Thompson, Jr., acquired a hotel at the foot of Newkirk Street in Canton, a neighborhood in Baltimore’s outer harbor, and converted it into a restaurant. Thompson was an enterprising and colorful character; legend has it that each morning he’d step out onto the 450-foot pier off his restaurant to shoot a half-dozen ducks over the Patapsco River. Thompson’s Sea Girt House became known for its jumbo soft crabs, fish, and fried-chicken dinners, which for many years were served with a salad, French fries, and hot muffins for 60 cents a plate. Then, of course, there was the crab imperial, a gratin of crabmeat bound with a mixture of diced onions, green bell pepper, and pimiento in a thick cream sauce, which quickly became Thompson’s signature dish. (Today’s version of the dish is generally much lighter than the original so as not to suffocate the sweetness of the crabmeat.)

Thompson’s decision to locate his restaurant where he did turned out to be fortuitous. In 1898 Lowrey’s Place, a popular beer garden in nearby Colgate Creek, closed to make way for River View Park, an amusement park that was to be built at Point Breeze off Broening Highway in East Baltimore. River View Park opened in 1890 with all the requisite attractions: a quarter-mile-long roller coaster, a “Human Roulette Wheel,” a swimming pool, and bandstand concerts that were reported to draw up to 60,000 patrons. (Future jazz legends Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle met, and began their songwriting partnership, while working there as “The Dixie Duo” shortly after World War I.) Thompson’s Sea Girt Restaurant happened to be right on the streetcar line that took visitors to and from River View Park, which had come to be known as the “Coney Island of the South.”

Maybe, though, it was all just too good to be true. River View Park somehow survived five major fires, but it could not seem to survive the long dry spell of Prohibition, which went into effect on January 16, 1920, and would not be repealed until December 5, 1933. It closed in 1929. Western Electric Company bought the property at auction later that year, tore down the amusement park, and built its mammoth Point Breeze Works on the site.

By the 1940s, a new generation of Thompsons—George W., Sr., the great-grandson of the founder, and his wife Mary Margaret, whom he’d married in 1927—were running the family restaurant. In 1949 they bought Cahill’s Bar, a liquor-store-turned-tavern at York Road and Belvedere Avenue, and began making preparations to move their restaurant there. As original location was being demolished to make way for a marine terminal, they were reopening Thompson’s Sea Girt Restaurant at its new location.

George ran the kitchen, Margaret the front of the house. The décor was nautical through and through, of course, with backlit porthole windows and a big, beckoning lobster tank. Mrs. Thompson knew many of the customers by name.

The family was struck by tragedy in 1969 when George Thompson was fatally stabbed in a robbery at the couple’s home. In time their son, George W. Thompson, Jr., known to all as “Tommy,” stepped in to help run the restaurant.

“Nationally famous landmark for sea food and prime beef, specializing in Maryland crab dishes,” Thompson’s Sea Girt House billed itself. The beef, in fact, didn’t always take the back seat. In 1972 George Jr. made news when he went to the Maryland State Fair in Timonium and bought the grand champion steer, a 1,035-pound Hereford, for a record $3.02 a pound. But the crab cakes reigned supreme, to the point that by 1981 Thompson’s was dispatching them in insulated containers via Federal Express—six for $24, plus tax and shipping—to devotees all over the country. (“A breed apart from the usual,” New York Magazine christened them. “Toothsome, moist, and delicious.”)

The Thompsons, mother and son, continued to operate the restaurant until 1983, when they sold it to Tomas Sanz, a talented Spanish-born chef, and two partners. Sanz had been running the kitchen at Tio Pepe Restaurante, a landmark Spanish restaurant in Baltimore that at the time was owned by his older brother. Sanz brightened the menu with his own creations—a Spanish salad, for example, and filet of sole Alcazar with bananas and hollandaise—while keeping the specialties that had made Thompson’s Sea Girt House famous. But it was, perhaps, a losing battle. A lack of off-street parking in the area and too much petty crime for a mostly older clientele were said to have contributed to the restaurant’s demise. It closed on December 31, 1993.

In something of a postscript to the story, however, Thompson’s Sea Girt House wasn’t quite finished. As it turned out, Mrs. Thompson had kept the rights to the restaurant’s name, and in 1987 she and her son had opened another Thompson’s on 83rd Street in Ocean City, Maryland. She greeted customers there, as she had always done, until the restaurant closed in 1997. Margaret Mary Thompson died five years late at the age of 92. Her son recalled at the time that her favorite meal at Thompson’s began with a Crown Royal Mist with a twist, followed by crab cakes, stewed tomatoes, and fried eggplant.

Here is the recipe for the Maryland Crab Cakes served at Thompson’s Sea Girt House.

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