Every time I come back to MD, I'm amazed at how different things changed since I grew up there in the 90's. Black's Bar and Kitchen is smack in the middle of Bethesda and is one of the nicer places I've been to in the area in a really long time. The menu is described by the restaurant as being regional Maryland and Virginia flavors and I can see that as the menu is pretty heavy on seafood but they do also have a nice line up of meat ranging from pork chops, veal chops, rib eye steak and duck.
Jeana, Chris, Carolyn and I met up for a nice reunion of sorts and spent 3 1/2 hours there, not because the service was slow but because we had a great time catching up and the restaurant was nice enough to let us stay there the whole time and never once pushed us out. Jeana and I started the night with a dozen oysters - I found out at dinner that we have really different oyster preferences. She likes them smaller and briny and I like them bigger and creamier. Luckily our waitress was able to recommend 2 types of oysters that fit our different tastes. Jeana got the Malpeques (East Coast, $2.50 each) and I got the Stellar Bays (West Coast, $2.50 each). I will say that while I'm a huge lover of oysters, there are so many different kinds that I never really know the names of the ones I like. But I will forever remember Stellar Bay because they were mind blowingly awesome. They were huge, with ample white meat bursting out of the shell but still with a light clean taste. The meat was very tender and being that one of my biggest gripes with oysters is that they are never filling, 6 of these bad boys was definitely a very satisfying appetizer.
As for entrees, Jeana and I got the crab cakes ($35 - yes, you read that correctly), Chris got the scallops ($32) and Carolyn got the fried chicken ($19). I make it a rule that if I'm going to eat crab cakes it's only in the MD/VA/Delaware region because most other places put too much filler in them. While the crab cakes here were quite good, I was quite shocked that they were charging $35 for 3 small sized portions. Although I will say that despite their size, they were chock full of crab meat and were extremely filling. It was served with a crab meat and tomato salad (nice that they threw in more crab meat to the dish here), bacon lardon pieces, local pea greens as well as small wedges of sweet potato. The salad was a bit too heavily dressed with the lemon vinaigrette but overall it was one of the fanciest crab cakes dishes I've had in a long time. It did almost take me 2 hours to eat the whole thing because of how filling it was. While I did enjoy it, I still prefer my crab cakes from a local seafood join like Cameron's where it's served with tartar sauce and french fries and comes out of a Styrofoam container. Some things just don't need to be fancied up. I didn't try the scallops but they looked fantastic - very plump and firm. Carolyn's fried chicken also looked awesome - she had 4 huge pieces and they looked golden brown and crispy.
Since we wanted to still sit around and talk some more, we decided to order dessert as well. After a lot of hemming and hawing, we got a chocolate bread pudding ($12) and honestly, I wasn't a huge fan of it. The chocolate was baked into the bread pudding and for moistness they gave us a side of whip cream and ice cream. But that didn't really make it any tastier. It just fell flat for me.
We stuck around for another hour or so and I appreciated that they let us do it. We had heard a rumor that they were knocking this place down soon to make room for condos, which seems to be the general trend in Bethesda which makes me incredibly sad. It's not that I think Black's was fantastic and needs to stay but the town is just becoming super bougie and generic and that just sucks. While the food at Black's was good, the prices were ridiculously high for what it was - which is why I'm knocking my review down half a fork. These are New York prices which I'm generally ok to pay when I'm actually in New York (or even London or some other comparable city) but I'm definitely not ok with paying for it in MD (and yes, I know Bethesda is super richie rich these days but still...). Total bill with drinks, tax and tip: $75/pp
Photo Credit: Yelp
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