Lorraine’s Seafood Restaurant

On Smith Island the bar, the general store, and the community center are all the same building, and Harborside somehow makes that work: Smith Island cake and cold beer at the edge of a Chesapeake the outside world has not gotten to yet.

Reachable only by ferry from Crisfield, the Bayside Inn serves Maryland’s last inhabited offshore island with crab cakes and seafood pulled from the water outside the window. The ferry ride alone is worth the trip.

Crisfield calls itself the Crab Capital of the World and mostly gets away with it, and Fisherman’s Grille sits right in the middle of the skipjack fleet to prove the point with blue crabs about as fresh as they come.

The Red Shell leans hard into gloriously authentic waterman shanty energy, cold beer and steamed crabs in a crab town so far down the Delmarva that only people who actually want to be there ever show up.

Onancock has been a working colonial port since before working ports were a novelty, and Mallards gives the town’s last regular Tangier Island ferry stop a waterfront bar worth detouring off Route 13 for.