It’s hard to be the second sibling. Parenting ismore casual, less neurotic. Folks are always comparing you to the older child. And you get the second choice of bedrooms. It’s been a little like that for Hell Point Seafood, Washington, D.C., restaurateur Bob Kinkead’s new restaurant in Annapolis. Expectations have run high and reaction—from local media to foodie chat boards—has been mixed since its opening in June. So it’s not Kinkead’s. Neither was Bobby, John, or Teddy, Bobby.
Hell Point occupies the former Phillips at the end of Dock Street, and while the menu is certainly more innovative, the interior still has a somewhat corporate feel. With its cocoa and sage walls and abundant glossy white trim, the upstairs dining room feels ready for a Pottery Barn photo shoot. Tables aside the long row of windows overlook a parking lot (and a bit of water, if you’re facing westward) where a parade of skateboarders, dog walkers, and tourists cross by. Several times someone looking familiar would enter the dining room, only for us to realize we had glimpsed them in the parking lot just minutes before.
Hell Point’s menu is full of familiar dishes (and a few new faces), too. Grilled salmon rubs fins with fresh Maine lobster roll, and the obligatory jumbo lump crab cake shares mention with spice-rubbed rare tuna. Unintentionally, almost everything we ordered turned out to be fried, though a more careful look at the menu could have avoided that. We could have chosen curried mussels instead of a rice flour-dusted Thai squid with lime-chile dipping sauce or grilled swordfish instead of soft-shell crabs. But we couldn’t pass up the prospect of fried clams and cornmeal-crusted flounder.
The fat clam bellies were juicy good and served nestled with thin slices of fried lemons in a linen napkin turned out like a blossom. I wish, however, they hadn’t been burdened with so much batter which sloughed off like a shell. And their $16 price tag towers over the other appetizers on the menu.
The flounder turned out to be more crunch than fish; it too got lost in its batter. But the last of the season’s softcrabs, crusted in masa, were as sweet and as good as they should be, and the dish’s accompaniments—a brightly flavored corn puree and a gorgeously light scallion spoon bread—made me want to reach across the table and eat from my companion’s plate.
Though we were tempted by several desserts—peach tarte tatin with pistachio ice cream, chocolate pot de crème—we chose a disappointingly dry hazelnut tart, more crust than filling, whose promised chocolate praline sauce, turned out to be three small dots of soft chocolate at the edge of the plate.
Hell Point has a young staff, but our server was eager to please, going out of her way to track down a specific bottle of beer the bartender thought was out of stock and graciously mixing a half decaf coffee on request. Behind us, another server treated older clients with care and very young ones with humor, offering high-fives as the preschoolers left with their parents. An Annapolis restaurant is going to need this kind of balance in order to make the wide range of guests the city hosts—from tourists to politicians to Naval Academy faculty—feel welcome and eat comfortably. And unlike its more refined older sibling, I think Hell Point has a chance to do that.
Mary K. Zajac writes from Baltimore.
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