Downtown Ocean City MD

Downtown is the old end of Ocean City, the inlet up to roughly 15th Street. The boardwalk economy is bucket fries, pizza, and soft serve. That makes Mug & Mallet at 2nd Street stand out. It runs long paper-covered tables, wooden mallets, and steamed blues. Its standing claim as the only crab house on the boardwalk dates to 1976. At the far south end, Harrison's Harbor Watch has looked across the inlet at Assateague and the commercial harbor since 1984. Its trade is crab cakes and a raw bar, not trays of steamed crabs. It is the downtown pick for a view and a tablecloth.

Downtown is thin on steamed crabs and has been for a while. The boardwalk fire of 1994 took Crab Alley's original 9th Street building. That operation now cooks across the bay. Locals settle in at Mug & Mallet or head up Philadelphia Avenue toward the midtown crab-house row. Or they cross the Route 50 bridge to West Ocean City. That run is ten minutes without traffic and far longer with it. Nowhere else on the island gets you from the sand to a crab mallet in under a block.