Jimmy Emmert—who comes from a long line of Chesapeake Bay watermen—and his wife, Lori, took over the former Floyd’s Crossroads Pub in Dayton two years ago.
Lori and Jimmy Emmert’s seafood and crab house, sitting by the side of a country road in Dayton, about 25 miles southwest of Baltimore, is a decidedly old-school version of the beloved Maryland genre.
Emmert’s Seafood encompasses a pale butter-yellow clapboard house, an attached covered outdoor patio, and, for good measure (not to mention historical significance and a bit of roadside advertising), the long firehouse-red custom seafood-steaming trailer where the business officially began.
Inside the restaurant, old family photographs (Jimmy culling oysters on the South River; Jimmy on another boat with his grandfather), nautical maps, and newspaper clippings (a Waterman’s Gazette story on the family) line the cornflower-blue paneled walls of the cozy dining room. A boxy bar stands just inside the door, where the bartender can be seen squeezing fresh citrus for crushes…