It takes nothing away from Tom Douglas, who chronicled Seattle's love affair with crab cakes (and wrote a cookbook with 50 crab cake recipes), that the best example in town comes from a competitor's kitchen. It's the highest ingredient-cost item on the Steelhead Diner menu, $15.95. Most restaurants start with lesser grades of crab (a couple of ounces at most) and typically extend it with cracker-crumbs or other filler; not here.
Kevin Davis, Steelhead's chef and owner (with his wife, Terresa), developed the recipe when he was at the now-defunct Oceanaire: start with plain white bread, properly moistened with homemade, whole-egg mayonnaise and Dijon mustard, seasoned with garlic, cilantro, green onion, Hungarian paprika, a touch of habanero, a drop of tabasco and a splash of lime. For each crabcake, take a handful of Dungeness crab meat, the good stuff (legs and claws that costs $27 a pound, wholesale) and add just enough of the base to hold it together until you've got a hefty, six-ounce wad, about the size of a tennis ball. You won't taste the breading at all; its only a mortar of flavors to support the briney crab legs.
A prep cook, Juan Allegria, who's been with Davis for eight years, actually puts them together and delivers them to the kitchen. These days, Davis himself is busy transforming the Oceanaire, which he'll reopen as Blueacre Seafood on March 19th; his chef de cuisine at Steelhead, the talented Anthony Polizzi, fried up our most recent order, topped with flash-fried parsely and served on a bed of traditional Louis sauce. It's a dish you can share as an appetizer, or make into your main course.
Davis himself, as we've written in this space more than once, is not a fussy innovator. "There's a reason for culinary classics, dishes that stand the test of time," he says. "When it's done right, a crab cake can be as good as anything you'll ever eat."
Steelhead Diner, 95 Pine St., Seattle, 206-625-0129 
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