In a bit of blue crab diplomacy, the owners of Baltimore’s Cafe Campli filmed an Italian-language tutorial on how to enjoy Maryland’s favorite crustacean, Christina Tkacik reports
[Music] and now it’s time to see what’s coming out today for our media partner the Baltimore Banner so we love our Blue Crabs here in Maryland but it’s not as familiar to other people in other parts of the world yes and banner food reporter Christina tassk is here to tell us how two Baltimore restaurant owners taught Italians how to cook the blue crabs Maryland style Christina good morning good morning yes so tell us about this story so yes the owners of Cafe cample which is a restaurant on Harford Road an Italian restaurant happened to be in Auto Italy when they came across some blue crabs at the Italian grocery store um now blue crabs are an invasive species in Italy and they are reaking havoc on the local seafood industry there particularly clams um and similarly to our blue catfish here um Italian leaders are encouraging people to eat their way out of it you know eat the you know eatat their way out of this Invasion um but they’ve run into some issues with Italians not always knowing how to cook blue crabs and not being the biggest fan of the Crustaceans oh okay so what have they figured out you know as a solution for all this have they figured out a way to cook it what did the owners do with the blue crab um so yeah these owners decided that they would do their best to have a you know a steamed crab situation uh I don’t think that they were able to actually steam the crabs but they picked up two crabs at the grocery store um they were very cheap and they boiled them you know kind of found the local equivalent of Old Bay and um and filmed a video in Italian with instructions for Italians on how to enjoy a crab Feast Maryland style wow such a cool story I didn’t realize when we said Italians that they were actually in Italy doing this so we love I thought like oh you taught some Italians that were right here in Baltimore so that’s amazing thank you so much Christina thanks for having me and if you’d like to learn more about this story or others from the Baltimore Banner head to the Baltimore banner.com