It's late afternoon and you're at a rear table at the Crackpot Seafood Restaurant in Towson when they bring your entree, and immediately you start attracting lots of attention.

It ain't because of your magnetic personality, either. It's because of what's before you, which is a crab cake. But not just any crab cake. This is the biggest crab cake you -- or anybody else -- has ever seen.

This is a crab cake the size of a discus. It sits on a huge platter encircled with crackers and lemon slices, and it looks so good you don't know whether to dig in or start capturing it on canvas.

As other customers pass, their eyes widen. They gaze at your crab cake with a look that borders on reverential.

"It's OK. Come over and look at it," says Neil Smith, the Crackpot's owner, to a woman who has just walked in.

"Can I eat it?" she asks.

You laugh. Smith laughs. The woman laughs, too. But her husband isn't laughing.

He is just staring, longingly, at the crab cake. You can almost see him thinking: "If the wife wasn't here, I could take these two bozos and be out the door with that thing in a heartbeat."

Anyway, what's causing all the fuss is what the Crackpot bills as "The World's Largest Crab Cake." This is 20 ounces of backfin and lump crab meat that they call the Pounder Plus.

It sells for $34.95, which sounds like a lot until you consider the price of seafood, which is like the price of Texas crude, and the fact that two people generally split this monster.

Then again, there's always a hungry cowboy, usually a young guy with a couple of beers under his belt, who insists on polishing off one of these babies by himself to impress his girlfriend.

In any event, since it was introduced in May, the World's Largest Crab Cake has been a huge hit with Crackpot customers -- and a big boost to business. As has the line of specialty crab cakes -- Mexican-style, blackened, smokehouse and the like -- introduced by head chef Tom Lyons.

At the "Taste of Baltimore," a charity event featuring area restaurants and food vendors two months ago at Camden Yards, the line for the Crackpot's food looked like opening night for "Rent."

Call it a gimmick if you want. But behind the Pounder Plus and the new crab cakes lies a story.

It's a timeless story, really. It's a story of great pluck and inventiveness, a story of a small businessman looking for an edge against the omnivorous chain restaurants that seem to spring up like toadstools all over the landscape.

If you're Neil Smith, one day you look up and there's a TGI Friday's going up not far away, and then there's an Applebee's Neighborhood Grill and Bar and God knows what else coming.

At first you ignore them, but sooner or later you feel them.

OK, you're not going to the poorhouse, but at the end of each night, you check the receipts and business is flat again, and you mutter a soft oath and think: "What am I going to do?"

Then, if you have a little fire in the belly, you go do something.

A neighborhood fixture

The Crackpot Seafood Restaurant sits in the Ravenwood Shopping Center, a strip mall at the corner of Loch Raven and Taylor that has seen better days.

Its anchor store is a Giant supermarket. Near the Crackpot there is a dry cleaners and a hair salon. There's a Hollywood Video store across the rutted parking lot that seems too flashy for its surroundings, like Linda Evangelista at a bowling dinner.

The neighborhood is aging; residents and business owners alike complain that a steady influx of "renters" has brought an increase in crime and decay.

Over the past 26 years, though, the Crackpot has been a neighborhood fixture. It draws a healthy crowd of senior citizens for lunch and a diverse dinner crowd from Parkville and Towson. Late at night, students from Towson University and Loyola College stop in to drink beer, eat Buffalo wings and play pingpong.

This is a pleasant, homey seafood restaurant. You want linen tablecloths and expensive chandeliers and a waiter named Andre with jelled hair and a narrow black mustache who recites the entrees like it's the opening scene from "Othello," this is not the place for you.

The 110-seat restaurant has a rich history. It opened in 1972 as a traditional crab house. Ray McLaughlin, Neil Smith's uncle, was one of the original owners.

You could say the joint opened with a great deal of promise, but you'd be wrong.

The restaurant did well at first, so well that the partners opened two more Crackpots in Columbia and Rosedale, and soon opened franchises on Long Island and in Pennsylvania.

But the expansion was overly ambitious. The partners were spread too thin financially, and within a few years the business crumbled and changed hands.

Left with the flagship restaurant and a mountain of bills, new owner Lou Fonti struggled. At one point, he put up a sign on the employee bulletin board that said: "If You Have Any Problems, Do Not Come To Me."

One night in the fall of 1978, Lou Fonti left the restaurant and drove out to the bridge over Loch Raven Reservoir. His body was found the next day.

Neil Smith took over the business in 1979 from a squabbling (and unlikely) pair of restaurateurs: a doctor and a dentist.

Smith, a guidance counselor at Garrison Junior High School in Baltimore, seemed equally out of place. But the business, which made around $700,000 that first year, grew steadily, fueled by a booming economy and a palpable sense during the Reagan years that the good times were here forever.

"In the '80s, if you had a restaurant, you could pretty much make money without even trying," says Smith, now 56.

But in the '90s, the chain restaurants began arriving. TGI Fridays opened in what is now Towson Town Center, and soon there was a Chili's in Belvedere Square, an Applebee's on Joppa Road, a Red Lobster in White Marsh. An Outback Steakhouse and a Carrabbas Italian Grill were destined for Hunt Valley.

"When new restaurants open, people go to them," says Smith, always a realist. "They want to experience new surroundings, see what the food's like ... just go someplace different."

By 1993, customer counts and revenues at the Crackpot were down significantly. Smith reacted in the time-honored manner of so many business owners: He became delusional. He woke up each morning and thought, "This is a temporary problem. It will go away."

For a while, Smith skirted the problem. When the pharmacy next door moved out in 1995, he opened a liquor store. It was an instant success and helped soften the restaurant's losses.

But this past spring, Smith decided it was time to tackle the chains head-on, before one more eatery opened nearby with a 20-foot-tall Day-Glo sign and a smiling onion logo and a "fun-food!" menu.

In a rear office at the end of the Crackpot's long, narrow bar, a meeting was held. Present were Smith, Tom Lyons and the restaurant's three other managers. It wasn't the Yalta Conference, but an air of urgency permeated the proceedings nonetheless.

Beat them at their game

The focus of the meeting was simple. How do we increase sales? How do we cut costs? How do we handle the competition from the chains?

It was decided that an experienced consultant was needed. P.J. Byrne, Smith's nephew, a 31-year-old whiz kid who had managed chain restaurants in North Carolina, was brought on board.

In essence, Byrne preached a Zen-like philosophy: To fight the chains, BE the chains.

He urged them to learn a new and sacred mantra: portion control. Weigh everything you serve, he said, just like the chains do.

"Before when you came in here, you might get a crab cake that weighed 4 ounces, or one that weighed 5 ounces," Smith explains. "You'd get a sandwich with 4 ounces of shrimp salad one time and 3-plus ounces the next time."

Byrne also urged them to tighten up on inventory, lest high-priced seafood slip out the back door into the trunk of an employee's car.

Finally, he said, the place needed more servers. One for every four tables, just like the chains. This is the '90s -- people don't like to wait for food. Keep customers waiting too long to be seated, he said, and the next sound you hear will be the squeal of tires as they go fishtailing out of the parking lot.

"We had a lot to learn," Smith says. "Our problem was to copy the chains, but keep our own identity."

To this same end, Smith felt the Crackpot needed a new marketing strategy.

"We needed to find a niche that set us apart," he says. "We wanted [to offer] something no one else had, something easy to prepare ... something that would appeal to everyone and be affordable."

It was during yet another meeting with his managers that Smith was struck by what passes in his business as divine inspiration.

"Why don't we do a crab cake?" he said. "Only we'll make it the biggest crab cake in the world."

Certainly, the crab cake was a hugely popular item with local diners. John Shields, author of "Chesapeake Bay Cooking," writes that the crab cake has been a staple of the Maryland diet dating back to at least the 16th century.

It's a food that engenders tremendous passion, too; Shields says he's witnessed barroom brawls over which restaurant or tavern serves the best crab cake.

Armed with their new idea, the Crackpot managers went to a half-dozen nearby restaurants, bought crab cakes and brought them back to the Crackpot to critique. It was all very cloak-and-dagger.

Then Lyons, the chef, went to work in the kitchen, mixing the staples -- crab, eggs, mayonnaise, bread crumbs -- and experimenting with different ingredients to create the Crackpot's own unique flavor.

Then one Monday this past spring, the World's Biggest Crab Cake made its low-key debut.

Low-key is the way to go with these things. If a new entree bombs, you get rid of it, pronto. By the weekend, when the big crowds come, nobody even knows the thing blew up in your face.

But the reaction to the Pounder, Smith recalls, was "Wow!" The Crackpot had a big hit on its hands.

Heartened by the response, Lyons headed back to his kitchen and came up with a series of smaller, specialty crab cakes, among them a Hawaiian crab cake (with ham and pineapple), and a Caribbean crab cake, blackened with island seasonings so spicy they take your breath away.

Then Smith and Lyons went out and promoted their new cuisine big-time on local radio, letting the various morning drive-time personalities stuff their faces and rhapsodize on the air about the pure pleasures of a Crackpot crab cake.

Pretty soon, more and more customers were filling the tables at the old restaurant at Loch Raven and Taylor, and if you were Neil Smith and Tom Lyons, life was a little bit sweeter.

And that's where our story, the story of the World's Largest Crab Cake, ends. It's a happy ending, too, isn't it? The small businessman looks the chains right in the eye, rolls up his sleeves, and finds a way to beat them at their own game. The little guy wins, at least for now.

Ours is a bottom-line society, and the bottom line is this: HTC Business at the Crackpot is up dramatically, up 14 percent over the same period last year.

You don't get too many endings like that anymore.

Pub Date: 11/11/98