Faidley’s Seafood has packed up and now occupies its showcase space in what old-fashioned Baltimoreans think of as the new Lexington Market. The tenants initially relocated in 2022. The venerable seafood house, home of the jumbo lump crab cake (and a lot else), took a while to exit the neighboring 1950 market house and be outfitted about a half block south.
It joins dozens of other vendors. The question has to be asked. Is the new market, now that it’s got all its working components, a worthy successor to the old? My personal experience of the Lexington Market stretches back to the days of paper cups of buttermilk, all you can drink for a nickel.
It was once this gustatory delight, where my family went for food exotica that never showed up at a neighborhood grocery store. You went to Lexington Market for a beef tongue sandwich, easy on the mayonnaise. We bought cow’s stomach lining, called tripe, or parts of a pig most people shunned.
We also went to Lexington for the Berger’s cookies, but not the chocolate ones. There were once strawberry, vanilla and lemon iced Berger cookies. And yes, there were condiments like yellow greenish chow-chow, and molasses taffy so powerful that you took one bite and went directly to a dental office.
There were loose Utz potato chips, which somehow tasted better than the prebagged and sealed variety. The noisy and crazy Lexington Market was — and is — an exhilarating people place. It fit hand and glove into the once-bustling departme.
