The Dish: Tourists are flocking to this Greenmount Avenue takeout window

Phil Laguerre was scrolling TikTok in Boston, where he lives, when the algorithm fed him his next food mission: a video promoting the massive, crunchy seafood egg rolls at a restaurant in Baltimore. You can’t find those in Boston.

“Boston has seafood,” he said, “but more traditional dishes.”

Laguerre achieved his foodie dreams last week while in town visiting his fiancée as he stood in line at I Love Seafood, a takeout window on Greenmount Avenue that’s attracting the attention and dollars of diners in the city and beyond. Laguerre said he was caught off guard by I Love Seafood’s inconspicuousness — there are no tables, chairs or even a sign above the window, which is built into the side of a dilapidated Formstone-clad building called the Greenmount Collective.

“My GPS said I was there and I was like, ‘I mean, there’s a line here, there’s a window, so this must be the place,’” Laguerre said.

I Love Seafood, previously called King Crab ATL, was founded in Atlanta before relocating to Baltimore in 2024, said Jamari Morgan, who mans the window with his family. Even Morgan’s grandfather is involved; Morgan said he catches the crabs for their popular egg rolls, which are about the size of a burrito, generously stuffed and deep-fried until their exteriors are bubbly and golden brown. Steaming and picking the crabs is time-consuming, Morgan said, but “it saves a lot of money.” The restaurant has also developed a reputation for its distinctive version of yakamein or dirty yak, a staple of Chinese American carryouts in Baltimore. At I Love Seafood, diners can order it with lobster on top.

The Greenmount Avenue carryout restaurant is the latest case of social media bringing tourists and other foodies to Baltimore eateries well off the beaten path. Gone are the days when only a celebrity like “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” host Guy Fieri, or perhaps Anthony Bourdain, could have that kind of impact. And more and more, online influencers don’t need to have the audience of a Keith Lee or Dave Portnoy to have an impact, as accounts with even modest follower counts have their videos go viral.

“We see this rise of the micro-influencer,” said Tim “Chyno” Chin, who runs the Instagram account The Baltimore Foodie. “It doesn’t take a million or bajillion [followers] to boost or aid a business.” More recently, he’s witnessed platforms like TikTok and Instagram elevate the work of smaller creators in their ravenous quest for more content to push to users. Many of the highly viewed videos about I Love Seafood were produced by accounts with a relatively small number of followers. “Y’all gotta get down here,” said a Philadelphia-based influencer with 4,000 followers in a TikTok review this spring. That video now has more than 150,000 views.

A similar trend has played out in some of Baltimore’s more recent unexpectedly viral sensations, such as Café Dear Leon’s crab dip bagel, which got a boost from creator Giovanna Poscé, who has just over 4,000 TikTok followers. Bonjour Bakery on Falls Road had lines down the block after a foodie with a mere 700-plus followers reviewed it. In contrast, more established influencers like Chin often have more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, and sometimes over 1 million. But Chin said he welcomes the democratization of social media. Baltimore can always use more cheerleaders to shine a light on its ever-creative food scene. “It’s always about supporting small business,” he said.

And Baltimore’s chefs, cooks and bakers are particularly talented when it comes to creating viral-ready seafood dishes that you can’t find anywhere else in America, said influencer Simone Phillips.

Phillips, who runs the account Charm City Table and has contributed to The Baltimore Banner, had a hand in making the seafood egg roll a staple of Baltimore restaurants back in 2020, when she used Twitter to spotlight the version made by Papi Cuisine, then in Fells Point. “There were lines for literally months,” she said of the dish, which took on a life of its own.

Today, crab and crab cake egg rolls are relatively common on menus at Baltimore restaurants, something Phillips said is unique. “What other city are you going to that you can find a crab cake egg roll on a large amount of restaurant menus?”

I Love Seafood happens to be just one of the eateries with TikTok-famous seafood egg rolls at the moment. One Louisiana-based influencer flew to Maryland to try the king crab-stuffed egg rolls from Southern Butter, a Windsor Mill eatery going viral without even having a storefront. His verdict? “I think it’s okay.”

Not all of the reviews of I Love Seafood are positive. Online, several customers complained they’d used the website to order dishes they never received. But the eatery also has returning fans. Customer Morgan Wilson, who lives nearby, stops by once a month for her usual order of seafood egg rolls, which she finds both affordable and satisfying at $10 or $15 apiece. “One egg roll will fill you up,” she said. When her best friend came to visit Baltimore from Mexico recently, Wilson brought her to I Love Seafood. “She gave it two thumbs up.”

For Laguerre, I Love Seafood hit the spot. “Everything I ordered tasted great,” he said. But he made one error: He ordered six egg rolls.

“They were huge,” he said. “I bought too many.”