Food & Drink in Brooklyn Park

Maynard’s Cafe's flavor slingers craft a surf 'n' turf menu brimming with oceanic delights and land-locked meats. Dining companions can warm up for competitive chew-offs with the Maynard’s Combo, an amalgam of finger foods that include crab balls, jalapeño poppers, chicken tenders, and steamed shrimp among other handheld poppables. Then order up a heftier entree, such as the chicken fettuccini, crab legs and drawn butter, or fried oysters. The new york strip steak cohabitates with crab cakes and brings two sides to the table. Guests can savor their meals while oogling karaoke performers crooning after 9 p.m. Wednesday–Sunday or watch cards go flying during rounds of Texas Hold 'em or high-stakes Go Fish on Thursdays.

Sandella's upscale flatbread chain is spreading rapidly to form a robust crust of healthy pizza and paninis surrounding the Baltimore region and beyond. The secret of Sandella's proprietary brick-oven flatbread is kept by skilled property managers, who ward off teen detectives' regular attempts to solve the menu's mystery of health and taste fusion. Configure your body's bread-intake valve for a provolone & veggie panini ($4.99), or sneak away from your dust cloud from fighting cartoon characters for a brazilian chicken grilled flatbread ($5.99). This Groupon is not valid for alcohol purchases, but perfectly valid for 100% crushed-fruit smoothies and fountain sodas.

Bagby's menu offers pizza proponents a smorgasbord of piping-hot pies, in addition to plentiful portions of pastas and salads for disc dodgers. Bagby's pizzas push the laws of thin-crust thermodynamics by balancing a bounty of toppings on their ultra-skinny surfaces. Fill the pie-sized hole in your soul with a 10-inch prosciutto-and-goat-cheese pizza ($10.99), topped with tomato puree and garden-fresh arugula, or a 14-inch four-cheese profusion of mozzarella, goat cheese, provolone, and Grana Padano ($15.99). Dough designers can create their own tomato masterpieces by choosing from more than 15 toppings ($9.99 plus $1 per topping). Non-pizza eaters can savor baked penne with sweet fennel sausage ($11.99), or keep the meal as light as a Yanni piano ballad with a Caesar salad garnished with garlic croutons ($7.50).

Dough takes on double duty at King's Pretzel & Pizza, forming the foundation of New York–style pizza slices and twisting and flipping into soft pretzels that come sprinkled with seasonings. Cheese oozes from stuffed pretzel logs, which burst with such meats as hot dog, sausage, and ham. Waffle cones and dishes brimming with homemade ice cream greet grins with 13 different flavors, from coffee and butter pecan to eggnog and pumpkin pie. The restaurant's scents waft throughout the Patapsco Dutch Farmers' Market, where shoppers pick up homemade jam and fresh produce and scour the indoor and outdoor furniture selection for wood they can burn to run their furnace-powered freezers.

Trinacria's ambitiously stacked sandwiches helped launch the Italian deli's lunchtime legacy. Offerings run the gamut from a veggie sandwich packed high with fresh mozzarella and roasted red peppers ($5.69) to a meaty Italian cold cut with salami, capocolla, proscuittini, and provolone ($2.99). Wrap lips around a roast-beef panini ($6.99), with roasted peppers, olive oil, and gorgonzola, or opt for delicatessen selections. Trinacria's menu of cured meats, cold cuts, and house-made sausages allows customers to craft their own brown-bag fillers. From asiago ($6.99 per pound) to American ($4.69 per pound), pancetta ($6.99 per pound) to pepperoni ($4.79 per pound), gourmands won't want for options.

Recently featured in the Washington Times, Gertrude's is a salt-stained bastion of coastal cuisine, with a menu chock-full of Chesapeake classics. Chef and owner John Shields, a nationally acclaimed coastal-fare innovator, author, and crab whisperer, named the restaurant for his grandmother, Gertrude Cleary. Grandma Gertrude's traditional Baltimore crab cake recipe lives on at her namesake restaurant with a dinner order of Gertie's crab cakes ($20), which arrives dressed with a choice of eight sauces, including the Creole or three-mustard. It's served with a choice of sides such as apple and fennel coleslaw, hush puppies, or grilled rosemary potatoes. Other maritime entrees, such as the citrus barbecue shrimp ($24) and the Chesapeake rockfish imperial ($30), recognize each other from the Shark Week extras' green room and happily provide diners fishing for Bay fare authenticity with transcendent catches for immediate consumption. Also available are Gertie's seafood Creole ($24) and locally raised beef burgers ($10).