WASHINGTON -- New York has pizza. Chicago has hot dogs. But perhaps no city has embraced a regional dish the way Washington has the crab cake.

You don't have to go to a special crabcakeria or a sidewalk stand. Crab cakes are everywhere: at manly steakhouses, flirty bistros and waterside restaurants. I've even seen a crab cake at Japanese restaurant Sushi Ko, where it is -- some might say heretically -- fried in tempura batter and served with avocado.

Restaurateurs take for granted that we love them. And that isn't always a good thing. Like all simple dishes, an exceptional crab cake isn't easy to make. You need sweet crab, enough lumps for texture and a subtle matrix of flavors that enhance the crab but don't overpower it: traditionally a little Old Bay seasoning, lemon juice, herbs and a binder such as eggs, mayonnaise or bread crumbs.

Some restaurants take the trouble to make the regional dish shine; others seem to know there's a sizable number of diners who will order crab cakes regardless. Hence the bland, greasy, bready or all-of-the-above specimens you may have had along the way.

Over the summer, The Washington Post embarked on a hunt to define and discover the best local examples among restaurants that serve them year-round. We started out looking for the quintessential Maryland crab cake, until it became clear that no one could agree what that is.

``A Maryland crab cake has to have Old Bay,'' Chris Clime, the executive chef at Passion Fish in Reston, Va., told me. Not necessarily, countered John Shields, author of Chesapeake Bay Cooking and host of the PBS television show Coastal Cooking. Old Bay, mayonnaise, Tabasco sauce and Worcestershire sauce are common. But Eastern Shore traditionalists say Old Bay overwhelms the delicate flavor of the crab, which should be mixed only with melted butter, lemon juice and a little horseradish.

And crabmeat from Maryland isn't the common link. Most area chefs say they can't get local crab all year. Mallory Buford, chef at Kinkead's in Washington, says he has it about eight months a year. Johnny's Half Shell on Capitol Hill gets it in the summer, but sources its crabmeat mostly from the Gulf Coast, as does DC Coast downtown. The local Jerry's Seafood chain stopped using Chesapeake Bay crabmeat years ago in favor of a more reliable source of blue crabmeat from Venezuela.

Chefs I spoke with generally preferred domestic crab, which comes from the Gulf, the Carolinas and, of course, the Chesapeake Bay. But all agreed that Venezuelan crab is a good product, and our tasters agreed. The meat is snow-white, with a clean flavor. The crabs are larger than their domestic counterparts and provide great chunks of meat. Venezuelan crab also arrives fresh by air. Most crab from the Philippines and Indonesia is pasteurized and shipped by boat, Shields said.

Indeed, some diners find they prefer imported crabmeat.

``As soon as I started serving (local crabmeat), people started sending it back, saying `This tastes fishy,' '' said Shields, who also is chef at Gertrude's at the Baltimore Museum of Art. ``I think for the last 15 years, almost every crab cake you've had in every restaurant has been Southeast Asian crabmeat. It's washed and bleached. That takes away a lot of the flavor.''

So ``Maryland style'' didn't provide a standard. But after 25 crab cakes, we discovered our own criteria. On the whole, we preferred cakes made with jumbo-lump meat, the top grade. The more refined ones at restaurants such as BlackSalt, Kinkead's and Johnny's look like neat patties, but pull apart to reveal chunky lumps of crab inside. The chefs use a little bread filler or lump crab to hold the cakes together, then pan-fry or broil them. Deep-frying, says chef-owner Bob Kinkead, is a no-no.