SEATTLE — Years before he ever imagined he would own restaurants and write cookbooks, Tom Douglas sometimes went crabbing with his dad in Chesapeake Bay.

"You put a chicken neck on a string and hang it from a pole over the bridge to catch blue crabs," Douglas said. He comes from a large Delaware family — he's the fourth of eight children — and prime fresh local crabmeat was too expensive to buy for home use. "That was a going-out treat," he said.

But even as a youngster, perhaps because of that early experience, Douglas' appreciation of food (and crab cakes) was keen. It led to his first job as a $1.18-an-hour cook's helper at the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington, Del.

"My job was to open oysters and clams. I opened 400 oysters a day," he recalled.

The chef there taught him important lessons he still follows for making crab cakes. "He said the No. 1 rule was being gentle. No stirring, only folding. The more you work them, the tougher they get," he said.

Douglas established his own cooking career in Seattle, where he happily discovered that the Pacific Ocean offered up Dungeness crabs that were fabulously tasty, too.

Now, at 47, more than 25 years, four restaurants, a radio show, a catering business and three cookbooks later, the James Beard Award-winning chef is teaching some of his secrets in "I Love Crab Cakes!" subtitled "50 Recipes for an American Classic" (William Morrow, 2006, $19.95).

When he graduated from high school, Douglas said, "I wanted to try something new. I drove across the country and ran out of gas and money in Seattle." That was in 1977. He thought it was only a temporary stint when, following his natural instinct, he got a job in a hotel kitchen there. Restaurants always need workers, he said.

"To this day the hardest thing is to find good cooks," Douglas said. "Then I learned if you want to make more money, you have to be good at managing people."

He stayed with the restaurant life. After making his reputation cooking at the city's Sport Cafe, Douglas, with his wife and business partner, Jackie Cross, opened his own restaurant in 1989 with money borrowed from his wife's uncle.

There followed three tough years, he said, blaming the name they chose for the restaurant. Driving through Astoria, Ore., they'd noticed that all the restaurants were called grills or cafes, but lounges had flower names.

In an effort to be original, Douglas said, they named their new restaurant Dahlia Lounge. "All we got was calls from people asking what kind of music we were playing tonight."

They finally put up a big flashing-neon fish sign, with the word menu. "That helped," Douglas said. The Dahlia Lounge has been going strong ever since.

After 12 years, they began expanding. Their second restaurant, Etta's, one block north of Pike Place Market, is named after their daughter, Loretta, now 16. A third restaurant, the Palace Kitchen, and a fourth, Lola, soon followed. Douglas said he still has the big flashing fish sign.

When he first moved to Seattle, he recounted in the book, it never occurred to him that he wouldn't be able to find a crab cake in the land of the Dungeness crab. But he didn't, and it was unfathomable to him, he says.

"Well, I fixed that! And what's more — I became a little famous for it," he adds, almost modestly.

"Twenty years later," he said, "crab cakes have become a national phenomenon."

His book celebrates their infinite variety. Along with his own recipes in "I Love Crab Cakes," there are some from other chefs, including Emeril Lagasse and Jacques Pepin, as well as from his mother, Mary Douglas, to whom the book is dedicated.

At the front of the book, Douglas gives the basics for making good crab cakes, whether with East or West Coast crabs. At the back are ideas for sauces and accompaniments.

Douglas' latest tribute to the lore of the crab cake: He is holding a contest at his restaurants through October to find the most popular kind — based on tallying up what customers order.