Crawfish King- Crack. Peel. Eat. Wipe Face. Repeat.

A few weeks ago, I was going to have lunch at Bistro The Home but when I got there, I found out they were closed down! I was depressed because I really loved Bistro’s pasta, especially their unique squid ink pasta that normally cannot be found anywhere else.

Even though I was sad, what intrigued me was the new restaurant that was going to take over. It’s called Crawfish King and they opened just over a week ago. They specialize in Southern Cajun Seafood Boil and this is their second location. Their first location is in Seattle.

I’ve never had crawfish before so I went here with Meta Knight for dinner.

We came at around 7pm and much to our surprise, the entire place was packed! Richmondites really know the place to go for cool, interesting food, eh? We had to wait for a good 15 minutes before we were offered a small cramped table.

If you know what Bistro the Home looked like before, you can probably tell they did a complete makeover on this place. The entire restaurant is decorated to look like you’re on deck or on a ship catching crawfish.

You can order your seafood by the pound and it is all market price. The crawfish at the time Meta Knight and I went was $12.99/lb. Once the seafood is chosen, you get to pick the sauce and the spicy level.

Aside from the seafood boil, they have other items such as fried seafood, gumbo, Jambalaya...etc. However, not every item was available such as fried okra, fried mushrooms, and blue crab.

For the two of us, we ordered Two Pounds of Crawfish ($12.99/lb) and Fried Oysters with Fries ($11.99).

We mainly ordered the fried oysters and fries as our carbs because we knew two pounds of seafood would not be enough for two people. The ‘cajun fries’ were (much to our disappointment) regular fries. There was not even a hint of cajun seasoning.

The oysters were okay but definitely not the best fried oysters I’ve ever had. Overall, this platter was  ‘meh’ but it got the job done of filling us up.

They serve the seafood in a plastic bag and the bucket is for shells.

Okay, so here goes my tiny rant. I read somewhere (I think the Seattle location’s website) that you get free corn, potatoes, and sausages if you order two pounds or more of crawfish. However, this location only gives you corn... and by corn, they mean half a corn. If we had known the corn was going to be so puny, we would have ordered one pound of crawfish and another pound of clams or shrimp.

We chose mild as the spicy level and Big Easy as our sauce. Mild was plenty spicy for us. We both loved the Big Easy seasoning because it was incredibly flavourful and I particularly enjoyed the massive amounts of garlic. One big FYI though- the crawfish is super oily! There was literally a pool of red oil sitting on the bottom of the crawfish.

The crawfish you get will range in size so some might be really small but some might be giant.

This particular one was very large and if you don’t know what crawfish is, it pretty much is like a tiny lobster. There is not much meat in the head so you just kind of suck its juices and eat the tail and claws. One thing we both noticed about their crawfish was that it was overcooked. If it was perfectly cooked, you should be able to get a whole piece of tail out in one piece, but in our case, it was mushy and did not come off in one piece.

Here is the scene of the crime. It is a dirty (but fun) experience so make sure you come with someone you are not trying to impress. It'll will be hard to look pretty wearing a bib while sucking the guts of little creatures with oil running down your hands. :D

It can get expensive if you want to fill yourself up here. We were okay because we had fries, but otherwise, one person would probably need about two pounds of seafood to be full.

Overall, it’s a very cool and fun experience to eat crawfish so I’d definitely recommend trying this place out. The horrible service that everyone talks about on Urbanspoon is true but I can tell they are trying really hard to accommodate the unexpected demand of hungry customers.  

Service Rating: 2/5

Food Rating: 3/5

Price: $$$-$$$$

Overall Rating: 3/5

Happy Eating!

<-- just lovin' my crawfish

courtesy of.. my camera :P