Sunday, November 28, 2010

catch up: the boiling crab

I had a craving for crab for a really long time, so N and I finally went to the Boiling Crab in Alhambra to be rid of it (this was back in September). I had heard it gets insanely crowded during dinner time, so I figured if we went at the very beginning of the dinner hour we'd be okay. We arrived at 4:50pm, and we ended up waiting an HOUR AND A HALF! It was insane. If I wasn't craving crab so badly, I would never have waited that long.

The Boiling Crab is a crazy restaurant where you order shrimp, crayfish, and crab by the pound, and they serve it to you in a plastic bag. There's various seasonings you can get on your seafood, but the agreed upon best flavor to get is "the whole sha-bang" which is a combination of all of their seasonings in one big mixture. It's salty, spicy, cajun-y, and just really, really good. The tables are covered with a shiny wax paper and each party gets an entire roll of paper towels since you eat everything with your hands there:


We got king crab legs, shrimp, and sweet potato fries. Once you get your plastic bag full of seafood, you dump it out straight onto the table and go at it. The shrimp come shell on, so it is impossible to be neat about it. 

It was good. Really, really good. But could I ever justify that wait again? I don't know. There were plenty of people doing carry-out, so maybe that's the way to go...if you could cover your home dining table with paper.

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