A new restaurant is opening up in town called Boiling Seafood Crawfish, promising “New Orleans style” food. Hmm, sounds tempting (I am fond of crawfish for one thing).
Then I discover that the signature items are hot seafood served in a plastic bag, with no utensils available (management provides a bib and plastic gloves, for what one enthusiastic reviewer terms “Messy Fun” and a swell interactive experience).*
“Walking into Boiling Seafood for the first time is terrifying. At each table, diners are hunched over what looks to be a gory heap, dismembering pieces parts with their bare hands and gobbling them up like extras in the Walking Dead. The fact that the restaurant is small and dim – a former Chinese carry-out – only seems to heighten the anxiety…
Whether it’s cracking crabs by the Chesapeake, dunking Maine steamer clams in butter, or attacking a mountain of boiled crawfish deep in Cajun Country, the most enjoyable seafood experiences are usually a god-awful mess. Good luck finding a messier meal in town than this one. At one point, I literally was picking shrimp shells out of my hair, and I’m pretty confident that I ruined a perfectly good pair of pants.”
Note to reviewer: it’s eminently possible to get through a heap of steamers without ruining your clothes, and I’ve had lots of good crawfish dinners without needing to dissect the tiny goddamn things out of their shells.**
Whoever dreamed up this communal dining equivalent of mud-wrestling, include me out.
Any other Fun concepts out there that need to be thrown in the dustbin of restaurant history?
*Not sure what the brown crud on the corn in the photo is, but I’m betting it’s either corn silk the chef left in place to enhance your “messy fun”, or possibly crawfish excrement for that authentic New Orleans touch.
**I do occasionally get cold peel and eat shrimp at restaurants, which is kind of messy, but would be less so if the idjits would stop sprinkling spice on the shrimp shells which leaves a bunch of residue on your hands.
The hell? What kind of crawfish dish were you eating, and what kind of utensil were you using? Crawfish Alfredo at Red Lobster or something?
Crawfish New Orleans style is pretty much guaranteed to be boiled whole in spices along with potatoes and corn. The corn will be left with a coating of spices, which includes a lot of red pepper. You crack the crawfish with your bare hands. It is a huge mess and takes a long time to eat.
Yeah, I’m not keen on the plastic sack, but a boil is a beautiful thing. Shrimp, potatoes, mussels, clams, crawfish, corn, potatoes, onions, and peppers coated with spices when it comes out of the boil. Poured onto a platter for 2-4-6. Plan on being hungry and having time to eat. And yes, I definitely don’t wear my best clothes to a boil.
I’m guessing you wouldn’t care for Joe’s on Tybee Island that has both feral cats and alligators.
That was one of the charms of a college area brewpub in Tucson. They served beer in one-pint Mason jars. They also had a booth in which Linda (Eastman) McCartney had carved her initials when she was attending the University of Arizona.
There’s Lambert’s Cafe in Sikeston MO, home of the “throwed rolls”. They literally chuck them at you from across the restaurant. My dad got beaned by one once - a combination of bad eyesight and poor reflexes.
The type of restaurant in the OP can be found commonly in the Southeast. I suppose the mistake they made would be opening it in Cleveland, where that style is unknown. It would be like opening a spaghetti-covered-in-chili restaurant in Mississippi.
There used to be a steak restaurant called “U-R Cooks”. Their gimmick was that you cooked your own steaks at open grills in the middle of the restaurant. You’d stand there cooking your steak just like you would do at home, only paying more for the privilege. We used to joke they were going to open another restaurant called “U-R Dishwashers”.
Those places were popular in the Midwest in the 1980s, only they charged LESS if you cooked your own - $1, IIRC. They were fun places to go to if you were with a large group. ETA: The one I went to wasn’t, to my knowledge, part of a chain.
The novel “Cat’s Eye” had a character who proposed a restaurant where you select your own food out of the refrigerator, cook it yourself, and clean up afterwards.
There was “that corner” in my old town. One of the failed concepts was a sit-down restaurant that I will admit had wonderful food and great ambiance; the place seated about 30 people total, and had about 5 parking spaces within a 2-block radius. :smack: However, one reason that restaurant failed was because one of the owners failed to tell authorities that he was a sex offender, and also embezzled a lot of the restaurant’s money. :mad:
One of my favorites is the crawfish platter at Pappadeaux (typically comes with fried crawfish and crawfish etoufee, pictured here. Given the amount of meat in a crawfish, I don’t want to waste time dissecting them en masse. I’ll happily pay someone else to do it for me.
Oh, and every place I’ve ever eaten lobster at (including the world-famous Nunan’s Lobster Hut) provides tableware. And I’ve never been one to bother with lobster bibs.*
I suspect the real motivation behind the “New Orleans experience” at the restaurant described in the OP is the owners’ desire to save money by not having to shell the seafood and not needing to stock utensils. (Pity the cleanup crew that has to swab down the tables and floors).
Alligator, OK. I’m not into the idea of eating feral cats. Maybe we could have a theme restaurant chain where you bring your pets to dine with you, no matter what they are.
*which reminds me of one of my favorite Gahan Wilson cartoons of the guy in the lobster bib, uneasily contemplating a jury box full of lobsters.
**I like drinking out of Mason jars. I have several at home for that purpose.
Saving money on utensils is probably not the case. The way you generally eat at a crawfish boil is with your hands, whether at a restaurant or in your backyard. You could use utensils, but it would be odd in the same way that eating NY pizza with a fork and knife is odd.
Typically the tables have some type of disposable covering, like newspaper, to help with cleanup.
Every restaurant is built on “that one corner”. The location isn’t special; the business is. Running a restaurant successfully is a lot harder than most people think, and requires a very different skill set, with the result that most restaurants fail very quickly. So you get one place open up somewhere, and unsurprisingly, it fails. It’s followed by another, and another, and unsurprisingly, they fail too. Eventually, if the place isn’t torn down, you get management in who has the knack for business, and you get a restaurant that sticks around for decades. Until the owner retires, and then the cycle starts again.
My time in Mississippi was made all the more enjoyable by meals you just described - you drive by a shack on the side of the road on the way home from work, tell them how many people you need to feed (or how many pounds), and they give you a plastic bag (which is *maybe *inside of a cardboard box, but not always (or usually)) filled with boiled crawfish, potatoes and 1/2 corns. All of which are covered in a delicious seasoning mess. You then eat it with your hands - either all hunched over around the box/bag, or if you’re extremely fancy, you pour the giant mess onto a picnic table covered in newspaper.
