Hot N Juicy Crawfish

Having visited Hot N Juicy Crawfish and a number of its competitors, we can understand their appeal to both customers and operators. For customers, these sometimes cajun, sometimes Vietnamese-cajun restaurants turn seafood into a somewhat fun, very messy experience where bags of boiled clams, shrimp, and crab fill you up as you peel away shells and tails. Your toughest decisions are how much to spend per person, what sort of flavor (butter, garlic, and/or spice) you want, and whether to add sausage and corn to your boiling bags.

Operators barely have to worry about training employees or providing service: apart from throwing fries, mozzarella sticks, catfish, and shrimp in a deep-fryer or tossing one of the proteins into a po’ boy sandwich roll, there’s not much work to be done in the kitchen, or in the dining room. Customers grab their trays with bags of seasoned shellfish, then handle all the rest of the work on their own. Owners fill up the bench-like tables, rinse them down, and repeat.

Across the items we tried here – “Louisiana spicy” clams, “yes head” shrimp “hot n juicy, extra spicy,” dungeness crab “garlic butter medium,” and cajun fries – there were no surprises. You order seafood by the pound, choose one of six very similar-sounding flavors and a spice level, then pay two or three times raw supermarket prices to eat it steaming hot from a bag with a bib on. It’s red pepper spicy if you want it spicy, buttery if you want it garlic buttery, or otherwise plain. If you’re budget-conscious and/or a glutton for punishment, you order the eponymous crawfish, which are resuscitated from frozen and have so little meat that you’ll have to suck the shells to get any sustenance.

There was nothing awesome about this particular location, and although we’ve tried others, we haven’t returned to any of them. Though the concept feels like low-hanging fruit, it’s totally fine on occasion – we’re just waiting for a place to find the right pricing and X factor to make us want to come back.