Crab Pot Restaurant

Reviews 3

EN

Enrique Rodriguez

I decided to go here because I saw an episode on Man Vs. Food about The Crab Pot. I decided to get the Alaskan Feast. Before I went I was told you have to have at least two people to be able to eat there. It ended up being that you have to pay a double price for seafood, you cant order by yourself. If you go there with someone and they want a burger and not Seafood you cant order the meal. Or you can but still have to pay double. The seafood I wanted was $40. I had to pay $80 for it. Luckily I had someone with me. The location is nice, it is right on the pier next to the water. It is very very busy and it seems like there is limited staff. The waitress I had was very good and very friendly. Although, she was super fast, which is normally what you want, but in this case; we would have liked to take our time. Even though she was very good and very friendly; I felt like they were being super rushed. There is indoor and outdoor seating which was very nice on a sunny day. I enjoyed being able to sit in the Sun while waiting for my meal. The food was very good for being Seafood. But for the price I paid and what I saw on TV, I really expected the food to have a lot more flavor than it did. When I ate some of the crabs, lobster, shrimp etc. There just wasnt much flavor to it. I feel like they could have seasoned the food a lot better than they did. Or they could have at least given some type of sauce that would be good with the seafood. They gave butter on the side for the lobster which was good, but once again its just butter there is no flavor to it. I love shrimp like crazy, but was not expecting the entire shrimp, head and all. I know the points of this is too make you work for it so you enjoy it even more, but the lack of flavor just makes it so you get aggravated. The meal I had came with potatoes, andouille sausage, shrimp, muscles, potatoes, corn, crab and lobster. First of all there was not much andouille sausage to begin with which I love very much. For that kind of a price you would think they would load it up a little bit more. Potatoes were good, but they were also lacking in some serious seasoning. Basically the food was Bland with just a hint of seasoning. Of the entire meal that I received, the Sourdough bread and butter at the beginning of the meal and the corn that came with the meal was probably the best season food of the dish. I feel the hype is mostly because of the amount of seafood you receive that is piled in the table, the fact its on the water and the biggest hype of it all is the fact Adam Richman from the show Man Vs Food went there and said it was phenomenal. They either paid him to advertise for them, or they made a special dish for him with more seasoning. Personally, I believe he over embellished how good the food was and should just be brutally honest no matter what. If I had my own show of me going to different places to try the food, I would give my actual opinion whether it be good or bad of how the food is. In my personal opinion, I believe the food was okay, it wasnt the greatest food I have ever had in terms of seafood, but it was fun to experience a crapload of seafood spread on the table and a mallet to kill it with.lol I would recommend this to Seafood lovers who want to eat a lot of seafood and are want a fun experience. I dont want to give it a 4 or 5 star but cant give it a 3.5 star. So 3 it is. Mostly I would recommend this because it is fun to have a pile of seafood on your table and be able to open it with a mallet. I believe the food was a little overpriced and very under seasoned. I will go back to try it again and see if maybe it was just that one time. But it is definitely a one-time visit kind of restaurant. P.S. if you want a lot of seafood and sushi and some overall very good food for a better price; I would highly recommend Feast Buffet in Renton Mika Japanese buffet in Federal Way.

RO

Robert Ellis

This place is boarderline vile. The Crab Pot is an obvious tourist restaurant on the Seattle Waterfront, although it lacks waterfront views, to speak of, from the dining room. As a waterfront tourist restaurant, expectations for the Crab Pot are correspondingly low – the seafood will be average, it will have fresh Dungeness crab, which is hard to ruin, and will be overpriced. The Crab Pot not only fails to meet such modest expectations, it fails on a borderline rancid, epic scale. I worked as a captain and mate in the Alaska seafood industry for about a decade, working primarily in the Gulf and on the Bering Sea. So I recognized the aroma of rotting shellfish and disinfectant permeating the restaurant when I walked in. Things then got worse. Our rather large group had the “crab feed”. Servers bring bucket s of steaming, off-smelling swill and dump it on the butcher-paper covered table in front of you. Off-smelling swill may be too kind a description of the food. It smelled bad. It looked bad. The crab were a sort of dull faded red to grey color. They were also not fresh Dungeness, which are now being caught commercially caught in Washington State waters (season runs December to September). They were frozen Opillio, sometimes sold as “snow” or “queen” crab. Opillio, under the best of circumstances, tastes like iodine – it’s a cheap crab meat primarily used as a crab ingredient in other dishes so it can’t really be tasted. These actually stunk, had strong iodine taste, and a mushy freezer burn texture. There were a few Dungeness chunks. They also stunk and looked like something that had been forgotten in a corner until it had time to ferment, and were then cooked and mixed with a bunch of other things to disguise the taste and appearance. The clams and mussels were cooked to a rubbery texture, but still managed to reek. The shrimp were unpeeled. If someone made the mistake of trying to extract a shrimp from its shell, the mealy, gooey meat exploded as if from a lanced boil. Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of the Crap Pot is that its expensive. Other waterfront view restaurants serve actual fresh Dungeness crab – which, again, is difficult to make bad – for the same price as the vile “crab feed”. Rays and Anthony’s are by no means great restaurants – but they do manage to deliver well prepares fresh seafood and a water view at about the same cost as this place. There are so many good seafood places in Seattle. Do yourself a favor and give this place a miss.

HO

Holly Cremeans

My family and I went to The Crab Pot tonight for an early birthday celebration. After we were seated, in a back corner, we had to wait at least 15 minutes before our order was taken. Luckily we at least had water to drink. Since we had looked at the menu ahead of time online, we went in knowing already what we were going to order. We had the closed menus sitting on the end of our table almost right away...yet we still waited. Despite the fact that there were, what seemed like, dozens of servers wandering around. Then our order was finally taken, The Alaskan feast for 2 please! It was myself, my boyfriend and my son - do this should have been plenty. My boyfriend and I also ordered two starter salads with Caesar dressing, and my son ordered a root beer. Another, at least, 5-7 minutes pass before the root beer was delivered. When the salads arrived, both had ranch dressing instead of what we wanted. It didnt take long for the feast to arrive. But when it did, it was very underwhelming! There was only enough crab for 1 person, and the whole bowl was seriously over cooked. All the seafood was terribly rubbery and the corn/potatoes/sausage were dry. The entire dish lacked flavor. We didnt even get melted butter or lemon...we had to ask for it, and it took forever! Part of the experience of doing a feast, I thought, was getting to wear the special feast bibs. We didnt get those either. We watched all the other tables seemingly enjoy the full feast experience that we were hoping to get. We arrived at the restaurant between 4-4:30pm, and it was not very crowded at all. I had called ahead to find out when the slower times were since they do not take reservations, and we were arriving by ferry from Bremerton. Overall, very very disappointed. For the amount that we were charged, it should have been way better! This was supposed to be a fun, delicious, special dinner - but it was not. Happy birthday to me