Dinner at The Crab Pot

We were walking around the waterfront area of Seattle and suddenly stumbled upon the Crab Pot, which is a place that I had read about and had wanted to try.  One of the hosts suggested we come back by 5:30pm if we didn’t want to wait for a table, otherwise they start getting lineups by 6pm. 

Although this was a Thursday night, I had heard that it is one of the most popular restaurants with tourists and we decided to listen to the host and made it back to the restaurant just after 5:30pm.  Within minutes, we were seated at a table at the back, but unfortunately, we seemed to have gotten the short end of the stick as the table we were seated at was on a bit of a slanted floor, so both our table and chairs were rocking.

The Crab Pot is mainly known for their Seafeasts, where an extravagant amount of fresh seafood is dumped directly onto your table and you are given a mallet to break down the seafood with.  The great thing about this is that although there were 4 of us, we didn’t have to order 4 orders of the Seafeast.  They have 4 different kinds and the minimum order for each kind is 2, so what we ended up doing was ordering a bunch of appetizers along with 2 orders of the Pacific Clambake Seafeast. 

The meal started off in a promising well, with sourdough bread and butter being served with our three appetizers.  We tried the crab cakes, tempura pickles and stuffed mushrooms.  The crab cakes are a signature menu item and it is easy to see why.  Super delicious, but at $16USD, we expected more than 2 pieces.  The tempura pickles were a disappointment as there was nothing tempura about them.  The pickles were coated in a thick breading that did not resemble tempura at all.  Lastly, the stuffed mushrooms brought the meal back to a positive as they were cheesy and full of flavour.

The Pacific Clambake Seafeast arrived immediately after our appetizers and after the initial amazement of how they were just pouring out all of this seafood onto our tables, we started to dig in.

From the very first bite, we were all sorely disappointed.

Whether it be the clams, the oyster or the mussels, everything had grains of sand in it.  Plus, the food came out cold, which we thought was strange since it was supposed to have been freshly steamed.  The food was also overcooked and dry, which really made the experience lacking. 

Unfortunately, the experience did not live up to standards for us, and I’m not sure if we were just unlucky because we did notice that the table next to us had their Seafeast served piping hot with steam.  Based solely on our experience, we likely wouldn’t go back.