A gift shop right inside the door of a restaurant has never been interpreted by Munch to be a good sign.
It's a question of mission: Is this place in the food-serving business, or in the ever-proliferating promotions racket? Focus, people, focus.
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| | | Joe's Crab Shack Joe's Crab Shack is at 5 Station Square. It's open 4-10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Sunday. Call 412-690-2404. | |
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But at Joe's Crab Shack in the new Bessemer Court area at Station Square, the conflict quickly dissolves itself. Joe's has a gift shop, but it also has the good sense to put its junk in there, T-shirts and other nonsense, and deals the quality stuff from the kitchen. Too many other places, not to name any names (Planet Hollywood, oops) do the exact opposite.
What Munch wants in a restaurant is not a luxuriant $30 sweatshirt, but rather an intensely edible $7 crab cake sandwich. Which is why Munch and even Friend of Munch, reliably of more refined tastes, felt very much at home at Joe's, despite its carefully staged "quirks."
A 40-minute wait at Joe's (they don't take reservations) can be riddled by announcements such as "Smith party; where ya at? Come get fat!" and about a half dozen similar pleas that stay just under the red on the cute-o-meter and therefore don't prejudice your enjoyment of the seafood gumbo.
Munch adored it. A dark broth swimming with crab meat, shrimp, and rice seasoned with peppers and onions, the latter of which Munch banished to the edges of the bowl.
The additional "quirks" include the dancing wait staff that puts a flowered bra on men celebrating birthdays (but who among us hasn't done that?) and gives the like-afflicted women a paper tiara and feather boa. The staff dances about every 20 minutes or so. Our experience included the chicken dance, but fair warning was given.
"I think that would be fun," said FOM. "If you've got to wait tables, you might as well dance."
Munch considered that over crab balls (breaded, deep-fried ping pong ball-sized nuggets of you-guessed-it), nodding patiently despite wondering what kind of dance FOM would have done during a brief stint waiting tables at Dutch Pantry. Just as Munch was thinking Dutch Pantry Table Dance had to have been on Cinemax late one Friday, the reasonably priced entrees arrived.
Munch had the aforementioned crab cake sandwich, a quarter-pound offering robustly presented with pickle, onion, lettuce, tomato, two dressings, fries and slaw, while FOM enjoyed the crab-stuffed shrimp ($9.99), with which FOM substituted twice-baked potato for rice pilaf. The potato came with an amount of Cheddar covering sufficient to delight or offend, depending on your personal Cheddar threshold.
FOM said the filling for the stuffed shrimp, which was crab-based (what were the odds?), was spicy but good. But any part of any thing you don't like or find routinely inedible (such as, you know, the jagged shells of whatever creature recently died for you), you just throw in a bucket that serves as the centerpiece of the table. In that sense, Joe's is a very traditional bibs-and-nutcrackers-and-mallets seafood house, with rolls of paper towels at the ready for your bad buttery self. That motif is a trifle at odds with the larger setting, which is the standard junk-hanging-from-the-walls-and-ceiling motif of so much American mid-level dining. Joe's has about 50 percent more of it per square foot.
The Joe's Crab Shack chain got its start in Houston, where it hoped to combine tacky with fishy, and boy, has it succeeded. It specializes in Alaskan king crab, Dungeness crab, Alaskan snow crab and blue crab, but you can get a burger or a fried chicken dish, a steak or a salad.
The bananas foster FOM had for dessert was too cold, but why complain when you can buy a T-shirt that says "Bite Me" or order a specialty drink in a fishbowl? And then again, who hasn't drunk from a fishbowl?
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