The Angry Crab

The Angry Crab is a Cajun-style seafood restaurant on N Lincoln Ave in West Rogers Park that opened this March. It's been very hyped, and I've heard there's been long waits. We went around 4:00pm on a Thursday and didn't have to wait at all; however, by the time we left, a line was forming.

It's run by a trio of Vietnamese brothers. This cross-cultural type of restaurant began opening in Vietnamese neighborhoods at the start of the century, and are known as "boiling points". This is Chicago's first one. Everything you order is cooked together in one big pot and served all together.

There is communal seating, tables are covered with paper, and everyone's given a bib. There's a variety of seafood shipped to the restaurant daily from the Gulf and served with your choice of spices in plastic bags. You eat right out of the bag and discard shells and waste right onto the table. There's no plates or utensils except for a shellfish cracker and shell opener.

Seafood options on the menu include live lobsters, live crawfish, clams, head-on shrimp, head-off shrimp, mussels, softshell crab, snow crab legs, king crab legs, Dungeness crab, and blue crab when it's in season. You order by the pound. The concept is that you choose your seafood, then choose your spices. We went for the snow crab legs, mussels, and the Ragin' Bulls spice mix, which was classified as semi-spicy. You can also add meats and vegetables to your boil. We opted to add 2 pieces of corn on the cob, and 2 red potatoes, which were good additions. I also added a side of butter for dipping.



On the side, we had softshell crab over Cajun-garlic fries, which came with ketchup and a spicy sauce. Both the softshell crab and fries seemed overcooked to me, but we scarfed down everything.



There's no other restaurant like this in Chicago. It's worth a trip at least once. Go early to avoid the rush, and BYOB.