Description
The Los Angeles restaurant world has long been a place of improbable carom shots, but even here the Boiling Crab, a Cajun seafood restaurant opened by a Vietnamese family from southeast Texas and serving a young Chinese clientele, is unprecedented in the complexity of its resonances: Southeast Asian seafood culture colliding head-on with Franco-Acadian cuisine, Tabasco running into the bird pepper, spicy Vietnamese-Chinese crabstyles bleeding into the swamp cooking of the American South. At Boiling Crab, you choose seafood, boiled with a choice of three flavors - supersaturated garlic butter, lemon pepper, or a fiery Cajunesque seasoning that will stain your fingers and seep out of your pores - or, more likely, what the restaurant calls the Whole Sha-Bang, a mixture of all three. (It is good to remember that what the restaurant calls spicy is extremely spicy, of an intensity that more or less blots out the flavor of the seafood. Medium-spicy is fine.) It may take four or five attempts to get a glass of ice water, but a second beer appears on the table almost before you have a chance to open your mouth. Recommended dishes: shrimp, crab, crawfish. Severely limited lot parking.
