Crawfish House — Restaurant in White Center

I haven't found an amazing seafood boil place yet so I do think Crawfish House may be one of the best around Seattle, but it wasn't that spectacular. I'm not sure why, but seafood boil around here hasn't quite wow'd me despite our vicinity to the waters and having amazing fish and clam chowder. Service is solid though, I'll give them that.

We were recommended the tango sauce by a friend but our waiter insisted the house sauce was way better and the tango was "sour" and persuaded us to opt for the house sauce. Honestly, the sauce didn't impress and was a large pool of oil at the bottom of our boil. Dipping was alright, but it wasn't spread well to showoff the spices to our taste buds, overall the sauce was underwhelming and greasy. For spice levels, we asked for 3* but it was really mild, something near a 1.5* and also underwhelming.

Began with some appetizers too, we ordered at happy hour where the prices should be cheaper, but weren't discounted. Honestly, it was whatever and the appetizers were standard. Opted for the cajun fries and onion rings, both weren't surprising and nothing bad to report.

4 pounds of seafood total: both crawfish options, snow crab, and shrimp.

Louisiana Red Crawfish - sweeter crawfish like they mention, but small in size. Not overly sweet or anything, not that you'd expect that, but tasty.

Pacific (Signal) Crawfish - seasonal crawfish that's larger, looks more intimidating, and meatier. I liked this one more, it felt more efficient as I got more meat for similar effort and it tasted fine, wasn't bad or anything just less sweet.

Snow Crab - my personal favorite, but I love crab so there's some bias. Very easy to get the meat out and they're great sizes as well, being crab legs.

Shrimp - these were probably the worst tasting option here. They tasted "like the sea" and had sand in them. The only pro was that they're easy to peel and eat, but shrimp is better anywhere else.

Also got French bread, dipping in the sauce was alright but once again, the sauce wasn't anything special. It was mostly like tasting bread with olive oil on top, maybe our sauce was skimping on the special spices. Tagged on some potatoes and sausages with the order - potatoes are nice and tender. Sausages are juicy, but they are...

Hip hop, in a Seattle club like venue (decor but the space is small) but eating crab pot at cheaper than the Waterfront? Yes, please! And no, the lighting isn't dim.

It even comes with spicy salt and lime wedges whether you like it or not.

Mind you, the boil here isn't with the dry rub, it is with butter.. or at least the ones that we ordered this time. You get to choose from garlic butter, house butter with their special spices and the Louisiana boil. We chose the first two. Ain't nuttin wrong with mo' butta! Especially garlic! You even get to choose the spiciness, so we got the middle number, 3.

The first one we got was red king crab at 20.99/lb in house butter sauce. It is the largest king crab they have. We got a lb, which only gave us two crab legs. We even ordered 4 pieces of corn and 4 pieces of sausages for 3.00 extra. We should have ordered some bread too, to sop up all of the buttery goodness! The spice was good and gave some redness through the butter. What's even better is that instead of mallets and crab crackers, they give you kitchen shears to cut your crab with. Ingenious! They even have gloves and a lobster bib you can use. The second round we got the garlic butter with the snow crab and shrimp. Snow crab was 12 dollas a lb and shrimp was 13 dollars a lb. The shrimp is not headless, so I had to show my friend how to take the heads off. More garlicky than the house butter. They gave us about 12 snow crab for 1 lb and shrimp was about 10.

We also ordered the fried pickles, which to me was ok, it tasted like pickles that were in a jar and covered in calamari breading and fried. My friend loved them, probably because she has more of a salt tooth than me.

Next time, we're ordering the snow crab...

I grew up in New Orleans. Crawfish House isn't perfect, but it's by far the best crawfish boil I've had out here. They're actually doing it correctly in the Louisiana style. (We got the Louisiana-style sauce, but they had a few other options.) We got the "2 stars" spice level, which was consistent with an average NOLA boil- a decent bit of heat, but nothing overpowering. (Contrary to popular understanding, Cajun cooking is not about just dumping as much cayenne pepper as you can stand into everything. It's about perfectly-blended flavors with a touch of heat.)

We added potatoes, corn, and sausage to the boil- which are typical accompaniments. The potatoes and corn were quite good seasoning-wise, but some of the corn has kernels that were a bit hard to bite into. The sausage was fine, but far from the best NOLA andouille brands like Savoie's or Richard's.

We got the red beans & rice and crawfish corn soup on the side. The red beans were fine, but not great. They felt a bit undercooked- the best red beans have a creaminess that these didn't. The soup had very good flavor (we spooned a bit of the "crawfish water" in for some extra flavor!), but the texture was slightly lacking- a bit over-pureed. It needed a bit more distinct texture like some visible corn kernels. Something green like a bit of parsley chopped in would have really brightened it up (visual, taste, and texture).

With all that said, we enjoyed the meal and this is legit NOLA-style crawfish in Seattle, which is an achievement. It wouldn't get 5 stars in NOLA, but I'll give it 5 stars here.

Note: I'd previously had Crawfish King and they... don't do it right. (Un / under-seasoned boil with a goopy / snotty sauce dumped...