It used to be an Asian restaurant…sob. (RIP, Made in Kitchen.) It’s in the Asian-restaurant district. On our visit it was staffed almost entirely by Asians. Every diner in the place was Asian but us.
I’m going to call Crawfish King my favorite Casian restaurant in town.
As Cajun goes it’s pretty good too—with qualifications. You have to have no qualms about plucking (temperature) hot crawfish out of a plastic bag that’s all gooey with garlicky hot sauce. Leave your sleeves at home.
Then you have to know how to split the tail of the crawfish, aka the mudbug, crack it off the head, suck the head (yes, I said “suck the head,”) then eat the lobsterlike tail meat.
And repeat.
It’s not for everyone. Thankfully the mudbugs are getting bigger as the season ripens, assuring that for the next few months the juice, as they say, will be increasingly worth the squeeze.
Diners do all this tail-cracking and head-sucking over paper tablecloths without aid of plates, so you have to be fine leaving a big mess at your table. (Did I say leave your sleeves at home? I think I meant all your clothes.)
There’s other stuff on the menu, like fried shrimp (ours was overcooked) and a really fine gumbo (but still not as fine as King Creole’s world-class rendition). But everyone we saw was suckin’ the mudbugs, felling whole forests for sufficient paper towels to wipe the (spicy) hot sauce from their tingling faces.
Prices are cheap. Soda refills are free. Parking, since the King’s gratis spots are probably occupied, is just about impossible.
And the International District’s just a little more international.
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