Viet-Cajun fare at Juicy Seafood

Just past the diverging diamond on South Winton Road sits
Juicy Seafood. Its exterior does not stand out from many of its neighbors in
the Winton Place location, but its approach to its cuisine, service, and
environment does. The idea for Viet-Cajun fare stems from a series of
restaurants in the Southern US that fuse Vietnamese cuisine and seafood.

Juicy
Seafood serves a mix of fried and baked seafood, including oysters, shrimp,
calamari, mussels, and clams. Other seafood staples, such as blue crab, are offered
seasonally. There are only a few sides on the menu.

It’s easy to
miss what makes Juicy Seafood’s décor different than what you’d find in a
typical suburban strip mall. At first glance, the tables, chairs, and walls all
check out as average. As I waited for the lemonade I ordered, the difference
creeped up on me. The booths and walls are covered with customer names and
comments, written mostly in sharpie.

Restaurant
manager Jim Wang says he allowed customers to write on the surfaces for the
restaurant’s first four months in business. They would continue it, he says, but
they ran out of space.

“It adds a
special touch for customers,” Wang says. “A memory. You were here when we
started.” He says that Juicy has many repeat customers, some who visit multiple
times a week. I visited the restaurant on a Saturday afternoon, when it bustled
at about 75 percent capacity.

When
customers are seated in a booth, the servers unravel a table-wide sheet of
brown paper and top it with enough silver metal buckets for your party. Inside
the buckets are bags filled with plastic bibs with giant orange crabs printed
on them, gloves, crab-crackers, and forks. Prepare to get messy. You’ll likely
need all of the above.

When your
order is ready, your server will bring you yet another plastic bag. This one is
see-through and carefully carried on a silver-toned platter. The server stands
at the edge of your table, braces the bottom of the platter while holding the
holding the folds of the bag closed. Watching servers approach first-time
customers is telling and entertaining. Some customers are amused, others are bewildered
as they watch the staff jostle their meal in the bag with the sauce of their
choice, like balls in a lottery machine. Hot air clouds the bag as the server
sets it before you and unfurls it.

There are
four seasonings to choose from: Garlic butter, Cajun-garlic butter, lemon
pepper, and the Juicy special, which is a blend of all three flavors. You also
have an option of spice levels of mild, medium, hot, extra hot, or no spicy. On
the back of the menu, I checked off medium and chose a half-pound of crawfish,
a half-pound of crab legs, and a half-pound of snow crab, with baked salt
potatoes and a small-ish portion of sweet corn on the
cob (a nice haul for $24.99). A close-up look at inside bag reveals
millimeter-deep, lemon pepper-dominated waves of orange-colored sauce.

For the
uninitiated, eating crustaceans can be a jarring experience. Accessing the
juicy meat inside each shellfish is a skill unto itself. The head of each
crawfish should be twisted and pulled off without damaging the chewy, slim
sliver of meat inside. The next step is breaking the tail. “It’s a lot of work
for a little bit of meat.” Wang says. “But it’s worth it.”

When eating
snow crab, you pinch the tail and yank it off, then peel away the rest of its
shell. In order to access sweet meat inside crab legs, Wang advises that the
legs should be broken at the joints first. Depending on the thickness of the
center, you can crack open the shell with your hands, teeth, or a crab cracker.
Smaller forks are available upon request if you can’t pull the meat out any
other way. Dip the meat into your sauce and enjoy.

The baked
salt potatoes showed no hint of greasiness, and the sweet corn on the cobb was
a great compliment to the savory nature of the sauce’s seasoning — which
remains a mystery even to Wang.

The
seasoning is sourced from down South, he says, and its makers won’t disclose
the ingredients. “It’s a secret recipe,” he says.

This article appears in Jan 16-22, 2019.