rev:text
| - 3.5 stars.
Since we've been to Angry Crab several times now, we wanted to try Hot N Juicy to compare! Right away, we loved the location and energy in Tempe. They played fun music and the floor to ceiling windows let in a lot of light and was ideal for people watching haha. The location is much smaller than Angry Crab and the closest parking was in a parking structure behind the movie theater. They don't validate parking so we had to pay $12 to park there, yikes. I guess its expected to pay high parking prices in the heart of downtown Tempe but you'd think there would be a discount for dining close by at least?
Anyway on to the food. We ordered the shrimp, snow crab, etouffee, oysters, and cajun fries. They let you order half pounds of shrimp (only for shrimp) here which is great but overall the prices are higher than the other place. Seafood tasted fresh though. The oysters were tiny so we were disappointed by that. The corn and potato we ordered with the shrimp was mushy though.The etouffee was yummy, kind of like a hearty seafood gumbo with peppers and crawfish, but for 8 bucks we got a container filled with 70% rice and maybe 30% etouffee. Not cool. They were nice enough to let us sample the etouffee before we ordered it though since we've never had it before.
I think what kind of ruined this visit for me was how runny the sauce was on the shrimp. We got the Hot N Juicy Special which was a mix of Louisiana Style, Juicy Cajun, Garlic Butter, and Lemon Pepper. Overall it tasted diluted to me... We ordered the same sauce on the snow crab but the sauce was a lot thicker. So we would peel our shrimp and dip it back into the sauce crab bag. Not sure if its this inconsistent all the time but I guess only a second visit will tell.
Oh FYI if you don't know what kind of crab to order, there are 4 options. King crab is more meaty and saltier, the most expensive, and a harder shell to penetrate. Snow crab (our favorite) is the second most expensive, with a thinner shell and sweeter meat. Dungeness crab is the whole crab, harder to break through and also has sweeter meat. They were out of blue crab so we didn't get to try it, but this was the cheapest option at about ten bucks a pound.
|