Downtown Crackin’ Crab relaunching with sushi
Owners say seafood boil menu incompatible with mostly lunchtime clientele
It seems demand for seafood boil specialties at one Downtown spot has been decidedly lukewarm.
So in order to boost business, the owners of Albuquerque’s three-store Crackin’ Crab are going dark for a few weeks to convert just their Imperial Building location into a sushi/ramen/ ceviche place.
The owners of the seafood boil restaurant plan to relaunch at the same spot under the new business name Don Sushi.
“The Downtown area was a rough place to do business with a seafood boil menu,” said Richard Gallegos, a commercial real estate broker with Sperry Van Ness Team Southwest, who described the Crackin’ Crab cuisine as “Cajun meets Asian boil.”
Downtown diners, many of them busy office workers, are time-starved, and millennials are more on-the-go eaters, said Gallegos. Hence the rebrand for the eatery, which is located at 205 Silver SW, Suite H, Gallegos said.
Opened less than a year on the ground floor of the Imperial, the eatery will reopen with a more streamlined menu, said Gallegos, who has represented owners Rack and Vanh Mingkhamsavath, who run other Crackin’ Crab locations — one on the West Side at the McMahon Marketplace and another in Northeast Avenue near the Century Rio 24 movie theater.
Both of these stores are going great guns, said Gallegos. “It takes the right fit of demographics in an area for a restaurant like this to succeed,” said Gallegos.
“This new place will be a little more price friendly and fast casual,” said Gallegos of the Don Sushi menu, which also will include noodle dishes and poke, which is a raw fish salad served as an appetizer in Hawaiian cuisine, and sometimes as a main course.