Lulu Chi goes Cajun with heat
Lulu Chi has been a dominant figure on central Arkansas’ Asian restaurant scene for nearly four decades.
In addition to the several Chinese restaurants that bear her last name (three across Little Rock plus the one in Hillcrest she sold to a former chef, with which she no longer has any connection), she operates a pan-Asian restaurant (Thai, Chinese and Japanese) called Oishi in Little Rock’s Pulaski Heights and two Sushi Cafes (one in the Heights, one in west Little Rock). She founded, and sold off, Crazy Hibachi in North Little Rock. And she at one time had (and maybe still has) a piece of west Little Rock’s Sekisui.
So who would have expected that with her newest restaurant venture, Chi would go — Cajun?
That’s right. At Lulu’s Crab Boil, operating out of a former ice cream emporium on R Street in the Heights, you can consume cayenne ’til you’re cryin’, in conjunction with a variety of seafoods,
from crab and clams to crawfish and catfish. And don’t forget the po’ boys, gumbo, etouffee, andouille sausage and beignets.
Not so far fetched as it might seem, if you check out the restaurant’s website, luluscrabboil.com, wherein it notes that Bill and Lulu Chi’s roots go back to Shandong, China, where “Grandpa Chi” operated a fishing company in the South China Sea, with the fisherman taking home “the freshest of the catch to share in abundance with their families and friends” to be boiled up with corn and potatoes.
Chi does Cajun right, starting with her chef and kitchen staff, who obviously know what they’re up to.
The comparatively tiny space, which seats just over 40, is rife with seafood shanty accents, including wooden tables (half urethane-coated, half “raw,” so at suppertime the staff covers them with butcher paper to protect against inevitable spills becoming permanent stains) and sturdy chairs, plus the obligatory few bits of fishing net and other decor elements designed to remind you you’re eating seafood. Lights overhanging the “raw” tables have pierced tin buckets as lampshades. Classic rock, from The Beatles to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” provides the soundtrack.
On the “lunch” side of the
menu, go right for the po’ boys. Our Shrimp Po’ Boy ($9) came on a fresh, midsize hoagie roll with a bed of lettuce and more slices of fresh tomato and pickles than we’d ever seen on a po’ boy, plus about a half-dozen beautifully blackened shrimp (fried is also an option). It didn’t last long. Other po’ boy options: blackened or fried catfish, beer batter-fried oysters, cornmeal batter-fried crawfish tails and blackened or fried Voodoo Chicken.
We were also delighted with our Lulu Gumbo ($6), which contained a delicious, spicedjust-right and surprisingly filling melange of shrimp, andouille sausage, okra and tomato in “a dark homemade roux.”
You’d better believe the appetizer menu means it when it says Spicy Fish Beignets ($9), because the chunks of fish come in a crisp, fluffy beer batter fairly dripping with eye-tearing hot sauce. The portion is generous enough for a meal, too. So is the Salt Calamari ($9), nicely tender squid rings in a tempura-like peppercorn batter, though we didn’t particularly taste much pepper. It comes with not quite enough of a tangy sweet-andhot-and-sour sauce for dipping.
We can also recommend the Shrimp & Fries ($9), a pile of blackened, as we had them, or fried shrimp served over a goodly portion of Cajun-seasoned fries. We twice tried to order the Crab Fingers ($8), “Cajun-dusted and fried,” but the item has turned out to be more popular than the management estimated and the kitchen was out both times.
On the main menu, you can go in one of two directions. If you’re feeding a group, or are just up for a gut-busting, try one of the Combination Boils, two or more seafood items cooked up with potatoes, cob corn and andouille sausage, ranging from Shrimp & Crawfish ($26) to the Lulu Bucket ($45), with snow crab clusters (that’s a cluster of smaller crab legs), crawfish, clams, shrimp and mussels.
Or you can go with one of the three-step entrees. At Step 1, “Pick Your Seafood,” some of it seasonal, priced by the pound: crawfish ($12.99), shrimp ($14.99), whole blue or Dungeness crab (market price), whole lobster (ditto), snow crab clusters ($18.99), king crab legs ($34.99), Manila clams ($11.99)
or Pacific mussels ($11.99).
Step 2, “Choose Your Sauce” — Lemon Pepper (lemon, lime, chives), Garlic Butter (fresh minced garlic, drawn butter), Rajin Cajun (cayenne and habanero peppers) or Lulu Sauce (Asian chiles, pickled radish, garlic and Sriracha).
And Step 3, “Customize Your Spice,” with three levels of relative heat (indicated on the menu by the number of peppers — “Crybaby” (one pepper); “Hot to Trot” (three peppers), subtitled “Now we’re getting hot in here”; and “Inferno” (five peppers), aka “K.O. Crazy hot — where’s my stomach ulcer?”
Crybabies we were, for all three step-by-step entrees. And three of those sauces were plenty spicy — or even spicier — at that level. For example, we wouldn’t have wanted one more Scoville heat unit in the Lulu Sauce in which we got our Pacific mussels (which were enormous, to the point of monstrousness, and incredibly tender). Even the Crybaby version of the lemon pepper sauce on our Manila clams included a darned good shot of cayenne pepper.
Kicking in an extra three bucks to have our pound of clams cooked up with a piece of corn on the cob, sliced into six cobettes, turned out to be an excellent choice. It was a better option than ordering the corn on the side, which, though nicely dripping with butter, was kind of bland by comparison.
Our mouths still tingle from the Rajin Cajun sauce, which
was probably the best option for our $3, half-pound side of spicy andouille sausage.
However, the garlic butter that came on the side of our Snow Crab Clusters had, for Intrepid Companion in particular, an overwhelming amount of garlic; we did pretty well with just the delicate crab boil in which they were cooked. And after a very few minutes, the once-hot butter cooled and congealed into garlic-butter paste, suitable, perhaps, for slathering onto garlic bread but not for dipping crab meat.
Our dessert beignets ($7) were very similar to small sopapillas; supposedly “lightly dusted,” they came fairly well covered with sugar crystals.
The short wine list is posted in the front window as well as in table tents (where the beer list is on the reverse side); a small light-up sign above the door promises “Beer.” Beer might have been a better choice, but our $6.50 glass of sweet moscato held up surprisingly well against the sting of the sauces.
Much of what’s being served is finger food, but silverware ought to be automatic, especially since just about all the entrees required it, so we shouldn’t have had to ask for it on each of our three visits. (Our crab did come with a fairly fancy seafood pick and a nutcracker.) We had some communication and attitude issues with our first-visit waitress; silverware excepted, service on subsequent visits was generally pretty good.