Get crackin'
New Santa Fe restaurant encourages communal eating with seafood boils
Ever eaten dinner with your hands from a steaming plastic bag? If not, then it’s time to strap on a bib, have a seat at a butcher paperclad table and get acquainted with the gloriously messy, communal delights of the seafood boil — a fixture along the coasts but, until now, missing from the Santa Fe food landscape.
Enter Crackin’ Crab, which opened last week in the former digs of J&N Thai Bistro in the DeVargas Center mall parking lot. It’s the sister restaurant to two in Albuquerque (the first opened in the spring of 2015, and a third at Winrock Town Center is slated to open soon).
“I love seafood, and we love the sea,” said Ratchanida Chaikew-Lovato, aka Nam, who owns Santa Fe’s Crackin’ Crab with her husband, Joe Lovato. Nam, who is from Thailand, and Lovato, who hails from Albuquerque, are family friends with Rack and Vanh Mingkhamsavath, who founded the burgeoning Crackin’ Crab enterprise.
“When we travel to Thailand or wherever we travel, seafood is definitely on the list,” Lovato said.
Nam and Lovato also were the proprietors of J&N Thai Bistro, which they hope to reopen in a smaller space near downtown early next year. They reached out to the Mingkhamsavaths with the idea that a Santa Fe outpost of Crackin’ Crab would be a better fit for the DeVargas location than the bistro. (The couple, who have four young children, shuttered their Los Alamos eatery, Thailand Thai Cuisine, in March.)
Crackin’ Crab has a decidedly more casual, family-forward feel.
“It’s fun,” Lovato said. “Don’t bring your belt and collar; come in with a T-shirt and jeans.”
The centerpiece of Crackin’ Crab’s menu is the boil. Pick your seafood — crab, lobster tail, crawfish, mussels, scallops, clams, shrimp with or without the heads — by the pound at market price, which is listed on a sign as you enter and on the napkin dispensers on each table. Or make it easy and pick one of the three house combinations (that’s 2½ to 3 pounds of mixed seafood, for two to three people, at $49.95 on a recent visit).
Those combos come with a potato, corn and sausage, while the build-yourown add-ons vary by how much you’re ordering. All the sides are available as extras for $1 to $3.95.
Then, add a sauce if you wish — the restaurant touts its buttery, Cajun-style Crackin’ Sauce in particular — and specify a spiciness level. The cooks will assemble your boil, steam it up and slather on the sauce.
They’ll plop the whole thing in a plastic bag, tie it up and place it in a serving bucket for you and your tablemates to open up and dig in. (Silverware or gloves are available upon request, but getting messy is half the fun.)
The tradition of boiling shellfish and accompaniments, typically in a large pot heated with propane, has a storied history in America’s backyards and at its get-togethers, big and small. The makeup and seasoning of a particular boil varies depending on the coastal region. Crackin’ Crab’s founders were particularly inspired by the boils they encountered in California, Texas and Louisiana. (At the Santa Fe restaurant, the crawfish are shipped live straight from Cajun country.)
At Crackin’ Crab, if the boil isn’t your, well, bag, there are plenty of other seafood options, including raw oysters from the Delaware Bay ($15.95-$22.95); fried oysters or calamari ($13.95) to start; and fried platters of catfish, shrimp and soft-shell crab ($19.95-$16.95). Chicken makes a couple of menu appearances, too, along with Cajun and sweet potato fries.
A beer and wine license is in the works, Lovato said, but until then, you can order the menu’s most surprising find: Thai tea or Thai coffee.
Yes, J&N lovers, there’s still a bit of Thai influence in Crackin’ Crab’s menu and décor, which blends a few Asian elements (an elephant figurine, a lucky cat) with more nautical fare (a fishing net in the corner and a half-dozen or so as-yet-unoccupied aquariums). The dessert menu will include housemade coconut, Thai tea and coffee ice creams; tapioca and black rice puddings; fried banana with ice cream; sweet sticky rice with mango; and bananas Foster.
Lovato said there’s a surprising commonality between the Thai table and a coastal seafood boil: the familial magic of the shared meal.
“When I went to Thailand with [Nam] and her family, you sit down and you eat — nobody has their own individual plate, you put it on the table and there’s a little bit of everything for everybody,” Lovato said. “When you sit at the food table, you’re getting together as a family, mingling, socializing. It’s nice to have that kind of setting in general, to have the people you love around you.”
IF YOU GO
What: Crackin’ Crab Where: 604 N. Guadalupe St. When: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday, noon to 10 p.m. Saturday and noon to 8 p.m. Sunday More information: Call 505-982-9417 or visit crackincrababq.com
Silverware or gloves are available upon request, but getting messy is half the fun.