After seeing the travel channel shows 'Man Vs Food' Vegas episode, and being devoted, yet deprived shellfish eater, this place was a MUST-DO. You see, in Australia, shellfish are top-dollar, and not particularly accessible for this reason. You enjoy them on the odd occasion, but luxuries like 3-5 varieties of crab, are unheard of.
With expectations exceedingly high, we set off for this crustacean exploration. Greeted by friendly staff, who were helpful & attentive, guiding us through the menu.
With the orders, you can select between mild, medium & hot spices for your seafood. You then select a seasoning, such as cajun, garlic/butter & hot n juicy special.
Warned of their tendency to heavily spice food, we decided to order 2lb of the crawfish, hot n juicy special style, and 1lb of snow crab legs, with garlic/butter. Both mild, because why ruin the flavour of good shellfish?
The bags arrived, presented like this to further steam the flavour into the shellfish.
After a short time, not being able to wait any longer, we ripped into it
Starting with the ever so tasty looking crawfish, their heads were ripped off, and sucked of their juices. The Hot n Juicy special tasted like a combination of their seasonings, with hints of cajun, garlic & chilli. Needless to say, the combination of lobster-esque head juice, and the seasoning was amazing. The body of the crawfish is a much more enduring, and possibly less satisfying process. Their hard shell is difficult to remove, unlike a prawn or shrimp. It takes a combination of technique, process & strength to quickly peel one. Once peeled, however, the small piece of meat is flavourful, and has an amazing after taste, of yes, lobster.
As you can see above, the crawfish 'massacre' was swift and efficient, each of us trying to eat as many as possible as fast as possible, to ensure we got our even share. We then moved onto the crab. It had been a long time since my last over-indulgenet meal of crab, i mean a looong time. Using the nut-cracker to open the shell, exposing long arms of pure crab meat, was a thoroughly enjoyable process.
The crab meat was very fresh, and tasted sweet and succulent. The garlic butter only complemented the gentle flavour. I could eat this all day i thought to myself. The legs were large, with hidden chunks of meat throughout.
After finishing two huge piles of fresh seafood, we were both immensely satisfied, but it was obvious, we could not leave Vegas without another journey to Hot n Juicy.
The second visit, we tried king crab. We had read so much about the lengths fisherman go to catch it, which made it all the more desirable. Hopefully this image puts the sheer size of these legs to scale...They were enormous!
The king crab had an entirely different flavour to the snow crabs. Where the snow crabs were light and sweet, the king crab was robust and slightly meaty. They contained huge amounts of meat, that when peeled correctly, pulled out of the shell like candy bars.
This one here, is actually the 'claw bar'.
The second journey was equally as satisfying & enjoyable. If i was a Las Vegas local, i would without a doubt be here weekly.
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