Kai’s Crab Boil is a bona fide experience, start to finish. It’s a clamoring place where guests wear plastic bibs, eat with their hands, and wash it all off at a giant metal community sink. You don’t find that every day in Columbus.
On the menu is seafood. Really, almost any sort of shellfish-seafood, market priced. As the name suggests, the fare is boiled, then shaken in a sauce and delivered to the table with tools for cracking and digging.
Given the name, it makes the most sense to start off with Crab ($19.99) right? An order yields enough legs and claws to keep anyone busy for the foreseeable future. The limbs crack easily (with the effective cracking tool) and release the chunks of sweet crab meat relatively cooperatively. That’s important, as when it comes to shellfish, you don’t want to struggle to break the shell, then battle to get the meat out in teeny-tiny, unrewarding threads. For a dollar each, you can throw in options such as corn on the cob, potatoes, or sausage, and round out the meal. The sausage is the best bang for the buck, and it’s a nice respite from the labor-intensive crab.
The day’s menu also featured mussels, crawfish, shrimp, and a bargain priced Blue Crab ($7.49). It comes with a warning for amateurs: the skinny-legged crab is the sort from which you eat the guts. Like the regular crab, it breaks easily (we’re talking about the torso now) with the cracking tool. When the shell gives, it makes a thunderous crack and explodes with…stuff. Inside the torso, there’s the whitish muscle that resembles something along the lines of what you typically find in crab legs, and there’s goo, which is evidently the eggs. The goo tastes mostly like the house sauce (a buttery cajun-ish option), which is probably a good thing. Unless you have a particular, established affinity for the Blue Crab Culinary Experience, one of the other menu options would be a vastly better choice.
*Kai’s Crab Boil offer items based on what their purveyors have. At the time photos were taken, the Blue Crab was unavailable. Photographed here is the Dungeness Crab, which is larger than the Blue Crab.
You can also score fried items such as Shrimp ($9.99) or chicken wings. The fried fare is cheaper than the boiled options, but it’s also way less fun. That said, there are not many places in Columbus where shrimp are fried with both head and tail intact. Through the veils of their crunchy breaded sweaters, their little black eyes will stare accusingly at you. The heads snap off and separate easily from their bodies, and the shrimp flesh inside is perfect, and uncommonly tender. French fries are part of the deal, and having them baptized in the house garlic-cajun seasoning delivers lots of blobs of aromatic garlicky bits.
The service is super-friendly, so it’s easy to overlook some timing issues when the fried food arrived about five minutes ahead of the boiled goodies. There’s lots of people watching, too, because people in bibs eating food with their hands: that’s pretty entertaining. When you arrive, you might think the prominent metal sink is a weird decorating touch. But before you get done, you’ll probably have an undeniable compulsion to thoroughly wash your hands. Although, there is also the option to eat the meal with gloves. Retrospectively, that might seem like a good choice. You can find out for yourself at 839 Bethel Rd.
For more information, visit kaiscrabboil.com.
All photos by Lauren Sega.
