Crab Village promises diners a taste of the American South, but while the restaurant goes a little too far with its nautical, picnic-style theme, it doesn’t go quite far enough with its food.

There are two kinds of crab on the menu, both well-reputed, but options are limited for the casual diner. The Alaskan king crab legs are RMB298 per 500g, and the Dungeness crab is more affordable at RMB168 per 500g, but the smallest serving of available the night we dropped in was 2kg.

The menu also includes lobster, clams and mussels, and all the seafood comes with three sauce options: rajun Cajun, lemon pepper and garlic butter. We elected to go the medium-spicy Cajun route for our shrimp and lemon pepper for our mussels.

Our table was then covered with paper and bibs, and gloves and kitchen towels were handed out. The shrimp arrives in a plastic bag in a bucket and is placed directly on the table. It’s fresh, but the sauce is hardly raging. Instead, it’s a flat blend of pepper and seasonings with more color than flavor. The lemon pepper sauce is slightly better but almost identical save for the (welcome) addition of lemon. The quality of the seafood, particularly the plump mussels, was impressive. However, the shrimp were so large that they should have been deveined.

Aside from the mains, we had an uninspiring vegetable salad served in an inexplicable foil bowl along with tiny, two-pronged forks that we abandoned. The fried calamari is better but over-seasoned.

With cheap drinks, a beach atmosphere and upbeat music, Crab Village may have clicked as a bar, but for now it’s a still a bit uneven as a restaurant.

Our rating: 2.5/5

DETAILS

What: Crab Village

Where: N523 Jumen Lu 局门路523号

Tel: 6388-8668

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Review by Madhumita Bhattacharyya