The Cajun Kings on Jalan Riang

I think I read about these guys a couple of months ago (15-1 Jalan Riang, 6284-4426), but I didn't really think much of it at that time, as the thought of getting Cajun food in Singapore just wasn't that enticing. Then I heard more about this place when we got back from the US last month, and with memories of those mind-blowingly good crawfish at the Boiling Crab fresh in our heads, we wanted to come down here to see if we could get anything even remotely close to that here. Besides, I noticed that they were using plastic bags like the way Vietnamese-Americans do, and this guy was supposed to be from San Francisco too.

I still wasn't completely convinced that they were doing the Vietnamese slant on this though, as they seemed to want to position themselves as proper Cajun. All of my questions were cleared when we got there and saw them with buckets of limes and little plastic tubs of salt and pepper; this was without a doubt in a Vietnamese-American style, even if there was no white rice on the menu. But there was one problem when our piping hot bag came out: the red spices inside were rather shallow in quantity and thick in consistency. It was basically the result of having not enough butter, and conversely a surprisingly heavy amount of garlic. And unfortunately, the garlic was just too overwhelming.

Granted, the Boiling Crab has a garlic butter and Cajun spice combo too, but over there, we were able to crank up the heat without getting the garlic mix. Strangely, the Cajun Kings only allowed you to make it spicy if you got the house combo. Well, next time we come here, we're sticking to the so-called "OG" version without the garlic, and we'll just have to live with the fact that it won't be spicy. They didn't have those sweet crawfish (although they were selling dungeness crab at a whopping S$80 or US$65 each!). At least the heads on the prawns were still somewhat fatty and sweet enough to be enjoyable to suck on.