Crawdaddy, San Jose, California

After taking care of all of my stuff tonight, I finally got a chance to make a run for some of that Vietnamese Cajun food, but this time going further east to this place (779 Story Road, 286-2729). In contrast to Gumbo Jumbo, these guys were much simpler, with paper laid out on all of the tables and giant rolls of paper towels thrown your way with a plastic bib. The menu was short, and pretty much just featured shellfish with a few sides. I grabbed a pound of crawfish with a piece of corn and sausage while I was at it.

When I opened the scorching hot plastic bag, the sauce was all I could smell. With my last crawfish memory being a much simpler Louisianan version, I wondered to myself why one would want to overpower the wonderfully natural taste of crawfish with spicy garlic butter. And worse, why bother with that lime/salt/pepper dip on top of that? Well, after eating a few of these, I finally realized what was going on. These things were basically like eating buffalo wings.

Yep, you specify the degree of spiciness here, and I got the second to hottest one, which was delightful enough that I kept wanting to eat more. And dipping it into that lime dip somehow *did* make sense. Indeed, if it weren't for the lime juice mix, this thing would be a bit like those spicy crawdads that I remember getting on Ghost Street in Beijing ages ago. Either way, it's great for washing down with beer. Next time I'll have to try hitting up Southern California's Boiling Crab, which has opened a shop in San Jose too.