When a friend suggested heading to House of Crabs for a Friday night feast I immediately thought of Homer Simpson. More specifically, I remembered the episode where he takes Marge to Captain McAllister’s all-you-can-eat seafood buffet at The Frying Dutchman.
Polishing off the contents of the buffet, the couple drive around until 3am looking for another open all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant and when they don’t find one – they go fishing…..
Hoping my seafood shack experience would be more satisfying than Homer’s, I headed to HOC, upstairs Redfern’s The Norfolk bar. The restaurant itself actually looks like something out of a cartoon, a caricature of what you would expect a Californian Seafood hut to look like.
Old ropes, fishing nets, lobster pots and even an upturned dingy hang from the roof while the bar has been modelled to look like the hull of a boat. The interiors are kooky and kitsch and set the tone for an evening of silliness.
Arriving at the venue, I was disappointed that the reservation team had mistakenly reserved my table for the following night. Booked out, the staff managed to squeeze us four in the middle of the large banqueting table, in between two large dinner parties.
A tight squeeze, the lack of personal space was soon forgotten when we were presented with a complimentary jug of beer and a jug of some kind of passionfruit-based cocktail.
Getting liquored up like drunken sailors (for the night that was in it) we donned our bibs and plastic gloves in preparation for a messy feast from the sea.
Mains like “blackened fish” “flat iron steak” and classic “fried chicken” are featured on the menu…but the best way to eat at HOC is to order a selection from ‘The Boil’ – basically you choose between crabs, mussels, clams and prawns, choose your sauce, and your meal arrives in the bag it’s boiled in. When the bags arrived, we tipped them on the table for a free-for-all feast with everybody getting their hands messy.
Now for the downside, for all the fun involved in eating at HOC the actual food is a bit of a letdown. We selected the mussels, prawns, King Crab and Blue Swimmer Crab – each serving is 500g which the waitress assured the table was enough for one diner. Some of the mussels $19 were just empty shells, that would have been forgiven if the mussels that were there were big and juicy – they weren’t, they were a pretty disappointing size. The prawns $30 were huge, but the Cajun sauce that I chose to go with them was average, you are provided with free bread to mop up the sauce off the table, but to be honest it wasn’t tasty enough for that. Hearing that the Blue Crab Swimmer Crab $35 are the only non-frozen crab on the menu I expected great things from it, but it was a lot of work for very little meat.
On the upside the King Crab had a lot more meat but at $45 for 500g it comes at a cost.
Another downside was the unisex toilets. As will always happen with same-sex facilities, the lids in all 3 cubicles had been left up by male patrons…awesome. Also, call me old fashioned but I just feel weird preening myself at the sinks as guys trickle into the toilets to tinkle. But makeup fixing is a must as sucking meat from a crab’s leg wreaks havoc on your lippy.
Back at the table, which by this point was a mess of shells and sauce, we de-gloved, ordered a round of beers, enjoying the bustling atmosphere and booming classic rock music. The obligatory post-dinner rating of the restaurant was conclusive – we came for the crabs but stayed for the craic. We all had a great night, but it was just another of Sydney’s hotspots to tick off the list. If you’re in The Norfolk bar, I’d recommend heading upstairs to check out HOC but I wouldn’t go out of my way to go there.
And the big question is…did I drive around until 3am afterwards looking for an open seafood shack – no, but I did polish off some leftover curry before bed – 500g of crustaceans just wasn’t enough.
