For His Last Restaurant Reviews, Michael Bauer Liberally Applies Stars - Eater SF
"In the East Bay, Express critic (and new Eater SF contributor) Janelle Bitker explores the intersection of Vietnamese and Cajun cooking at Queen’s Cajun Seafood. While most of the bay areas Viet-Cajun spots tend to focus on boiled crawfish and fried sides, Queen’s Cajun steers towards a more comprehensive Texas-style menu that includes highlights like an “ideally salty and soothing” turkey neck stew or jambalaya “leaned toward fried rice” rather than the traditional seafood and rice stew you might find at Louisiana-style joint. Queen’s Cajun also knows how to fry their seafood “exceptionally well,” Bitker says, and the fried alligator tasted like “pleasantly chewier” popcorn chicken with a side of gravy that “deftly straddled the American South with Saigon.” Fried catfish — that old Southern standby — retained its crisp skin and flaky flesh until the final bite. While the all-important crawfish were bigger and meatier than the ones you usually find at California’s seafood shacks, the sauces were disappointingly bland compared to “the nostril-clearing stuff” you might find at a backyard mudbug boil." - Andrew Dalton
