Adam R.
Yelp
This is not a crab house. I say that because they have a very nice mostly seafood menu and almost everything else we ate was fair to good. It was in the crabs that Fenwick Crab House failed miserably. We did not have to wait and the environment was pleasant. Service was prompt. Prices were reasonable, and they had an excellent selection of beers. Several of us had appetizers, although our server was not really able to tell us what was and was not gluten free, for my daughter who has celiac disease. For appetizers we had a blue cheese wedge, excellent and generous; some honey old baby Buffalo wings, very tasty and large but a little overdone. I ordered an appetizer called "middlenecks" which advertised a dozen middle neck clams with a sauce of butter, shallots, and white wine. What I actually got was a dish of about 24 little neck clams with the same sauce, accompanied by a little loaf of tasty french bread. It was actually quite tasty, but they should have told me about the substitution.
And now we come to the main course. There were four of us and we ordered a dozen large crabs for $90, actually a reasonable price these days, and something called the Captains Crab Haul, a dinner for two for $54.95 it was really a very good deal and came with two salads, four pieces of fried chicken (very good and cooked to tender and juicy inside but somewhat burned on the outside, like the oil was too hot. It also included two ears of corn, sweet and delicious, 1/2 pound of steamed shrimp, excellent, two clusters of snow crab legs, also excellent, two containers of coleslaw, good flavor but too much mayonnaise and four medium crabs, in addition to the dozen larges.
The crabs were served in a big wide bowl and left that way on the table rather than dumping out on the paper and I could see right away that the seasoning was too light and irregular. They were also pushing the very bottom of what anyone would consider large. A few crabs looked typically seasoned and many had no seasoning on them at all. The first crab my wife had was no good, mushy with a fishy unfresh smell. I said, don't get excited. It can happen to anyone. I opened my first and it was badly under seasoned but also lacking that sweetness of a fresh hot crab. I put it to my nose and got a milder version of the same ammoniacal past it's prime seafood smell. Just then a waiter came by and asked how everything was. We indicated we had two bad crabs and he promised to replace them. We tried to keep going but it just went from bad to worse. A couple of crabs were edible but I never finished one. I actually had to spit out a mouthful on the third one I tried. We said, well maybe there's a problem with the larges and we tried the four mediums that came with the Captain's Haul and one was edible. We were just explaining to our waitress that the whole batch was no good when the other guy showed up with two brand new actually quite large looking crabs and decided to try them. One was merely unfresh. the other was foul, like wipe your tongue on a paper towel gross. At this point we had lost all confidence. Our waitress told us the manager was going to make us a fresh batch and we said we'd rather just take them off the bill and be done. Do you know that through that whole thing the unseen manager, whom we asked to see in person, never had the nerve to show his face! In the end they took off the dozen large crabs, took off nothing for the four mediums in our Captains Haul that we didn't eat, and didn't comp us so much as a drink or dessert.
People this is what you get if you steam crabs that are already dead. But the same person who did that also didn't apply the seasoning correctly and served them in a bowl. That's why I say that Fenwick Crab House might have the makings of a good seafood restaurant, but it is a CHINO, a Crabhouse In Name Only.