I love the idea of a labor intensive meal. Busting open blue crab in Maryland, tearing apart lobster claws on the Cape, dismantling a whole pig every Memorial Day at my parents' in Buffalo - the work that goes into manipulating shells, bones and guts to extract the perfect bite of food really transforms the every day task of eating into an memorable experience. It is on the opposite end of the spectrum from the faceless and mass produced fast food McWorld that we live in. After seeing a restaurant review for Brother's Crawfish in Dorchester a few months back, it immediately sounded like a place I needed to experience. With Kate being allergic to shellfish, I though this would be the perfect time to indulge in hive-free bliss while she was living the high life in Chile for the week.
Brother's Crawfish is an easy 5 minute walk from the Field's Corner Redline T stop at 272 Adams Street (at Lincoln Street). After showing up a bit late with my friend AJ, we were pleased to see that Matt and Mike checked the spot out and seeing they were BYOB, made an executive decision to hit up a local market for some cold beer. I should be late more often. I'm not sure the BYOB rule is advertised since we had to keep the bottles in the kitchen and they served us in styrofoam cups with ice, but looking back, it was absolutely the best way to enjoy them. Even though the menu was large enough to entertain choices, we didn't pay it any mind. We quickly ordered 5 lbs. of crawfish (1 cajun style, 2 asian fusion and 2 garlic and butter) along with corn, spuds and sausages on each.
After talking over the proper technique for getting the meat out of the shells, we were faced with 3 piping hot bowls of bright red crustaceans....it was go time. I have heard that the best flavor is hidden in the head/body portion of the crawfish, which contains no meat to speak of, but a combo of brain, guts, etc. After carefully twisting off the body portion from the tail, I attempted to test this theory. I think my slurp was a bit too aggressive, so along with all of the great taste, I received a snootful of the napalm sauce and dried spices. Needless to say, there was some coughing, streaming tears, and a very important lesson learned for the rest of the meal. Moving forward, I decided to crush the head portion under my teeth to get the flavor without macing myself with every passing slurp. Everything was delicious though. The sides were a great compliment and flavor/texture option from the mountains of crawfish, and the accompanying homemade hot sauce was perfect for dipping each little crawfish tail. By the end of the meal, our brows were covered in sweat, our fingers were shriveled and throbbing from the spice and the empty styrofoam cups carried the evidence of those burnt red fingers. Nothing a good hand washing and some frozen yogurt couldn't fix though.
Overall it was an amazing meal. Very inexpensive ($20 per person not including the beer), group friendly, and I can't wait to return and do it all over again!
