Fourteen Rooms, One Bag: Crab N' Spice From Ventura to Glendale

The sauce goes on last, poured straight from a jug over crab legs, corn and potato until the bottom of the pan turns red. Every one of the fourteen Crab N' Spice restaurants serves the meal this way, from a strip mall in Palmdale to a corner of Glendale, Arizona.

How the order works

You build it yourself, in three decisions.

First the seafood: snow crab legs, crawfish, mussels, clams, lobster, and shrimp either head-on or shell-on — all at market price, so the number on the board moves with the season. Then one of seven flavours: the house Crab N Spice, Lemon Garlic, CNS Lemon Garlic, All-In, Cajun Coconut, Cajun Hawaiian or Garlic Butter. Then the heat.

Add-ons are corn, sausage, quail eggs and potatoes. If you can't face three decisions, the Captain's Choice and Castaway combos make them for you. Garlic noodles sit on the featured menu right next to them, and they are the side we'd add.

About Assasin8

The top of the heat scale is called Assasin8, spelled like that, and the menu says plainly that it's the one with "a kick like no other."

Our view: order one level below whatever you think you can handle. A boil keeps cooking in its own sauce while it sits on the table, and by the time you reach the bottom of the pan the heat has had twenty minutes to soak into the potatoes. Nobody remembers the first crab leg. Everyone remembers the last potato.

Los Angeles County and the valleys north

Eight of the fourteen are inside a ninety-minute drive of downtown, and they are not interchangeable.

Ventura, on Telephone Road, is the only one that still closes between lunch and dinner on weekdays — it serves until roughly 2:45, reopens at 5, and wraps up by 8. Check before driving over at 4pm.

Up in the Antelope Valley, Palmdale on 10th Street West runs noon to 8:30 every day, and Santa Clarita — listed as Valencia on the chain's own site, at 24425 Town Center Drive — opens half an hour later and closes at the same time.

The San Fernando Valley store is Northridge on Devonshire Street, open 11am to 10pm all week, which makes it the earliest lunch in the group.

Closer in, Koreatown sits at 621 South Western Avenue. The chain's website shows no current hours for it, so call (310) 745-2649 first.

South of downtown, Cudahy on Atlantic Avenue and Carson on South Avalon share an email inbox and not much else: Cudahy stays open until 10 on Friday and Saturday, while Carson opens at 11 every morning and closes at 8:15 on weeknights.

Claremont, on Indian Hill Boulevard, is the eastern edge of the county — the stop for the Colleges crowd, noon to 10 except Sundays, when it closes at 9.

If you're comparing the whole city rather than one chain, our Los Angeles seafood guide has the wider list.

Orange County and the Inland Empire

Two stores here, and both said yes when we asked them for photos — the pictures in this piece come from the Corona kitchen.

Anaheim is at 160 West Lincoln Avenue, a few minutes from the 5, open noon to 10 every day. It covers a wide delivery and pickup area, from Fullerton and Buena Park down to Santa Ana.

Corona is in the Dos Lagos centre at 2785 Cabot Drive, and has the latest kitchen in the chain: open until 11pm Friday through Sunday. We wrote about it on its own in Dos Lagos, Not Downtown LA.

Bakersfield

One store, on Calloway Drive in the northwest of the city. Bakersfield is the only location that doesn't serve weekday lunch — doors open at 4pm Monday to Friday and at noon on weekends, closing at 9 either way.

Nevada and Arizona

The desert stores run long, even hours. Henderson on South Stephanie Street and Lake Mead Boulevard in Las Vegas are both open noon to 10, seven days a week — useful when your evening plans are less certain than your appetite.

Glendale, on North 79th Avenue near Arrowhead, is the only Arizona location. Noon to 9 most nights, 10 on Fridays and Saturdays.

All fourteen at a glance

Hours change; the chain posts current times per store at crabnspice.com, where you can also order ahead and join the rewards programme. For more rooms built around the same idea, see our seafood boil guide.

Photos © Crab N' Spice Corona · Published on FishRestaurants.com with permission.