Jack London Square Crab Crawl

A few weeks ago, I was taking Bo for a walk through Jack London Square when I stumbled across signs for The Crab Crawl. "FUN!", I thought, "I should invite C."

About 5 yards later, I realized that those people setting up booths? They had crabs. And garlic noodles. And today? It wasn't Sunday. Huh. Unless I called C pretty quickly, there'd be nothing left to invite him to!

He met us down at the Square a little while later, where we proceeded to check out the booty, and grab some goodies to nosh on while we polished off pints of Anchor  Steam.

As it turned out, we were less than tempted by the crab dishes that were left a mere two hours after the even started; one of the booths, whose garlic noodles we tried and loved, told us that they had no idea the event was going to be so popular, and they couldn't believe they'd already run out of their cajun cracked crab.

Those oysters up there, though? Those were really, really great.  Big, plump, juicy specimens from Johnson's Oyster Farm were shucked and daubed with garlic, then grilled up, one order at a time.  Each of us in line spent more than a few minutes waiting, but OH MAMA, was it ever worth it.

Generously sprinkled with Green Tabasco (my personal preference on grilled oysters), I slurped more than my share of these, nearly ready to go back for more.

The Crab Crawl's food stands were picked clean HOURS before they expected to be, which I love to see -- it just proves that Oakland is really finding her own voice and people are coming to hear what she's saying.

Tags: Food, Wine, Food & Drink, San Francisco, Oakland, Jack London Square, Festivals

Comments

[Joanna]

I heard quite a few complaints that food was gone long before 1pm. Only live crab remained...

The great news is that they expected 3,000 people and had over 6,000! So hopefully they'll have it again next year with more vendors, as well as visitors.

It's hard to plan for an event like that with such an expensive ingredient...

Glad you got to go! I was stuck at work. Sigh.

Cheers,
Joanna

p.s. - good to see you blogging again!

[kungfoodie kat]

I was there taking pics...sorry to have missed you. It really did turn out to be a stellar day with tons of folks. This was the first Crab Crawl so I'm sure the vendors will be better prepared for us East Bay chowhounds next year. ;-)