Walking into Yardbird on a Tuesday evening for the Crawfish Boil and the tables are filled and the bar area is packed, signs of an awesome, thriving restaurant. Mind you, this is on a Tuesday. There’s music lightly playing in the background, loud enough to hear but not too loud that you have to speak loudly to be heard by your guest or date. A perfect ambiance for a great dinner experience! Nevertheless, let’s get right into Yardbird’s Crawfish Boil.

If you’ve eaten crawfish before, you have a pretty damn good idea what you’re getting yourself into. If you’ve never eaten crawfish before……. this is definitely going to be an experience you’ll remember. First, let’s look at what is included in the Crawfish Boil.

For $40, Yardbird’s Crawfish Boil includes:

Welcome Beer Cocktail

Crawfish Boil

Fixins’ & dessert

What to expect when attending one of Yardbird’s Crawfish Boil?

You start off with a beer cocktail to get things poppin. Next come the “fixins’” part of the meal. A basket filled with those insanely delicious biscuits is served right away with an apple butter that is to die for! I recommend you check out Yardbird just to get a taste of this apple butter/ biscuit combo. Soon after, a fantastic large salad is served. It comes out lightly dressed and with plenty of chopped boiled eggs. These fixins are served family style, so yes, you’ll be sharing with your guest or date. Trust me, if you have a big appetite like I do, don’t be afraid….If you need any more biscuits or salad, just ask, it’s included!

Now that we have our snacks out of the way, it’s time for the main event, the CRAWFISH! This was my first time eating crawfish, so I must say I was surprised at how small these guys were! I was expecting some type of small crustacean, and I got well… an extra mini crustacean!… The best way to describe the flavor of crawfish, is that they taste like a crustacean. The boil added a beautiful spicy & savory flavor to the crawfish. You snap off the head, suck down the juice and then eat the tail. It is definitely an experience. I was glad I was able to get hands on and experience a crawfish boil, next time I’m in Louisiana I’ll have an idea what to expect.

The corn in the boil was a strong point as well, it had a spicy flavor from the seasoning of the boil. Also included were small bite sized mini potatoes and purple potatoes. The purple potatoes have a licorice type flavor, which is something I’ve never tasted before. The potatoes were seasoned well as part of the boil, and added some nice starches to the meal. Yardbird will refill your emptying table with a new batch of the crawfish boil for as long as the event lasts (2 hours). If you’re a pro at crackin crawfish and getting that piece of meat then you’re in for a treat.  It can definitely be a daunting task for someone who has never eaten crawfish and doesn’t enjoy cracking shellfish for extended periods of time. But hey it’s a Crawfish boil, now you know what to expect! Either way the experience is well worth it!

For dessert, if you like sorbet you’re in luck! For dessert you get a scoop of a sweet and sour tasting sorbet that comes with cookie crumbs at the bottom. They compliment each other very well in flavor and in texture. I much more prefer ice cream or gelato to sorbet, but I can appreciate well paired food.

 

 

To make things a bit fun, I made a Crawfish Apple Butter Biscuit Sandwich, pioneered by the innovative Hedonist. This was super delicious by the way, I highly recommend you go this route. Personally, it is so much more satisfying eating crawfish this way in “bulk” than nibbling on small pieces of crawfish meat every 15-20 seconds or so. The meal was great as it always is with the stellar Yardbird’s and I can not wait to go back and pound the rest of their menu.