Are you in the mood for Cajun-style shellfish with bayou-style hospitality?
You can find it a lot closer than the Deep South. If you will kindly travel as far as Fountain Valley, savory meals quite reminiscent of Louisiana are available in a laid-back atmosphere await.
The Red Claw, at 9475 Heil Ave., is a rather small place with diners sitting at paper-topped tables, decked in plastic bibs and using their fingers and utensils with equal dexterity to extract clams and peel shells from shrimp, crawfish and crab.
The focus on the food is clear in the decor as well. There is only one painting on the wall and the fa & #231;ade for the kitchen was decorated in a faux French Quarter look with a Bourbon Street sign and a bit of New Orleans storefront replication.
It made us remember good times in The Big Easy while getting settled in.
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Tim, Lyn Lopez: sharing love of Cajun food |
The owners, Tim Lopez and his wife Lyn, are not Big Easy natives. He’s Vietnamese and Lyn is from Australia. Theirs is a love story and marriage bound by importance of family and a love of music.
Due to problems in getting out of Vietnam with his family many years ago, Tim Lopez traveled on visas under fake names,his birth name is Cong Thanh.
Immigrating to another country for safety, he and Lyn met. They both have powerful voices and he’s known in some circles as the Asian Elvis Presley. Together, they perform all over the nation for special occasions and are often part of the popular music scene here in Southern California. The restaurant represents their love of Cajun food, which they knew they wanted to share with others.
The menu isn’t elaborate, only one side of a long, narrow orange sheet that lists nine appetizers, ranging from $4.50 to $7.99, and eight mainly market-priced entrees, plus a few side orders.
We’re always curious to see what neighboring diners are eating. We decided that a nice sake should be ordered first so that we could take our time figuring out how to go about our meal. There are only a few house wines, some good sakes and several beers for those interested in alcohol. You might want to have a lychee- or mango-flavored saketini,trendy sake cocktails that are making the rounds on restaurant menus and are nicely done here.
With the smaller menu, the four of us had the opportunity to try a majority of the entrees. After watching plastic bags being delivered to other tables and split open to reveal clams, shrimp and langoustines, we let the aromas help guide our decision-making.
Blue Point and Fanny Bay oysters on the half-shell came cold and briny, with a duo of sauces: mignonette with slivers of shallots and the other based on a classic cocktail sauce. The ceviche is fine too, a melange of finely carved pieces of scallops, shrimp and fish cuddled atop fresh greens in a citrus dressing. We did not expect to see escargot among the appetizers, but having been discovered, our gourmet psyche kicked in and we had to order it. As in a good French restaurant, they were tender morsels afloat in rich garlic butter.
We ordered the Cajun rice soup and it had a spicy snap to it and a background of flavors that could almost have worked as a base for jambalaya. The shrimp cocktail is impressive with the large size of the prawns, so that’s a definite appetizer we’ll repeat, even if it’s not a Cajun invention.
Until now we weren’t eating food with our hands, but the time to start peeling off paper towels from the whole roll on the table had approached. The main courses were arriving, so it was time to concentrate on crawfish, Dungeness and blue crabs, clams and the like.
First came a whole crab that had been alive only moments before. This freshness is imperative to an ultimate shellfish experience. We peered at the red-shelled crab for a moment and then the owner came by and helped us take it apart. Meaty and rich, it almost made us forget that we had also ordered some of those entrees that come in a bag.
By now, we were having cold beer with the food. It’s a good match. The waiter arrived and put a large plastic bag, tied with a topknot, in the center of our table. He tore it open for us, revealing a hefty pile of clams that had been steamed in a very aromatic wine sauce perfumed with basil. Anyone who enjoys steamed clams should be pleased with these flavor-packed ones.
Soon another bag arrived. It had a very generous portion of crawfish in it. The steaming broth for all the shellfish can be made from mild to hot in spiciness, according to your preference. We opted for medium hot and it suited everyone at our table. It was time to get down to hands-on style eating. Seems we’d all had some previous experience eating crawfish as everyone knew how to take one and twist off the head and unceremoniously suck out the savory juices. Then,in case you’re not yet an aficionado,you peel the shell from the small tail section and devour the piece of succulent meat.
Two sauces are presented to dip that select piece of meat. There’s a salt and pepper mix with lime juice squeezed in it and a typical Southern mix of mayonnaise and ketchup. These nubbins of crawfish are delicious without any dipping at all or with that bit of enhancement.
Greedy eaters that we are, we still had a bag of steamed shrimp to go. It soon arrived and there we sat for another half an hour peeling and dipping and sighing some more. When the first two plastic bags were about to be removed from our table, simultaneous with the arrival of the shrimp, I wasn’t ready to give up the end product and all of us sopped up some of the heady sauces lingering in the bottoms of the bags with bread.
We had no reason or room left in our tummies on this visit to try a steak but there are two, a rib eye and a New York cut for the non-seafood person for $15.99 and $17.99. Side dishes of corn on the cob, andouille sausage or salad will round out any entree.
Dessert was wonderfully refreshing sorbets in lemon, orange and mango flavors and delicious ice creams in coconut, pineapple and pina colada.
For more information call (714) 531-3500.
