 Captain Kidd's Restaurant & Fish Market
There are many things about Captain Kidd's that made me want to like it. The sheer range of fresh fish, for one. The friendly, no-bullshit service, for another. Other things made me not like it so much. The food, for one. The smell, for another. As fate would have it, we happened to visit the day after the great Redondo Harbor mass sardine suicide of 2011 … yet it smelled more oppressively fishy inside.
I was here with a group from work because, as it was told to me, someone at the office had at some point purchased $4,000 in Captain Kidd's gift certificates from our "morale budget," and so every celebration lunch—birthday, last day, first day, promotion, whatever—ends up taking place here. And while I know that probably sounds like the premise of a middling spec script for "The Office," it's what happened. Basically, we have unlimited FishBucks™ For Life. The odd thing is, Captain Kidd's is not particularly close to our office.
The place itself is memorable as fuck, I'll give 'em that much. Located right in the harbor, it's a charming enough place, decorated to … uh … the gills … with quaint seafarin' randomness, as seemingly all seafood places on the water are mandated to be. It's part restaurant, part fish market, with eating areas inside and out, and giant tanks of live fish for your visual and culinary pleasure. Despite the seemingly boundless amount of fresh fish, I'd guess that most of the food eaten here is fried.
Much was ordered—clam strips, jumbo shrimp, corn dogs, cole slaw, crab legs, fish kabobs, I can't even remember it all. It's possible someone even got one of those illegal Japanese blowfish, who can be sure? You can deep-fry those, right? I got a full Dungeness crab simply because it was the most expensive thing on the menu, and at that moment it seemed hilarious to be spending so much on a "combo meal" for lunch. And even more hilarious because I knew I would never even nearly eat the whole thing … yet so many people in the world are starving!!!!! Ha, ha! And I didn't nearly finish the whole thing! In all honesty, I found the crab pretty bland and chewy, nothing special. The fries were rubbery and run-of-the-mill; the mediocre cole slaw may have been the best part of the meal. The clam strips were pretty good, I guess.
The service was nice enough, but not exactly polished—which was kind of refreshing, except when our server asked us to settle the bill early because "I gotta take off." I think we only dropped a couple hundred bucks despite everyone ordering the most expensive things they could … meaning it looks like we'll have to eat here again … several more times.
Review by Ray-Ray Sugarleonard, March 2011 |
