Boiling Crab restaurant nets customers after opening in Westwood

With signatures scrawled all over the walls and swarms of students lined up outside, the Boiling Crab was bustling around 4 p.m. Tuesday, having opened just a week ago.

The new restaurant is located on Glendon Avenue in the building that used to house the Westwood Brewing Company, or Brew Co., a popular student bar. The Boiling Crab focuses on all types of seafood, with mostly Cajun-style dishes.

On the first day, Feb. 9, people waited in line for up to two hours to get into the restaurant.

Soren Royer-McHugh, a UCLA alumnus and Boiling Crab employee, said UCLA graduates make up a large part of the staff at the new location of the seafood restaurant chain. He’s familiar to the location, since he said he celebrated his 21st birthday at the former Brew Co.

Johnny Tran, another Boiling Crab employee and UCLA alumnus, said he wanted to stay in Westwood after graduating and that he wanted a job that would be more fun to go to than his previous internship at a law office.

The Boiling Crab restaurant manager on duty declined to comment for this article.

Tran said many of the restaurant’s customers are UCLA students or other residents of the neighborhood.

The Boiling Crab took months to officially open after employees trained in November because the company needed to complete some renovations to the building, Royer-McHugh said.

Spencer Hicks, the restaurant’s lead waiter, said he transferred to Los Angeles from the Boiling Crab’s Las Vegas location days before the new restaurant’s opening.

In between answering multiple ringing telephones, Hicks described Boiling Crab as a quickly growing company with a focus on fast-paced service.

“Eating here is like going to sushi for the first time,” Hicks said. “Everyone learns to eat with their hands. It’s not like a normal restaurant.”

The restaurant uses only disposable plates, napkins and utensils. Flat-screen TVs showing sports games hang on the walls, and diners in large bibs fill the venue in wooden booths and tables covered in the writing of previous customers.

The most popular items on the menu are the fried shrimp, crawfish and blue crab, Royer-McHugh said as he walked a couple to their table.

Behind a two-pound plastic bag of mussels and blue crab, fourth-year gender studies student Sky Lea Ross said she had been waiting for the restaurant to open for months and has already visited the Westwood location twice: first with her friends, then alone and in a rush.

Last week was her first time eating at any Boiling Crab establishment, she said, but she had heard before that the food was good and sometimes passed by the restaurant while it was under construction.

Even though she said she loves the food, Ross said she won’t come to the Boiling Crab too frequently in the future because of its prices.

“Last time I was here, I ordered a whole lobster,” she said, laughing.

Though the Boiling Crab is a chain, some employees said they think the restaurant has the environment of a family-owned establishment.

“Everyone works as a team,” Hicks said. “Having customers is like inviting someone to your house.”

The first Boiling Crab location opened in 2004 in Orange County, where the company is based. The company has 16 branches in total, mostly in Los Angeles, Orange County and San Jose.