Positioning itself as an one-stop shop for your seafood needs, Blue Lobster offers both restaurant dining as well as live seafood and gourmet food products for takeaway. The restaurant section is long and narrow, with a mixture of booths and tables, and nicely decorated with illustrations of marine life. We were one of the first to arrive for dinner on a weekday night, and saw hardly any other diners the rest of the night. Our server showed us to a booth and placed an amuse bouche of marinated squid on the table. The squid was sweet and tender, and we picked at it while we perused the menu. Western and Chinese seafood dishes were on offer, with the menu being divided into those two distinct sections. From the Western section, we picked Boston seafood chowder to start, and fish and chips for our main. From the Chinese section, we decided to try deep fried soft shell crabs and, on the server’s recommendation, tiger prawns in Szechuan sauce. Our chowder came first and was satisfactory—creamy but not too rich, and tasty. Next came our soft shell crabs, which were unfortunately too greasy although the sauce they sat in had a nice sweet and spicy flavor. Also overly heavy on the grease were our fish and chips—the batter was positively soaked with oil, and the fish tasted overcooked. Halfway through this dish, the tartar sauce arrived, which even the server acknowledged was sloppy timing. Apart from this one glitch, though, the service was generally good. The food, however, continued to disappoint. The Szechuan prawns had very little that was Szechuan about them, and were more a boring sweet and sour. Dessert was tiramisu with ice cream. The dish came beautifully presented, which surprised us as the rest of our dishes were simply plated. But it didn’t taste nearly as good as it looked; the tiramisu was run of the mill and the ice cream was also very average. It is regrettable that a restaurant that appears to put so much effort into its setting and concept delivers such mediocre food. BYO no corkage.
