Restaurant Review: Legal Seafood (Kendall Square)

So this is the first restaurant review that I am writing for the blog. Let me tell you a few things about what I do when I critic a restaurant.
I love eating out.
But I hate spending my money on bad food or food that I could have easily made in my own kitchen.
I get critical when it comes to bad service, dirty bathrooms, bad plating, and bad ingredients. If something doesn't taste good, I send it back to the kitchen for them to remake it. If it still doesn't taste good, I never come back to the restaurant.
If I don't really mention the service, bathrooms, plating, ingredients, it pretty much means that they were fine. Otherwise I felt just neutral about it and I didn't really care.

Now... onto the review...

So right now I'm in Boston, checking out a college that I got accepted in. We flew in at 3:30, and my entire family was pretty much starving once we arrived in the hotel at 4:30, so we ate dinner at the local Legal Seafood restaurant.

Legal Seafood is a Boston based restaurant chain that is famous for having fresh seafood. It has the usual American seafood classics: shrimp cocktail, oysters on the half-shell, steamed lobster, crabcakes, etc.

Legal Seafood is known for having exceptional oysters, so we ordered a dozen oysters, three of each variety:

Cape Cod Oysters: Very full bodied/meaty oysters, with a clean finish and a brininess that didn't overpower my palate. Nice.

Kumamotos Oysters: Kumamotos are typically grown in the west coast, them being the smallest variety of the oyster in the dozen we got. Nice clean flavor, but drastically having a more briny flavor compared to the Cape Cods. These were not the best Kumamotos I have had, and they were rather disappointing.

New Jersey Oysters: Similar to the Cape Cod Oysters, with that classic oyster flavor. Nothing more to be said here.

Five Star Oysters from Canada: Good clean flavor, and a nice after taste. Brininess was at a perfect level.

There was cocktail sauce and mignonette. The cocktail sauce overpowers the brininess of the oysters, and the mignonette simply tasted bad; it had no kick from the raw oysters and was rather bland. The oysters were eaten with just a squeeze of lemon.


Steamed lobster, with steamed mussels, little-neck clams, corn, and chorizo, accompanied with melted butter and clam stock.

The lobster was nice, especially the claws, having the classic lobster flavor: a natural sweetness in the meat, with a unparalleled texture in the claws that is truly unique to lobster meat. I felt the lobster was steamed a little too long, however, as the tail meat seemed unusually tough.

Before ordering this, I understood that because it is an odd season for shellfish right now, with alot of them mating during the spring, shellfish tend to accumulate sand in its flesh. The clams and mussels, in this dish, had an overwhelming amount of sand in the flesh, to the extent where they were inedible. Pretty disgusting. I had to complain to my waiter, and we were able to get another batch of steamed little neck clams, which were better, but still had a significant amount of sand in them. They were left largely untouched.

So what do I think of Legal Seafood? Its an average, maybe even below average seafood restaurant. Legal Seafood claims to always have the freshest and most flavorful seafood around, but I still can't get over the Kumamotos, and steamed mussels and clams. Now I understand that getting the sand out of the clams is impossible, and my incident with the shellfish may be inevitable, but I believe that Legal Seafood has to be more responsible for what they bring out to their customers. Legal Seafood claims to have the freshest and most flavorful seafood in the area, but I highly doubt that.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll venture into a better seafood restaurant.