Mary’s Fish Camp

I recently had the opportunity to have dinner with two lovely lady food bloggers, whose blogs I sub to and enviously devour – Kathy and Robyn.  It seriously boggles my mind how much each of them can eat in a single … event? (It’s not a sitting, because Kathy in particular seems to have envious eating adventures – just wandering around and eating anything that catches her eye.) and remain so svelte.  I am seriously jealous; after one week of eating like that (posts to come!), I gained, quite literally, 10 lbs.  I am not joking, sadly (I’ll post up the entire disgusting list of week long eating later…). 

In any case, we tossed out a couple of ideas and finally settled on a place that none of us had been to yet – kind of surprising since they cover a wide spectrum between the two of them, and I’m all over the place – Mary’s Fish Camp, the illegitimate offspring of Pearl Oyster Bar, easily one of my favorite places.  We had all been to Pearl Oyster Bar and were eager to try something that supposedly was on par.

After some debate – and a bit of my holding my tongue to not say “But I want my own lobster roll!” – we opted to split three appetizers and one lobster roll.  This proved to be incredibly smart on the part of Kathy & Robyn (despite my whiny brat stomping her feet inside my head) – well, you’ll see why.

My choice was the Louisiana crab dip.  This was overwhelmingly blah.  I mean, creamy stuff to put on a piece of toasted bread – you can’t really go wrong there in my opinion – and it wasn’t disgusting or bad, just blah.  Not special and not really crab-a-licious. 

The next choice – I forget who chose this one, sorry! – was fried clams and oysters.  Again, you can’t go wrong with fried shellfish, in my opinion, and I found my clams tasty (amazing: I am not a big fan of cooked oysters, and despite my blindly choosing whatever piece was next, I managed to get two clams, woohoo!) but there could have been more pop to the breading, or something more interesting about the tartar sauce.  As it was, I could imagine receiving the same thing from – dare I say it? – any random seafood chain that serves fried belly clams.  Yawn.

Our third appetizer choice was fried calamari, which boasted jalapenos.  I’m a big spicy-wimp, but I didn’t really taste jalapenos, even though they appeared to have been deep fried with the calamari.  Yet again – yawn yawn yawn.

And the main event – the lobster roll.  Can I tell you how glad I was that we opted to split instead of getting my own?  This was horribly disappointing; afterall, it’s meant to be a duplicate of Pearl Oyster Bar’s version, which I absolutely adore.  But this one fell far flat; the bread was gummy and not wonderful and buttery like Pearl’s; the lobster lacked the lobster flavor that uh, makes lobster lobster.  The mayo was overpowering and overall, it was very blah once again.  The fries were barely passable, though we all kept munching them hoping they’d get better.  Ok, that’s a lie.  We’re just piggies like that. 

(Psst: Kathy’s opinion here)

We opted out of dessert, which we’d been eyeing eagerly when we first sat down; at these prices, we really weren’t interested in another big, fat disappointment.  (Dessert post next!) 

Yvo says: That lobster roll’s market price was $33.  This was just under a month ago.  WTH?  At least if you’re $33, rock.  Don’t suck!  I was really disappointed and uber glad that Robyn & Kathy both suggested splitting everything; as it was, I think the bill came out to $28 a person, less than a lobster roll would have been.  It was really mediocre.  Oh, also, a weird point to note: why do people make it so hard to be “good”?  We split the tab onto 2 credit cards (since they wouldn’t let us do 3), and accidentally undercharged me.  I went up to fix it, and it took a good extra 15 minutes of time to not just explain the problem, but to get it fixed.  (The waitress didn’t understand me for some reason.)  In the end, it was all fixed, but it almost made me not want to speak up next time – waste of time.
not recommended, go to Pearl Oyster Bar instead