Wednesday, September 01, 2004
Legal Sea Foods -- there ought to be a law!
Larry Bly
Larry Bly runs an ad agency and does freelance writing in the Roanoke area.
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Not only does Legal Sea Foods have an unusual name, they have an incredible reputation in cities where they can be found. Nearly every year, Washingtonian Magazine's annual polling of restaurants puts them at the top of their "best local seafood". That's really saying something, considering that Legal is a franchise (but an upper-end quality one, I should hasten to add) and you considering that you can get great, fresh seafood about anywhere in D.C.
So when I trotted up to Boston recently on a little vacation, I was disappointed that my friend was taking me to a franchise restaurant, rather than some little secret place where all the locals go for great food. Turns out, Legal Sea Foods is local to Boston. Its flagship restaurant is right downtown. And if you ask locals where to get great seafood, they're apt to point you in the direction of Legal.
To say that they're strictly "upper-end" is not entirely fair. They do feed the masses, but the menu ranges from the very affordable to pricey specials with complex sauces and sides.
I started off with a cup of the New England clam chowder, which claims to have been "served at the past six presidential inaugurations." We haven't lost a single president to "bad chowder," so it must be fresh.
My Bostonian friend swears by the Arctic char. I'd never heard of it, but my friend's pedestrian tastes in seafood dictates that he eat only fish and chips or other white, fluffy fish-fare. The char was topped with truffle butter served with basil buttered corn and a choice of one side. It's around $22 and one great presentation -- and no ordinary fish dish.
I chose the halibut with crab imperial stuffing. It was served with a cream sauce and choice of two sides. I chose onion strings (golden and delicious) and mashed potatoes. This plate was well worth the $23 or so I paid for it. Plentiful, too.
Another dining friend had a seafood trio of crabcake, shrimp and scallops with a side of perfectly done (and crunchy) snap peas with oyster sauce. I ate most of his snap peas. He begged me to, honestly.
Legal Sea Foods offers wood-grilled items: salmon, sea scallops, shrimp, haddock, rainbow trout, tuna, bluefish and chicken breast. Legal lobsters come steamed, stuffed or baked in any number of ways. Surf and turf is a beautiful 8 oz. filet and your choice of shrimp, shrimp and scallops, or steamed lobster.
Lunches are reasonably priced and varied: shrimp and garlic, Portuguese fisherman's stew, seafood gazpacho, and wood grilled classics like salmon filets, rainbow trout, and bluefish.
There's a ton of others too: fried soft shell crab sandwich, Maryland style lump crab cakes, lobster roll, steamed shrimp over Jasmine rice, shrimp wontons, baked scrod, fish and chips, baked stuffed sole and seafood gumbo, to name a few.
We sat downstairs in a very special area: the wine cellar dining room. We were surrounded by thousands of bottles of wine on the walls. Legal's wine selection runs pages -- a small book, in fact. Wine by the glass is extensive with more than 20 whites, three champagnes, more than a dozen reds, dessert wines and even packaged samplers in which you get to try multiple wine groupings like Chateau Ste. Michell Chardonnay, Neibaum-Coppola Chardonnay, and Henri Prudhon. These are wines from Washington state, Napa Valley, California, and Burgundy, France. Other parings are equally enticing and varied. We had mixed drinks. Go figure!
The raw bar includes oysters on the half shell, littleneck clams, and cherrystone clams on the half shell.
You could almost make a meal of the appetizers alone: hot lump crab dip with seafood chips, Jumbo shrimp cocktail, fried calamari, coconut shrimp, steamers, fried oysters, steamed mussels, smoked salmon, bluefish pate, and shrimp wontons.
The decor is enticing and the small wait at the door is worth it. Legal seafoods are all over Boston and the nearest one to us is in Washington, D.C. Give it a try next time you're up having a chowder with the president.
Legal Sea Food not only runs its own restaurants, but it's a seafood company that supplies many other fine seafood restaurants.
To find out more about them, or to order their fresh seafood delivered to your home, go to their Web site: www.legalseafoods.com
Located in Boston at:
One Seafood Way
Boston
02210 1-800-EAT-FISH
