Restaurant talk: Offshore's Nextdoor

Friday’s snail mail brought me a menu for Lake Highlands new restaurant Offshore's Nextdoor (which many of you have chimed in on already), located in the old Hog Wild spot. So Saturday, around 10 p.m., I called them up (the mailer said they were open until midnight). I first asked how late they were open (because even though the menu said midnight, I couldn’t imagine a restaurant in that location doing a whole lot of business after 10 —it ain’t exactly a Saturday night hotspot), and, alas, she said the kitchen closed at 10 p.m. But then she asked what I wanted and said they would go ahead and get it ready for me. Wow, thanks!

When I arrived to pick up my ahi tuna salad and grilled shimp po boy, there were two groups of happy looking people on the patio — a really cool, clean and relatively spacious patio — enjoying drinks.

Inside, it had a real Aw Shucks sort-a feel. That leads me to my one (and so far only) gripe about the place — no oysters on the half shell or boiled crab legs.

After considering the hospitality with which the staff treated me, and observing the cool atmosphere, I really wanted the food to be good — and it was. My husband (who’s in the restaurant business if that means anything) thought they went a little heavy on the spices (both items), but to me it was perfect. I like intense flavor. The tuna was perfectly seared and succulent, and peppered with sesame and cayenne (I think) on a bed of lettuce. A lot of times when I order ahi tuni, I end up with overly oily fish—not here. They didn’t skimp on the shrimp (which can also be ordered fried) on the sandwich — that made my dining partner happy.

Overall: I am super happy to have them in my neighborhood and I look forward to returning — and if they had boiled crab legs I'd be there every day.

Oh, and they offer free wi fi!

Comments

[Melissa]

I went on Friday @ 6:15pm with 3 friends and thoroughly enjoyed the food. We arrived right on the cusp of it getting super busy. The service was attentive throughout the meal, despite being quite busy. The only problem we had was the place is pretty small and there was an unhappy young child at another table. Unfortunately, she vocalized her displeasure at the top of her lungs every chance she got. No fault of the restaurant.

We had the jumbo shrimp, a poboy (forgot which one), fried catfish and the jambalaya. All were quite good with the jumbo shrimp and jambalaya the big winners at our table. We'll be going back to enjoy the patio and maybe dinner at a later hour.

[DoubleTee]

We were also there on Friday night and I have a few observations of my own...

The place is still very small, just as Melissa mentioned. We arrived around 6:30pm and the inside was almost full. But that wouldn't have mattered as we had 6 in our group and I didn't see any tables inside that could accommodate a group of that size. So be aware of that if you're planning on eating with friends.

We ended up sitting outside. It was warm, but not to bad. It will certainly be very pleasant later on this year. Service was attentive and kept our drinks reasonably full. However, don't come to the restaurant hungry, or if you do, plan on ordering an appetizer. We waited for a little bit more than an hour for our food to arrive after placing our order. While the adults in our party were fine, our kids were getting quite antsy.

The food was mostly good. I had the crawfish etouffee. I'm sure there was some crawfish in there, but it seemed like it was diced up very finely and it was very spicy. Our friend had the salmon with crawfish and crab sauce. It was very good with large pieces of crawfish and crab meat. My wife had the crab cake po-boy and our other friend had the chicken sandwich. Both of them said their sandwiches were very good.

We would probably eat there again.

[An Hour?]

An Hour wait? Yikes.