Out of Town Eats

Rockin' Baja Lobster
April 13 - in Irvine for business. The training class I was helping train had a night out and 18 of us went out to the Newport Beach Pier area to grab some grub. Now, Newport Beach has great memories for me as I spent a few teenage summers hanging out there. The fondest for me is staying with the Buuck's at the rental they rented each year. OK, I could go on and on about that and them... but, I'm here to write about food and eateries.Rockin' Baja Lobster has quite the theme - and that theme is BUCKETS. Buckets o' beer (6 for the price of 5, about $3.50 each, not bad, actually) and buckets o' shell fish - most of it fried. Fried slipper lobster tails (that would be crawdads on steroids), shrimp fried, the crabs were steamed or boiled, no chips and salsa, all you can eat ceasar salad, and family-style servings of refried beans and spanish rice (no other choices of beans).
WAIT STAFF:Young and helpful, somewhat forgetful about water, but other than that, they worked hard.
DRINKS:Hey, this was business, so I had only one beer, a Negro Modelo. The beer menu was not huge, but some variety. The drinks looked interesting - pitchers of margeritas, but the 3 different mojitos sounded yummy - but I was driving, so only the one beer for me. Perhaps I can come back and have a mojioto.
FOOD:As described above, made to be served fast - but the quantities only sound big. A bucket of shrimp (Shrimp Lover's Bucket) is $16.95, and like all buckets, is half filled with paper, so the food is at the top two inches of the cute galvanized quart-sized buckets. The buckets were pretty much the same with paper and food, except the snow crab, but they are long. I had the Lobster Lover's Combo, a fried lobster taco, which was good, only fried, a lobster enchalada, and a cup of lobster and corn chowder. I got beans and rice with that and the salad and salsa bar. It wasn't so bad, $13.95 is reasonable for lobster. I think the fact that the restaurant is not generous with the ubiquitous chips rubbed me wrong. The best part of the salsa bar was chili butter, smeared on a tortilla was tasty. Eighteen people produced a bill of $463.88. ouch.

Rockin' Baja Lobster gets one happy face on the cranky scale. It would have gotten two happy's except the no-choice of rice and beans and zero free chips was just not generous enough for this theme restaurant. (It must be the tourists who get sucked in, I don't see locals comin' back)