Love the food here and if you want a different dining experience thus is the place to go. Food a little expensive though and seating tight and cramp but apart from this it\s worth trying

On a recent trip to Sydney, my wife and I took our son and his wife and son to the House of Crabs for a meal, because I had read a really positive review of it in, I believe, an airline magazine. Since there is no food in the world I like better than crab (which I have eaten in restaurants literally all over the world), I was keen to try this one out and the rest of the family were happy to come along. The location is upstairs in a local pub, but that didn\t faze me as I have eaten some outstanding meals in very unpretentious venues. The pub was very noisy, being a Friday evening, but fortunately the "people" noise level died down a fair bit when you went up the narrow stairwell. Unfortunately they replaced that with insistent loud music that you couldn\t get away from. The eating area consists of bare tables with paper tablecloths, vinyl-covered benches along the walls and hard chairs on the other side of the table. Practical enough for something like crab that can get a bit messy, but not very comfortable. They attempt a sort of Southern US theme, which I guess for folk who have never been to the US seems exotic, but for one who has, is not convincing. I\ve eaten in lots of diners across the US, which is what I am sure this tries to emulate, but perhaps unsurprisingly, it just doesn\t capture the right "feel" of those. The insistent loud music did nothing to help with that. And finally, prices are not commensurate with diner or pub meals, which is really what they serve. But what about the food—surely the most important thing? Well here I think my disappointment was at least partly a result of the choice I made. The crab only comes one way, what they call a "boil" which is a stout plastic bag with 500g (a pound) of chopped-up whole crab in various sauces. I chose blue swimmer crab, a favourite since I used to catch them in Lake Macquarie in my teens and eat them simply boiled and with salt, pepper and fresh crusty bread. Still, to my mind, the best way to eat crab