Jake’s Famous Crawfish: Seafood restaurant in Portland

During our trip to Portland, we paid a visit to Jake’s Famous Crawfish, a seafood restaurant in downtown Portland. This restaurant has been a downtown Portland landmark for 127 years. Their menu features a variety of fresh fish and seafood dishes, flown in daily. As a seafood lover, I was super excited to eat here.

The vibe

Jake’s Famous Crawfish has a traditional vibe to it, kind of like New Orleans. There’s a lot of green, wooden furniture, and a full bar. It’s a large restaurant so it can seat a lot of people and large tables too.

We are seated in a booth, which was spacious but it was like a wooden bench booth (like a church?) so it wasn’t cushiony. Lighting was somewhat dim so the ambiance was nice for dinner.

Food

We order a bottle of wine to share and choose a white reisling. It was only around $25 USD – cheap for a bottle in a restaurant!

By the way, they give free bread with butter. It’s not focaccia bread or anything, so it tastes pretty average, but always nice to get free bread.

Note: all the prices in this review are in USD.

Crispy fried calamari ($18)

A classic appetizer, we order the calamari to share with 4 people. It is served with sherry aioli and cocktail sauce. The calamari tasted fine (nothing extraordinary) and it was exactly what I was expecting. I did like that the portion was quite big!

Pan fried oysters ($16)

My boyfriend loves pan fried oysters! They are not deep fried so it is only lightly battered and you can still taste that juicy oyster meat. It served with tartar sauce.

I was surprised at how many oysters they actually include in one order – 6! That’s quite a lot for the price because in Vancouver you probably only get like 4.

Jake’s clam chowder ($9)

My boyfriend also really likes clam chowder so he orders a small cup for himself. You can order a bowl for $11 and a sourdough bread bowl for $13. The soup has a good viscosity to it and there are quite a bit of clam meat so that is good. Even for just a cup, I found there to be a reasonable amount in the cup so I’m expecting the 2 bowls to be much larger.

Now onto the entrees…

Crab & shrimp stuffed halibut ($52)

Our server highly recommends the stuffed halibut so our friend orders it. It is stuffed with Dungeness crab and Bay shrimp, served with mashed potatoes and some veggies.

This is quite an expensive dish but for halibut, crab and shrimp, it seemed reasonable. However, I didn’t like the taste of the halibut at all, mostly due to the fact that it is also stuffed with brie cheese. I found the cheese to be overpowering and the dish became too rich for me.

Alaskan cod fish and chips ($26)

Our other friend orders the cod fish and chips. He is not as adventurous with his food so this is a pretty safe bet. The cod is beer battered with panko and served with cole slaw, fries and tartar sauce. I didn’t get a chance to try any of his dish because I was actually too full lol but I feel like you can’t really go wrong with such a classic dish. The fries and fish looked like it is fried well.

Jake’s famous étouffée ($29)

I order this dish after spending a lot of time researching what to order (lol you know me, I like to do my research). Finally, I settled on ordering the etoufee because it actually has crawfish in it. I mean come on! It’s called Jake’s famous crawfish restaurant but so far none of our dishes have had any actual crawfish lol. Anyways, I order this for my main and it has crawfish tails, chicken and shrimp, rice and a rich nut brown sauce.

The etouffee is originally a Cajun/creole dish from Louisiana so it is similar to a gumbo or maybe even a thick curry. I actually really liked the nut brown sauce because it was very tasty and went well with the rice. There is kind of a spiciness to it so after awhile, you will notice it tastes a spicy. There were A LOT of crawfish tails and shrimp meat in the sauce too so every bite was filled with seafood. Our friends liked this dish so much they helped us eat it too.

We actually ordered this dish to be shared between 2 people, so they gave us 2 plates of this (what you see in the photo is only 1/2 of it). I can’t imagine how large the serving is if we had not split it up!

Jake’s traditional bouillabaisse ($46)

My boyfriend orders the bouillabaisse, which is essentially a fish stew with lots of seafood in it. This bouillabaisse comes with mussels, clams, scallops, prawns, salmon and crab legs. It is served in a gigantic bowl – like actually huge bowl – and 2 pieces of cheesy bread for you to dip into the fish broth. Needless to say, it is a lot of food and I would say you can share this with 4 people actually lol. Lots of seafood and the crab legs were fresh and delicious.

Compared to the bouillabaisse we had at Provence Marinaside recently, I will say this fish broth was more “watery”. The colour is more clear and the fish broth isn’t as savoury, but still quite good.

Final thoughts

Loewe’s rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

We really enjoyed our dinner at Jake’s Famous Crawfish. Out of all the dishes we ordered, I think the ones my boyfriend and I ordered were the best – the crawfish etouffee is a MUST order. None of us really liked the stuffed halibut that much, but everyone else ate the etouffee and liked the bouillabaisse. I also really liked that they didn’t charge us for splitting the etouffee because some restaurants charge a fee (it’s dumb).

Portion sizes are big and generous! Service was excellent and all the seafood tasted fresh and delicious. They have so many seafood dishes on their menu that it can be hard to choose what to order, especially since portion sizes are large and you will get full easily. Prices are not cheap (especially after USD and CAD conversion), but for the amount of food you get and the quality, I think it is super reasonable.

We will make sure to return to Jake’s Famous Crawfish the next time we are in Portland!

Sincerely, Loewe