Nab a seat beneath the covered front patio of this standby for fiery crawfish. Flavors include Cajun mix, lemon pepper, garlic butter, and 88 Boiling, which is a mix of all the above. Try green mussels or snow crab for an alternative boil option.

This is a friendly, no-frills spot with a couple of TVs, inexpensive beer, and both Cajun and Viet-Cajun mudbugs. The garlic butter sauce is more garlicky than others you’ll find in town. As for heat, there’s multiple levels: mild, medium, spicy, extra spicy, and 2x extra spicy (think you can handle it?). Other types of seafood boils are also available. If you’re still hungry, tack on an order of fried catfish with a side of vegetable fried rice.

This is the kind of mom-and-pop place that’s a joy to stumble upon. The owner, Henry Tran, is a former shrimper and fisherman from Port Arthur who started doing boils for family and friends out of a trailer in Waller in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The trailer grew so popular, he eventually opened his own restaurant. Tran offers two crawfish flavors: traditional Cajun and a sweet-and-sour garlic glaze called Craven.

The crawfish here are cooked in a wok after being soaked in a Cajun boil, much the same way crab and lobster are prepared in Chinese cuisine, so those spices and oils coat everything and get way down deep in the crevices. The Kitchen Special, tossed with green onion, lemons, orange, butter, and garlic, is sweet, savory, tangy, and wholly original; while the Thai Basil flavor conjures the streets of Bangkok.

Crawfish & Beignets originally opened in 2000 in Hong Kong City Mall and relocated down the road to Dynasty Plaza in 2019. The crawfish boils here come with three options. There’s the classic Cajun and the Krajun, the restaurant’s version of Viet-Cajun with garlic and butter. But we are particularly obsessed with the Thai Citrus crawfish, made super-tangy and lightly sweet with the addition of orange slices, plus white and green onions.

Chef and owner Trong Nguyen started offering mudbugs in mouth-numbing garlic butter more than 15 years ago, just as that style was becoming a staple of the Houston crawfish diet. An order of Viet-Cajun medium here is fiery enough, but don’t stop there: Nguyen’s menu includes other non-crawfish dishes you simply cannot miss, like the Viet-Cajun blue crab, com ga xa xiu, and fried seafood gumbo.

At all five locations, owner Kiet Duong uses real butter as well as sugar, which makes his crawfish sweeter and, let’s be honest, more addictive. The flavors—Original Cajun, Kickin’ Cajun, Texas Cajun, coco loco, garlic butter, lemon pepper, Thai basil, and The Mix, a blend of garlic butter and lemon pepper—appeal to a range of palates. Or, you can mix and match one of the restaurant’s house blends to cater to your liking.

The popular House Special flavor—a blend of garlic, butter, and myriad other spices—is far less sweet than anything you’ll find in the predominantly Vietnamese area on or around Bellaire Boulevard. And while the crawdads are delicious, they’re not always the main event. Owner James Duong says that the Hungry Home Platter—a mouthwatering mix of king crab, blue crab, snow crab, sausage, shrimp, crawfish, corn, and potatoes—is a best-seller.

The flavors here—lemon pepper, Louisiana Cajun, garlic butter, and wild Cajun—are less buttery than at other places, something that owner Lee Ngo says he was aiming for, because too much butter fills you up and makes you want to eat less. And, frankly, since some joints tend to go way overboard with the stuff, we can’t disagree with his thinking. Wild Cajun also snow crab clusters, crab legs, and jumbo shrimp. For an over-the-top experience, choose from one of the fried platters, served with french fries and garlic bread.