- Michael Gebert
- Crayfish boil
I arrived late at Dolo Restaurant and Bar, located a little southwest of the primary Chinese restaurant area that spans Archer and Cermak in Chinatown, and my friends had already been through the menu and decided on some things to order. One of those things was a big platter of crayfish and crab; we were interested to see what the Chinese interpretation would be. It arrived a few minutes later, and to our surprise it proved to be nothing more nor less than a seafood boil like you might find in some place in Maine called Ye Old Fish Shanty or in Shreveport or anywhere else they catch up stuff like this: red crawfish mixed with crab legs, half ears of corn, boiled potatoes . . . and some sausages which one member of our group identified, based on extensive experience in childhood, as Hebrew National hot dogs.
I asked him what he meant by that. “We are a destination,” he said. “We’re not your walking distance from the Red Line place, we’re not visible by the naked eye. You drive past us, that’s the only way you’re going to know about us, or word of mouth. We have to be different, we have to have food that’s different.” Fresh seafood was what they settled on as their differentiator—and if my friends and I could have doubted it from what we ate that night, we would have been quickly set straight. As we were leaving, we saw live crustaceans being delivered and placed in the tanks in the restaurant, including shrimp and an enormous dungeness crab.
