The Seafood Boil And The Buffet

The reversal of a pandemic-era restaurant trend?

Back in the summer of 2021, I wrote a short piece on the exploding Cajun “seafood boil” restaurant segment. Seafood boils are not a new idea, of course; like the New England clam bake or the Maryland crab-picking, the seafood boil is a classic regional dish/activity, hailing in some form from the Southeast. But during the pandemic, a relatively recent fusionized Asian-Cajun version of the seafood boil began to appear rapidly.

The dining trend had been growing before that, but one thing that drove this expansion was that a lot of Chinese buffet restaurants switched over to a seafood boil concept, as did many current or former owners of Chinese restaurants.

I wrote:

Urban Hot Pot in Rockville, Maryland advertises its “new Cajun seafood carryout menu.” The Teppanyaki Grill & Buffet in Lanham, Maryland, is open again but prominently advertises carryout-only Cajun seafood too. Ditto Tokyo Seafood Buffet (a standard Chinese buffet, despite the name), outside Ellicott City. What gives? Where did this concept, more or less new in the D.C. area, come from? And why did restaurants with no connection to it embrace it suddenly?