An avant garde approach to food and art, located near Test Track.

Our recommendation: The Angry Crab is worth your time, but skip everything else in this booth. The Watermelon Mary should be skipped twice.

Booth Overview

Food

• Compressed Watermelon Tataki 🌱 – $4.75
  – with Pickled Watermelon Rind, Yuzu Pearls, Watermelon Foam and Wasabi
• Angry Crab – $7.25
  – Whole Crispy Soft-Shell Crab with Green Papaya Salad, Mango-Sriracha Fluid Gel, Coconut-Lime Foam with Pomegranate and Mango Crush Pearls
• Pan-Seared Scallops 🌈 – $7.50
  – with Vanilla-Butternut Squash Purée, Brown Butter Cauliflower Purée and Lime Foam
• The Tropics – $5.00
  – Lilikoi Mousse, Guava Cake, Coconut Crémeux, Compressed Pineapple and Mango Gel

Beverages

• Watermelon Mary – $6.50
  – featuring Boyd and Blair Potato Vodka
• J. Lohr Riesling – $6.50
  Monterey, CA

Our Thoughts

Best of the Booth

The Angry Crab is wonderful and well worth waiting in line for. The tropical flavors go so well with the sriracha and the sweet crab; this one is a surefire winner.

Rest of the Booth

The Compressed Watermelon Tataki is beautiful (isn’t everything with watermelon beautiful?), but the components weren’t balanced right for us. Too much wasabi. There’s promise here, but it wasn’t quite fulfilled.

The Pan-Seared Scallops had plating problems – one of our plates only had a single scallop, and at $7.50 that’s a little dear to be making that mistake. Ours were also overcooked. On the one hand, this is an opening-day take, and service might smooth out. On the other hand, seafood dishes at Festivals are usually the ones where you wait for fresh when they’ve been sitting under the lamps. To have it not be well cooked when they’re dishing them out apace isn’t great.

There’s nothing wrong with the Tropics. There’s just nothing amazingly right about it either.

The Watermelon Mary is evil in a glass. Balsamic vinegar boba might have seemed like a cool idea, but it should have died on the tasting table. We can’t recommend this, except as something to serve your enemies at a “revenge is a dish best served cold” brunch.

All Food Studio Reviews