This All-You-Can-Eat Cajun Crab Buffet Is for Serious Eaters Only

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

They say that COVID killed the buffet restaurant. But don’t tell that to the dozens of eager seafood lovers we saw standing in line at Supreme Crab Buffet at 9 o’clock on a Friday night.

We’d been searching for an all-you-can-eat spot that was open late, and this popular Redwood City Asian Cajun spot seemed to check all the boxes: It features two serve-yourself hot food buffet counters, a salad bar, a dessert station, and, oh, did I mention that the crab legs, too, are all-you-can-eat? All that for just over $30 a person, and it’s open until 10:30 every night.

The fact that the place has the cheesy charm of a theme restaurant — a super-sized inflatable crawfish that greets you at the door, and all manner of maritime paraphernalia — is just an added bonus.

Even more than your average buffet restaurant, Supreme Crab isn’t for the faint of heart. At about half past 9, no one in Supreme Crab Buffet’s dining room looked like they had come to partake in fun conversation. These were serious eaters only. A sisterhood of pre-loosened pants strings. A convocation of hawk-eyed killers ready to clear that fresh tray of crab legs as soon as it hit the buffet counter. (Special shout-out to the solo diners at a buffet restaurant, like the slender Filipino gentleman we saw who appeared to be loading plate after plate with crawfish exclusively. That guy will eat you under the table.)

Any AYCE enthusiast can tell you about the folly of hitting up a buffet without a strategy, which is to say, without a firm commitment to avoid filling up on low-value carbs. And Supreme Crab does offer plenty of carb options to tempt you: garlic bread, fried rice, potstickers, at least two or three different kinds of potato and, for some reason (it’s a trap!), pizza. The two I couldn’t resist were the garlic noodles and the plain white rice, both of which go so well with all of that saucy, spicy seafood — especially when you ladle a little bit of extra garlic butter or Cajun sauce on top.

The two main hot food counters are laden with many of the staple dishes you can find at any Asian American buffet: beef and broccoli, teriyaki chicken, General Tso’s and a panoply of assorted batter-fried things. There were dim sum–style sesame balls. There were leathery kalbi-style short ribs. There was even a whole corner of the salad bar dedicated to Korean banchan — a tasty baby octopus salad and better-than-you’d-expect kimchi.

Listen: You should eat whatever you love. But in our professional opinion, you’re wasting precious stomach space if you stray too far away from Supreme Crab’s most prized offerings — its many different varieties of shellfish.

In this regard, the restaurant more than met our expectations. We piled our plates high with crawfish and juicy garlic-butter clams. We must have taken down a dozen cheesy mussels, that Asian buffet staple, each plump specimen topped with a comforting layer of mayo and Parmesan. And we feasted on a half-dozen different varieties of shrimp, each one more delicious than the last: cocktail shrimp; easy-peel garlic-butter shrimp; crispy salt-and-pepper shrimp whose heads we bit off and devoured, shells and all; and head-on Cajun seafood boil–style shrimp, whose juices were especially tasty soaked into a mound of steamed rice. We left a fearsome stack of crustacean carcasses in our wake.

(You can also order your seafood boil by the bag, a la carte, if that seems like a better value proposition for your party — or if you like your crawfish spicier than the relatively mild heat level they default to on the buffet table.)

All of it was great, but none greater than the restaurant’s biggest star attraction: the long and spindly snow crab legs, whose tray at the buffet station we monitored at all times so we could snag a plateful whenever the staff unloaded a fresh supply. (This is a “snooze you lose” situation; we watched a whole batch get cleared out in less than 10 minutes.) These, too, were cooked Cajun-style, with lots of garlic and a mild chili heat. We’d suck all the flavor off of the shell, then work our forks inside, jostling them around until it popped open. When we did it just right, the crab’s sweet, succulent flesh would pull out intact, ready to be dipped in butter or lemon juice.

For certain immigrant communities in the Bay, in particular, there’s no bite of food that feels more luxurious.

Which is maybe a good time to mention that Supreme Crab Buffet was one of the most diverse restaurants we’ve visited recently, with an even split of Black, brown and Asian American customers. Here in the multicultural Bay Area, it seems, there are few things that bring our communities together quite like the promise of all-you-can-eat crab legs.

For anyone who’s ever gone out to eat at a trendy upscale restaurant, looked around the lily-white dining room and wondered, “Where are all my POC at?” — the answer might be that they’ve got their disposable gloves on and are absolutely going to town on a big plate of seafood at Supreme Crab. And they’re probably having a better time than you.

Supreme Crab Buffet is open Mon.–Sat. 11 a.m.–10:30 p.m. and Sun. 10 a.m.–10:30 p.m. at 373 Main St. in Redwood City. (The buffet stations close at around 10 p.m.) There’s also a San Francisco location, in Fisherman’s Wharf, that isn’t open as late.