Bags of Boil for a Crowd
Kai's Crab Boil builds its menu around one format: the bag, dumped table-side and shared. Crab, shrimp, and oysters come tossed in a Cajun-leaning butter sauce, ordered by the pound and split across a table lined with butcher paper. That structure alone tells the room it's built for groups, not solo counter seats. A boil restaurant lives or dies on the sauce-to-shellfish ratio and the seasoning heat level offered at ordering, and the range here runs from mild to a level that clears sinuses, which gives a table of six enough spread to argue over.
Crab legs snap easily when the boil is cooked right, and shrimp holds its snap without turning rubbery, both signs of a kitchen watching timing rather than steaming everything the same length regardless of size. Oysters round out the order for anyone who wants something raw or lightly cooked alongside the boiled shellfish, a smart hedge against a table where not everyone wants their seafood swimming in butter. Columbus doesn't have a deep Gulf-style boil lane the way it has Somali goat or Vietnamese pho, so a room committed fully to the format stands out by default rather than by crowding a saturated category. The price sits upscale for what is, functionally, a bib-and-newspaper meal, which puts it in league with the seafood towers at steakhouse-adjacent rooms rather than with cheap-eats crab shacks.
That pricing makes sense for a special-occasion group dinner, a birthday, a bachelorette detour, less so for a quick weeknight craving. Expect noise, expect hands getting messy, expect a bill that adds up fast once garlic bread, corn, and sausage additions get thrown into the bag. This is a destination for people already deciding to make a night of seafood together, not a stop for someone eating alone at the bar.
