Foodie Review: The Stoned Crab in Macungie, PA

The Stoned Crab
1905 Brookside Road
Macungie, PA 18062
610-398-8060

My wife and I dined at the Stoned Crab for our anniversary this year.  Overall it was enjoyable but largely unremarkable...  We started with a Hawaiian Mimosa (Pineapple Juice, Champagne and Vodka) which I had hoped would be a little sweeter but was OK.  

We moved on to our appetizers... I had the French Onion Soup (my favorite soup) and she had the Shrimp Cocktail.  She enjoyed her shrimp while I thought the French Onion Soup was just alright.  To be fair it was chicken based and I prefer beef based FOSoup (because that's how it is supposed to be made)... so take my "meh" to the soup with a grain of salt.  I certainly ate it all.  Then the meal moved to the salad which was... well salad.  Nothing to complain about here.  A fine Caesar Salad as salads go.

On came our entrees!  I was very excited to taste the Chesapeake Chicken and my wife ordered the Bay Sampler (or something like that, can't recall exactly what the menu said) -- it was a little bit of everything.  My wife's sampler platter was a lot smaller than she had hoped... it was scallops, shrimp and a crab cake... I thought the crab cake was another scallop if that says anything to you.  She liked the crab cake fine, really enjoyed the scallops but through the shrimp lacked any flavor at all.

My Chesapeake Chicken was a nicely grilled chicken breast with crab, hollandaise sauce (so they claim), a tomato and some Swiss cheese on top.  One would think this would be a wonderful marriage of different flavors.  But from bite one to the final bite (again, I ate it all :)) I found it (somehow) lacking in flavor.  I couldn't taste any hollandaise sauce (although I could see it) and the Swiss cheese must have been a very mild Swiss because I couldn't taste that either - although it did add a nice texture.  The crab was there and it was decent crab.  I think (my opinion here) that they should have dipped the crab in a lemon/butter mixture before topping the chicken.  Again, it was very edible but not remarkable.

The service was fantastic and the staff couldn't be nicer.  The atmosphere was a mixture of nice and strange.  We were in a "quiet" room in a corner -- which wasn't all that quiet at all.  And when we left I felt like we were walking out through waiter station... it was just a little strange.  We left stuffed and as I said, no complaints... but nothing outstanding to say either.  If someone said to us, "Hey, Let's meet at the Stoned Crab for dinner."  We would certainly go, but I'm not sure we would choose it as a dining place with other better seafood places around


Overall:
Atmosphere: 3/5 - Upscale, sort of private in a sitting in a closet kind of way, a little noisy.
Service: 4/5
Food: 4/5
Price: 2/5
Overall: 3/5

Pros: Excellent service, good but not great food.
Cons: Noisy for what you'd expect, I expected more out of the food.
Go Again: Maybe

Bruce is the author of four books: Sands of Time, Towering Pines Volume One:Room 509, The Star of Christmas, Philadelphia Story: A Lance Carter Detective Novel and The Insider's Story: A Lance Carter Detective Novel.  He also has a new novel coming out in June 2014, The Kill Commission.  Follow Bruce's Novel releases by subscribing to his FREE newsletter!