Crave Fishbar
“Service was ultra-friendly, drinks were spot-on, and overall looks like yet another solid addition to the UWS' rapidly improving dining scene.”
“Crave has the best oyster menu that I have found in the city with upwards of 12 from both coasts available at all times.”
“Love the ambiance in this new location and cant get enough of the yellow fin tuna plate, Lobster Curry, and the best frickin cavatelli i've ever had.”
Crave Fishbar
Takes Reservations: Yes
Delivery: Yes
Take-out: Yes
Accepts Credit Cards: Yes
Wheelchair Accessible: Yes
Good for Groups: Yes
Outdoor Seating: Yes
Dogs Allowed: Yes
Waiter Service: Yes
Caters: Yes
Price range.
$$$ Price range $31-60
8 reviews
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Just had an awesome dining experience here! Upper West Side location is Crave Fishbar's newer location, therefore, my companion and I decided to check it out for tonight's dinner. After all, it is his birthday! I am so in love with their decor. It was super relaxing, comfortable, and casual. Its atmosphere reminded me of dining outside on a beach broad walk or on a cruise ship. For now, it is much more peaceful and quiet than its hectic, crowded original location in Midtown. It is still a secret! Happy Hour East and West Coast Oysters are $1.00 from 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm here! Check it out!
My companion and I made it for Happy Hour. Yay, us! Availability of oysters depends on the season. Platters of oysters came with lemons, limes, and grapefruit! Like what they said on their window, #oystergram worthy! Our favorite one tonight was the East Coast Beausoleil oyster from New Brunswick, Canada. It starts with a forward briny taste and a sweet finish. From the West Coast, we enjoy the Totten Inlet from Washington, it was briny with a bit of watermelon accent per the description. It was refreshing! We also got the Apple Cider Sangria and Berry Lemonade to go with our oysters!
For dinner entrees, we got the Monday Special, French Dinner and the infamous Handmade Squid Ink Spaghetti.
French Dinner – Steak and frites with half a dozen of mussels. Sautéed purple onions over a fresh piece of steak, simply perfect. Frites were seasoned with sea salt topped with chives. For the mussels, we went with the original French-style; shallot, white wine, tomato, and butter. The sauce was really good that I wished that we had more homemade sourdough bread to soak it up!
Handmade Squid Ink Spaghetti – spaghetti had a super bouncy texture and clam stock was full of flavor. There was a generous amount of chopped shrimp in every bite. To my surprise, it was indeed spicy, hence, from the red chili peppers but I love it!
An ideal dinner date for delicious wines and cocktails with oysters!
Absolutely nothing wrong with this place…. Monday mussels $17 comes with fries. Dollah oystahs 4-6 every oyster on the menu is included in the happy hour!! (East side loc has happy hour until 7) service is awesome, drinks are stiff and yummy, ambience is quiet and calm before 730 then gets a bit busier and noisier after, super chill, super yum, super super! Love crave. One of the best oyster happy hours in Manhattan. I've had other food at the east side location and it was just okay but the mussels and the variety of dollar oysters here are amazing!
Cute little Hamptony spot on the UWS – the interior is straight out of a grandmother's cottage in Cape Cod. We came mainly for the Happy Hour, which is a happy two hours indeed, from 4-6 everyday, with any oyster on their menu. We enjoyed the Malpeques best – small, sweet and simple. I love how they provide a variety of citrusy fruits to top them with – grapefruit, lime and lemons. The HH cocktails are good too – the apple cider sangria is borderline juice (but with a punch), but the Tequila Mockingjay (oh, so clever they are!) is a tasty one.
We were starving and stayed for dinner which consisted of:
– Calamari – crispy, crunchy and nicely spiced
– Fluke ceviche tostadas – which were completely covered in cabbage slaw, but hefty in fat slabs of fluke. There's the tiniest of Thai chili slivers on the tostadas, but the bite with the chili is the absolute best
– Lobster curry – a bit salty, but the lobster is cooked to perfection, tender and sweet. You pretty much have to order the side of rice (with snap peas and egg) to eat with it (because nothing else will come with the curry). The fried rice is a bit dry and whatever, but you're smothering it in curry anyway
Service was a bit slow and inconsistent. Nothing from dinner screamed must-eat again, but we definitely will be back for more oysters. I guess you can say, Oy'll be back! Ha !
This is definitely my kind of spot. This location has only been opened up for the last 4 months. I dropped one star because they have happy hour $1 oyster special from 4-6pm, while their midtown location is from 5-7pm. I was really looking forward to trying some of their west coast oysters. Love the decor to this place, outside is more on the rustic side, while the back is more classy but still very chilled. We ordered the spicy tuna tartare to start, and the Handmade Squid Ink Pasta and the Homemade Cavatelli. All the dishes were delicious! The chinese long beans and the spicy chips included in the tartare was definitely very interesting. My Squid Ink Pasta had a lot of shrimps on top, the clam stock they used for the sauce was fantastic, and I love the added pepper flakes to give it a nice little kick! The Cavatelli is a good option for vegetarian lovers and the tomato based sauce was very tasty. They also have very good options on resiling so definitely give their wine list a try!
Really awesome food but slow and mediocre service. I also saw Margo Martindale so that was cool. Happy hour oysters include both east coast and west coast and are some of the best ones I've had. Do not order the porgy poke unless you like pure soy sauce. I really enjoyed my barramundi with haricot jaune and fiddlehead ferns. My friend also loved the lobster curry with garlic rice. Everything is super healthy (e.g. bread and side rice are both whole grain), fresh and flavorful. I would come here way more often if service isn't so slow.
The atmosphere here is incredible, and so is the food! It was incredibly packed on a Friday evening, obviously, and we waited 45 minutes for our table. Thanks to their genius layout, however, we were able to comfortable enjoy a drink at the bar at their mini standup tables and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, our cocktails, and our waiter.
When we finally did get seated, our wonderful waiter travelled with us and took great care of us throughout the night. He took his time, which was perfect because we had a lot to catch up on. Not being oyster experts, he was kind enough to have the oyster bar put together a sampler platter, 2 each, for us to try, half east coast half west coast. The presentation was superb, and I found East Cost unsurprisingly to be my favorite.
I would say the standout of the night however was easily the octopus appetizer. Two large and perfectly cooked tentacles topped a heaping bed of beautifully seasoned greens, and would've kept me very happy if we had just stopped there.
The barramundi with fiddlestick ferns was intriguing and new, with an excellent sauce and spring peas. I found the ferns a tad too bitter, but the fish was well-crisped while still being flaky and tender.
It was a splurge, that's for sure, but we had a truly enjoyable time and I would love to go back for another NY Oyster bar experience!
It's wonderful to have Crave on the UWS.
Made a reservation for dinner on a Saturday night. The waitstaff was exceptionally friendly and the food was great.
We started the night with two raw appetizers, the porgy poke and the fluke ceviche tostadas. Both were delicious, light, and fresh. The lobster curry entree was also incredible, although it must be ordered with the side of rice, otherwise you are just slurping up curry…
We didn't like the octopus, even though most people seem to rave about it. It simply wasn't charred enough and was missing the smoky, grilled flavor.
Also, prices are steep!
I did it. I finally tried Crave. I walk past this place virtually everyday, and everyday it calls to me. Everyday I hear its siren song. Everyday it asks me why I neglect its presence given how close I live. It chastises me for frequenting the East Village and Lower East Side for my restaurant adventures when my own backyard has something that's allegedly terrific. I do realize my Catch 22 here: I either I'm crazy because I think a restaurant is talking to me, or I'm crazy but I have an ever-present voice in my that wears the mask of a restaurant. So now that we've established my lack of sanity, let's move onto my review that you should be inclined to trust. Rational, no?
We went to Crave on Saturday night around 8pm without a reservation. I'm an OpenTable addict so this was a fairly new experience for me. Thankfully, a table had just opened up and was free for an hour and a half, which ended up working well. We were off to see a movie afterwards, so the timing couldn't have been better. What movie, you may ask? Finding Dory. We thought it wise to fill our stomaches with the very creatures we were about to feel empathy for.
Before I move onto the ingestibles, I must mention that the interior of this restaurant makes for an awesome dining experience. It's classy but not pretentious. You know you'll be shelling out a decent amount of cash for your meal, but the place is so down-to-earth that it's still approachable. I'm not sure what was here before Crave, but the space screams restaurant. There's ample room by the bar for those who want to come for happy hour/drinks, which is a totally viable option here. You also have a very large dining area, which I didn't was split into front and back sections prior to physically stepping in the space. The space itself is warm and the staff only enhances that feeling. This ain't your typical UWS joint.
Along with its notoriety as a seafood restaurant, Crave also boasts a pretty impressive cocktail program. I'm not sure when the idea of pairing seafood with high-end cocktails came to fruition, but the concept seems to have proliferated everywhere. Seafood and cocktails happen to be two of my very favorite things, so I'm thrilled by how frequently I find their cooccurrence. As stated, Crave is no exception. Along with a nice list of craft beers and plenty of wine, Crave has a cocktail menu that features some signatures, some originals and a few cocktails on tap. Me being me, I tried two: the Burning Man (high west campfire, giffard creme de peche, angostura) and the White Walker (high west white whiskey, aperol, orange, spiced syrup). High West makes some of my favorite ryes, so these seemed like natural choices for me. For those of you who aren't familiar with High West, they do some very unique whiskey blends that I haven't seen elsewhere. Campfire is a blend of SCOTCH, BOURBON, and RYE. Three in one! It's seriously tasty. Of the two cocktails I tried, I'd recommend the Burning Man. Both were good, but there's something special about High West Campfire that makes the Burning Man so good.
Instead of going shared plates-style, we each got an entree and split them. Not my usual preference, but as long as I get to try more than one thing, I'm happy. One note about the menu that my fellow health nuts will appreciate: they give you that nice little "(GF)" notation next to all dishes that are gluten free. Even better, most of the menu is gluten free! So if you're a health-conscious person but still want to eat out, Crave is a fantastic option.
Market Fish w/ roasted baby beets, baby turnip, red quinoa, lentil vinaigrette (A-)
As is the case at many restaurants which offer a market fish option, the fish rotations but the general preparation remains the same. The fish of the was mahi mahi, which we're both big fans of. This dish is easily the healthiest on the menu. Even the vinaigrette is healthy! The fish was cooked beautiful and the beets were very fresh and very tasty. I will say, though, that this is also one of the more boring dishes on the menu. It's not bad, but there's no real wow factor. We didn't regret getting it though–the mahi mahi held its own as the star of the dish, which you can't always say about fish.
Plancha-grilled Barramundi w/ romano beans, fiddlehead ferns, fresh peas, asparagus, tahini sauce, roasted cashews (A)
Still healthy, but it's got some extra oomph to it. Tahini is a brilliant ingredient. Again, I'm going to be weirdly didactic in a simple and demeaning way: tahini is made from sesame seeds and has the consistency of peanut butter. It's one of the many alternatives vegans use to make things creamy. So despite me avoiding cream-based sauces when I go out, I knew this one still gave me a green light. The sauce here is creamy but not too heavy and pairs beautifully with the fish. The peas, beans and asparagus were all lovely complements to the fish, and the cashews added some extra texture and nuttiness. Definitely a good choice.