SEA Crab House, a Quickly Growing Chain That Started on the Coast, Is Opening in Beaverton

Come prepared to bib up and request a roll of paper towels.

SEA Food Crab House The boil at SEA Food Crab House. Photo courtesy of SEA Food Crab House.
By Andi Prewitt

A restaurant specializing in Southern-style boils that began in Seaside has quickly and quietly become a mini empire with its first metro-area location scheduled to open this week.

The SEA Crab House, which also has spots in Astoria and Bend, will launch an outpost Friday, Feb. 3, at 4105 SW Orbit St., Unit 101, in Beaverton. That’s located in the city’s West End District, which includes several other new food and beverage establishments, including Portland Cider Company’s third bar and Prime Tap House: West End, known for its sauced-up, succulent wings.

The SEA Crab House—the “SEA” stands for “Southeast Asian,” since Thai spices collide here with Cajun flavors—was serving the boil the way you’d expect at its coastal locations during our last visit: dumped directly onto a piece of butcher paper covering the table.

However, photos on the menu section of the website and on the Beaverton business’s Facebook cage seem to indicate they’ll come more neatly contained on a baking sheet. Either way, you’d do well to come prepared to bib up and request a roll of paper towels. Each concoction comes with your choice of protein, including live lobster, live Dungeness crab, Alaskan king and snow crab, mussels, Manila clams, crawfish and shrimp.

For those afraid of sauce-covered fingers and faces, a menu of starters, soups and salads awaits. These dishes find their inspiration from a variety of regions, so you can expect everything from crab cakes to shrimp ceviche to gumbo to a Thai seafood salad.

“I’ve had my heart set on our Beaverton location for close to two years, facing challenge after challenge. I can’t tell you how excited I am that we are finally opening,” SEA Crab House founder and CEO Patta Lorwatcharasophon stated in a press release. “I can’t thank the community of Beaverton enough—especially the local chamber—who have shown us nothing but support from the beginning. We can’t wait to serve this new community of ours.”

This is the first of four planned openings for the chain in 2023. Up next: Seattle, Portland, Bellevue and Tacoma.

Reservations for Beaverton’s opening weekend are available online. Lorwatcharasophon anticipates a full house and warns that when the Bend restaurant launched, lines formed down the street to get in.

Feb. 3 is the location’s soft opening. There will be a grand opening and ribbon-cutting ceremony with the Beaverton Chamber of Commerce on Thursday, Feb. 9.

Willamette Week’s reporting has concrete impacts that change laws, force action from civic leaders, and drive compromised politicians from public office. Support WW's journalism today.