Sayville Seafood Festival

Actually, it's something like "Maritime Musuem Something or Other Festival or Somesuch." We checked it out this past weekend, the third time out of the last four years. Having not been able to go last year, I had been looking forward to it for several weeks. But, either the food has gone drastically down-hill, or over the last two years I forgot how mediocre or bad it was. In any event, the food was, in fact, mediocre at best but awful, overall.

Between the wife and me, we had a soft-shell crab sandwich, mussels, baked claims, fried calimari, and a sausage and peppers sandwich. Of these the crab was the best, but, as long as it's fresh, soft-shell crab is hard to mess up. The baked clams were nothing special, but not terrible. The fried calimari was like a rubber band. But the mussels...

Where should I start? First of all, the beards had not been cleaned off of them. I wonder how many unsuspecting types just ate the whole thing, because they are used to eating the whole thing, because every other place I've had mussels actually cleans the beards off. I don't know what that wirey, coarse bit of beard feels like in the mouth, and I don't want to know. I'm sure it can't be digested, and I don't want to feel it making its way through my digestive tract.

But besides the beards, the sauce had no flavor whatsoever. Of course, the typical or ordinary sauce would be a garlicky white-wine sauce. I tasted neither garlic, nor wine, nor even salt--and they came from the friggin' ocean!

The only reason we got the sausage and pepper sandwich was because the wife saw someone else with one and thought it looked good. I warned her about getting something like that at a seafood festival, but to no avail. It turns out the sausage was that hideous, awful dog-food quality stuff, and the peppers were very mushy.

The wife did have an orange-mango smoothie that she loved. I don't like mango's, so I didn't love it.

Despite the lackluster quality of the food, it was reasonably priced. All the seafood mentioned above came to only $21. The sausage and pepper sandwich was $6 (rip off). The smoothie (medium) was $5. Admission was $5 for everyone 6 and up.