This probably doesn't matter to anyone outside the Philadelphia area but I want to get it off my chest. Back when I was a kid, Seafood Shanty was the restaurant to get seafood. It was awesome. For whatever reason (hey, I was a kid), the franchise went out of business and disappeared. Recently, a local guy decided to bring it back. He bought some of the original recipes from the old Shanty and opened a store not far from my house. We finally got to try it out last night. I was disappointed.

First, service was pretty slow. I used to be a waitress so I tend to be fairly lenient on wait times. However, none of our food should have taken particularly long to cook. The most 'complicated' food was my husband's lobster rigatoni, which didn't even have rigatoni noodles. I had a steampot, which ended up way too spicy and didn't have a whole lot in it. My daughter ordered a "bucket of dungeness crab," which contained an entire half of a crab. To top it off, everything took so long that we didn't get home until way past my daughter's bed time.

This brings me to my second point. For the amount of food we received, the price was way too high. A few months ago, the three of us visited Joe's Crab Shack. We ordered similar food and the cost was the same. BUT there was twice as much food at Joe's. The bucket of crab I had there had one and a half crabs in it.

So, if you are in the Reading, PA area and are thinking about trying the new Seafood Shanty, skip it. Drive the extra hour and go to Joe's Crab Shack in King of Prussia. You won't regret it.