Catch & Cut

Catch and Cut sits at the foot of the Big Mac Bridge on the Bellevue riverfront, in a building that has hosted a few concepts over the years. The most recent was a Chinese seafood house, and some of it is still here: a Buddha on the dining room wall, calligraphy on the windows, rattan lanterns over the tables, and paper liners in the appetizer baskets that carry the old name. The new operators dropped a Cajun boil house into that shell and added steaks, sushi tacos, and a page of bar food. The name tells you what they think they are. After one dinner I'd say they're half right, and the half that's right is something good for NKY diners.

The Vibe

The patio is the reason to book. It sits right on the river with the yellow arch of the bridge, the downtown skyline, and boats going by. String lights, teal umbrellas, white metal chairs, and a fence you can lean on. We ate inside on a gray evening and watched the river from the window, which is a fine second choice.

Inside is a big open room with a corrugated metal bar face, a stainless bar top lit blue from below, a marquee sign reading BEER & COCKTAILS, TVs, and those lanterns. Tables are covered in branded butcher paper, the boils arrive in bags dropped into foil-lined buckets, and the bibs are on the table for a reason. It's casual enough that nobody minds the mess.

Our server, Faith, was there for us for everything. She got my wife an off-menu plain garlic butter sauce without blinking, pretty much nailed spice levels with a "the spicy makes me sweat" comment, warned us before we ordered dessert that the lava cake is closer to a brownie, and when we asked for chocolate sauce to rescue it, she went and found some.

The Food

We started with four appetizers, and the first thing to know is that the menu names don't quite describe what shows up. The crab rangoon nachos aren't nachos. They're flat fried wonton squares sealed around the filling, ravioli style, under sweet chili sauce, jalapeño, and green onion. The pastry is right and the flavor is there, but the crab rangoon to me seemed like it had been run through a food processor. I thought it would be a little more dense. The sauce runs sweet. Livable. (Edit to add that these were really good cold as leftovers out of the fridge.) The volcano shrimp are big, puffy, tempura-battered shrimp in a creamy chili glaze with sesame and scallion. Good taste, a small bite of heat. Again, I expected firm and the batter was fluffy when I wanted crunch. Not a bad thing, just different. The shrimp ceviche comes in a margarita coupe with tomato, red onion, jalapeños, avocado, mango, and fresh-fried tortilla chips. It leans hard into lime on the first bite, a touch more than I wanted, though I like ceviche in all its forms. The surprise winner was the Philly cheesesteak spring roll. Tiny, but tasty, and the beef inside wasn't tough, which is where these little snacks usually fail.

Then the boils, the benchmark I walked in holding. I had Combo D, which is black mussels, snow crab legs, sausage, corn, potato, and a boiled egg, in the original Cajun sauce at medium heat. My wife had Combo E, a lobster tail, snow crab legs, and sausage, in her garlic butter at mild. Both came in bags with the ticket stapled to the knot.

The sauce is terrific. That's the headline. A little thicker than typical, the spice suspended through it, with about an inch pooled at the bottom of the bag keeping everything saturated in a good way. It made for slurping mussels, which is the way it should be. They give you bibs and gloves if you want to stay clean, but I prefer a pile of napkins and a little mess. The potato soaked up the juice and became the best thing in the bag, while the boiled egg split in that sauce was ridiculously good. Whoever put that egg in changed my mind about homemade boils. The corn was tasty and a little soft. The sausage could have used some browning; it went in the pot with everything else and came out without any snap. Brown it first.

The miss, and it's the only real one, is that the kitchen leaves the shellfish in the boil too long. My crab legs wouldn't snap and pull clean, and my wife's lobster tail did the same thing. The meat clung to the shell, which is what happens to crab and lobster when they sit in hot water past the point of done. The flavor was still there, the sauce was still there, and I took the leftovers home, but on a plate where the crab and the lobster are what you're paying for, that's the thing to fix. It's a timing habit, not a sourcing problem, and it's fixable.

The Cut. My daughter went the other direction and ordered the six-ounce filet with the garlic parmesan mashed potatoes. The steak was cooked to order and juicy, but it came out thin, without sear, plated bare next to the potatoes, and the seasoning was so heavy on cracked black pepper that it buried the beef. The mash, on the other hand, is house-made and she liked it a lot. I'd said before we sat down that this didn't look like a place you come to for steak, and I was hoping to be wrong. I wasn't.

Dessert was the chocolate lava cake with ice cream. Faith's warning was accurate. It's a brownie puck with a scoop of vanilla on a large white plate and nothing else, served a little cooler than it should be. With the chocolate sauce she brought, it was fine. Without it, it wasn't. As we often do, an espresso martini completed the meal. This one was heavy on Baileys and sweeter for it, which isn’t the way I like it.

The Bottom Line

Worth a Short Detour. Come for the boil, order it with the sauce and spice you want, and eat it on the patio with the river going by. The sauce, the egg, the potato, and the view carry this place. The crab and lobster need a couple fewer minutes in the pot, the steak isn't the reason to be here, and dessert is an afterthought, and those are the misses that keep it out of the next tier up. I'd go back, and I'll be finishing the doggie bag before tomorrow ends.