We had a terrible meal at San Francisco's Allioto's on the Wharf, in 2003. I thought that was a well known place at one point, maybe too touristy now? The shrimp tasted like it came out of a frozen food section!

Perkins somewhere in New York State. Buffalo Shrimp Quesadilla. I don't know if it was the spices, if the shrimp had gone bad, the cheese was terrible or if it had gone bad. After taking the first bite, my goal was to finish half of it (I hate wasting food). After the third bite I gagged and had to give it up.

IIRC, of the large Wharf seafood restaurants, only Scoma's serves truly fresh fish (they have a Receiving station next to the restaurant to offload the fishing boats). Away from the Wharf, for fresh fish try the Hayes Street Grill, which IIRC only has a small freezer for ice cream.

Bad service is supposed to be part of Legal's raffish charm. There's a reason they make you pay when you order. I hate the place. There's nothing special about the food.

I can recall many bad seafood restaurants, from a Raleigh, NC Red Lobster where we had to wait 30 minutes for the water to be brought to the table, a New Jersey place with funny-looking and funny-tasting longneck clams, but they had a $4.95 lobster special (catch was this had to be eaten while standing at the bar), and in Bodega Bay in California, a golf course restaurant served me up a crab that poisoned me so badly that I spent three days in a jail cell spouting at both ends. I also felt badly when a bowl of thick soup with pink pieces of fish was put in front of me in Sendai, Japan. My host ordered it and found out later it was Shark Fin Soup. Mrs. outoftown and I have this thing about killing sharks for their fins, so to us, it was like Muslims being fed pork. Not a bad restaurant, just a bad seafood experience, like when my rental car got busted into during lunch at Fisherman's Wharf. Most of my other bad seafood experiences were masked by generous amounts of wasabi and/or beer.

-outoftown

A seafront restaurant in Cannes which specialised in seafood about 5 years ago

The moules were riddled with sand - wash the damn things for Gawd's sake!!

The bouillabaisse was mainly bones & feck all fish...

Ended up eating McDonalds on the way home because the entire meal was inedible

Despite recommendations in guidebooks, the extremely slow service made it an excruciating night, which isn't great for a special occasion. Food was okay but we were starved by then

Surely Legal could find a few more wait staff!

Speaking from the standpoint of (a) having grown up with fresh "wild" shrimp (and they all used to be that way, before deep freezers and shrimp farms) and (b) living in Texas, where we carefully export most of the "Texas" steakhouses, I will confirm for all who read here that the poster above made two grave and unforgivable errors, sins of commission, not omission not mortal, but certainly damnable..

He went to a "Texas Steakhouse" in Wheeling By God, WV (where the only likely food item actually from Texas was the contents of the salt shaker.....

He ordered scrimps.

Roadkill cooked in a hub cap over a trash fire in the parking lot would have likely been safer if not better (and they do have some pretty high grade road kill in WV, if it has a chance to age without too much tread-tenderizing).

AMEN!

That was adventurous. C�diz isn't exactly the greatest place on Earth...although you'd think its location right next to the sea, that shrimp would be okay...