Waterbury Restaurant Asks for Public Opinion on Signage, Resident Says it Looks ‘Abandoned’

Does it bother you to watch another person eat? Is it more enticing to see how full a restaurant is, before you decide to go in? A Waterbury seafood restaurant is asking for the public's opinion, so I'm weighing in.

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I recently wrote about the influx of boiled seafood joints opening up all over Connecticut, and one of the seafood restaurants that I mention in my article is Red Crab Juicy Seafood, located at 950 Wolcott Street. I was scrolling through Facebook yesterday, and I saw a post that the owners had put up. The point of their post was to ask the general public's opinion as to whether Red Crab should remove the big photographs blocking their windows, so the interior of the restaurant can be seen by people passing by.

It was interesting to see what some Waterbury residents had to say. Almost all of the comments had the same idea saying that the restaurant looked closed and one even said that it looked like "an old abandoned seafood restaurant."

Just to give you an idea of what they're talking about, here's a photo of what the Red Crab exterior currently looks like:

Here's a photo of the building from 2015, when my old favorite Hacienda Del Sol was still in operation -

Does it make a difference to you as you're driving by? Does seeing a bar full of people on the street deter you from pulling in? Are you offended when someone takes a mallet to a crab's shell and sucks out the meat from the body cavity? Or stuffs a sloppy fried oyster Po Boy in their face?

My opinion is - Take the huge photos down from the windows. My initial instinct is that you're hiding something like a broken window or an empty bar. Does it matter how many people are in a place to me? Only if it's too packed, I look for restaurants that look less than half-full honestly.