Happy Hour is pretty popular at Chewies starting around 5pm, so if you want a reasonably quiet room, get there around 4pm. Later the ambient conversation noise of a busy room, plus the loud music, will make hearing the person just a couple feet away pretty challenging.
I'd opted for the full proper dinner of chicken last time, so this time I thought I'd try their strictly happy hour discounted appetizers ("First Bites"). The items on offer are listed on a separate happy hour menu.
Boudin Balls (regular price $14) Creole style pork sausage meat and dirty rice stuffed sausage balls, chicken fried and served with sweet and smoky mustard.
- Mustard is still mustard, so if you use too much it'll flatten all the other flavours.
- Smells and tastes like liver. If you actually like liver or pate, this will be okay.
- Token salad plus four boudin balls, each roughly the size of a ping pong ball. At the Happy Hour price of $7, this is still almost $2 per ball! I feel the price is pretty steep unless you really like the salad too. At regular price, if you really only get 4 balls as well, don't order it and get a proper main instead.
Crocs & Hush Puppies (regular price $14) Chicken fried crocodile, house vinaigrette, corn hush puppies, jalapeño jelly
- "Jelly" dip is sweet and watery.
- Crocodile here is chunks so you can actually isolate whole pieces of crocodile (which is apparently cheaper to import from Australia than it is to get alligator from North America?).
- Tastes too much like chicken. And since the total portion of crocodile is probably about one KFC thigh, paying even $7 half price for the novelty of eating crocodile is too much. Just eat chicken.
- Hush puppies were pretty firm and not particularly tasty. Try the Revel Room's cornbread hush puppies, which come with their fried chicken dinner plate.
Unless the regular price portions are bigger (hopefully double!), under no circumstances should you order Boudin Balls or Crocs at full price. The portion starts to look awfully small when the price goes over $10. If you allow that they are in a downtown location and are willing to pay for that location, then half price to even $10 is acceptable.
Pan Seared Calamari ($13) BC Humbolt squid with a cucumber, mint and jalapeño salad in a crème fraîche dressing with smoked paprika aioli
- Decent sized plate at half price. Almost looks like a medium plate of fettuccine, except the "noodles" are squid. That's a fair amount of squid if you are paying half price during Happy Hour.
- Didn't look or taste really pan seared (keyword here being "seared") to me, and overall taste was a bit on the bland side.
- TIP: If you find it a bit too bland, instead of reaching for the sour hot sauce on the table (which tastes like Frank's Hot Sauce), maybe mix your salad and its dressing into the squid noodles.
- Price for portion okay, taste was so-so.
Dungeness Crab Cakes (regular price $15) Lemon aioli, with an avocado & cucumber salad in a sherry vinaigrette
- Strangely, this did not strongly taste like crab. Might be a fluke as the contents of the cakes did look quite crab-meat-like that there shouldn't have been much filler.
Despite a lacklustre experience from their happy hour menu (especially considering the price -- so I recommend trying their appetizers only during Happy Hour first), I continue to hear their fried chicken is still a winner. So Chewies probably still has better dinner mains than appys. Every restaurant menu has winners and duds, so check recent reviews for recommendations and go in informed for a tastier time.
My previous warning about the mid-way server change at Happy Hour continues to be valid. If you change your seat, definitely tell your server, or simply try not to do it. It took a long time to sort out 12 bills because our party moved around a bit.
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