Friday’s Crabhouse

Oh my goodness! If you love grease, high prices and a view this is the place for you. When talking to the locals, they recommend other restaurants just 1 street back. I’m no expert but $ 18 for a picture of beer is crazy.

Great view while passing time waiting for your ferry, but this place has disgusting greasy food. After it was too late of noticing, the food is prepared in the bar area which is covered in grease and frying baskets already loaded with fries sitting waiting to fry. How long are those fries sitting there? Also, there is only a selection of 4 beers… Bud, Budweiser, Corona, and Alaska Ale. Never again. Oh, and the girl serving a lime with the Corona should be wearing gloves when slicing limes as I noticed she had cuts in her cuticles!

Great view, nice place. Not great service.
However, Donald, the upstairs bartender, knows what he is doing, his service is wonderful and he is very friendly. His service is so much better than anyone else around that he is (by himself) earning the four stars I am giving this place.

Just based off the bar up top. Good customer service, great view, and clean. Although you can’t order food up top, you have to go back down.

This place has excellent seafood, service, and the location is fantastic for watching the ferry arrive and depart. The upper deck seating area gives a wide panoramic view of the Harbor front and the ambiance is of a true islander nature. The employees are friendly, courteous, well groomed, and even at busy times do well at multi-​tasking orders. I love all the wood as it gives the feeling of a tropical island getaway. The bar has a gazebo covering as well as part of the top deck area so you have the option of staying in the sun or relaxing in the shade.
This is a restaurant you definitely need to go see and the prices are well within the range of my budget. The centralized location near the shopping district makes it a perfect family snack and go.
An excellent crabhouse that I would love to see near my home.
If you are from across the pond, then this is the place to get your fish and chips. ;)
Kudos to you!

Nice place to grab a quick but once you get off the ferry, remember to bring cash as they do charge 3% for credit/​debit use.

My family and I were spending the afternoon near Friday Harbor and went here with the intention of sitting and eating while checking the return ferry schedule. After ordering up front, the staff said they would bring us our food to our table once it was ready. Unfortunately, after sitting and checking the ferry schedule we found that we only had 10 minutes to catch the next one or we’d be stuck here until 10 PM with no other plans!
We decided getting to the ferry on time was more important than eating, so we returned to the front counter to cancel our order. Much to our surprise, the staff rushed the order out and boxed it up for us. We made it to the ferry with 3 – 4 minutes to spare! To the staff here — Thank you for being so accommodating and for saving our day!

Go here for water view and the atmosphere. Food is good but all is fried. We could have split our meals and they were large portions.

Would give 2 ½ stars. Part of this review is due to the entertainment I had reading to my party of 9 the bad reviews on Unilocal.
Although most of these ring true, we did have good service… that consisted of the wait staff bringing extremely hot fried food to our table.
Skip this and find another better restaurant on Unilocal

This place should come with instructions.
If you have children and are looking for a comfortable place to grab an easy bite to eat go to any other restaurant on the island.
No table service.
Various ordering stations for different meals. Staff that is completely disinterested in assisting customers navigate the unnecessarily unorthodox system.
And food that is so far from worth the trouble.
When you’re an overpriced tourist trap for a captive clientele I suppose there’s little motivation for making things easy on the customer.
I suppose if you’re looking to get plastered and watch the ferry this place might do the trick.
I’ll never go back.

I’ll never go back! Owner is a sexist. Came here for a drink at 7pm on a Thursday evening with my husband right before last call (crazy right?! It’s 7pm!). I Was denied the drink I ordered by the owner. I ordered (soberly) a triple Moscow mule.
After We payed for our drinks, the owner then interjected between me and the bartender, saying, SHE WOULD NOT SERVE A GIRL who looks like me a triple drink, based on my body type. I was shocked! I said that I’m entitled to order any drink I want and that I’m not a girl, I’m a woman, she continued to deny me what I ordered and was being completely offensive.
I was basically at a loss for words that in 2015 im denied something at a restaurant because I am a woman. Denied by another woman mind you! I told the owner that her reasoning is seriously flawed. I understand she thought she was trying to serve responsibility but it’s 7pm at a tourist bar! I left feeling judged, insulted and with a bad taste in my mouth from the unfair treatment.
NEWS FLASH! Your business is centered around serving people on vacation alcohol.

Very pricey overrated greasy frozen fish. Got charged 1.00 for refill of paper cup ice tea 8 oz size after spending 85.90 for lunch for 4 servers were bored looking no plates food in paper baskets with plastic silverware and paper cups and just tossed on the table. No one checked on you or asked how our food was. My ice tea was 8 oz paper cup that was all ice charged 2.95 for it and wAs asked to pay for refill. Much nicer and friendlier places on the islandsr&

This was a great place to view Friday Harbor! The food we ordered was delicious… Caesar salad, mussels, barbecue oysters! I read complaints about greasy food, but if you order fried food what do you expect! This is a great outside casual place to dine and they love dogs!!!

We came here on a sunny day and absolutely LOVED the view. The patio was the perfect spot to soak in some sun and watch the action on the water.
That said, I felt it was pretty overpriced, especially given the quality and portion sizes. We got 2 orders of fish and chips. It was ok food. Not great, but good. I got an order of fried oysters. They kind of ruined it by stuffing them full of some weird tasting stuff. I love fried oysters but wasn’t impressed with the other flavors they put in there.
All in all, $ 50 for lunch (no alcohol, and just a soda and juice to drink) seemed awfully steep.
If you come, bring cash, or be prepared to pay a credit card fee.

Ohhh, Friday’s crab house. How I long for you.
Working in the industry for 14 years I feel I have a pretty well rounded scope of what a restaurant should or shouldn’t be. Good can definitely be hit or miss anywhere one might dine that’s why I make a point of asking the server what is their favorite OR what is the most popular. Luckily the Crabhouse is staffed with thoughtful and relatable employees who although they might potentially be slammed really do want you to have an amazing experience. Coming in with fine dining taste and an expectation of promptness might leave you feeling like your expectations haven’t been met, however, if your patient, and chill, you might have the time of your life here. The staff is warm silly and attentive, the grilled salmon w caper sauce is my go to (I like delicious consistency) If you do it right, and don’t mind being potentially patient the crab house can be the cherry on top of your Friday harbor experience.
The staff really is quite likable but Kitty and Eric really embody the spirit of the crab house Warm, funny, and genuine.

Terrible. Just terrible. The view is nice yes, but the food and the ordering system is so wacko that the view just doesn’t make up for it. My hubby ordered the burger & onion rings, and I had the fish tacos. When the little darling slapped the raw meat bare handed on the grill and then didn’t bother to wash up after I knew then we were in trouble. The burger was tasteless, bordering on gross and the rings tasted too fishy. The fish tacos were marginally better but were so sogged down in liquid from the pico that they just fell apart. I would come back here for a cocktail but that’s about it. The ordering system needs to be changed STAT and the quality of food needs to be stepped up about 12 notches.

So at first I thought that we were at Dick’s Last Resort, Friday Harbour because seriously the girl behind the counter was a total dick to us. The whole ordering style there is kinda jacked up and really causes a cluster. There were a few people gathered around the counter and you weren’t really sure who was taking your order. Wasn’t really a place to form a line. I am going to assume that the craziness of that caused this girl to be rude and rush us through ordering. We went up stairs to sit and wait for our order and the bartender up there was a really nice guy and he kinda redeemed the place. We had the oysters platter, all were very good and tasted like they just came out of the water (they probably did). Nothing bad to say about the food and there is a great view of the water from pretty much any seat in the house. I really didn’t like the ordering system. The Crabhouse could benefit from just using waiters and ditching the order at the counter operation.

Great crab cakes and great view! Their current rating definitely isn’t accurate. The crab cakes were mostly crab vs. breading.

The view is priceless! Hence why we stopped and tried it out, but we wish we would have gone for a worse view and better food and drinks. The port was really busy that day and we had to hang out for a while so we thought we would perch on the lovely balcony for a bit for drinks and food.
There were four of us and we had the Captian’s Platter and oysters which consisted of mostly fried foods. The fried fish, shrimp, scallops, and octopus had an ok flavor, but nothing special. The oysters fried were edible, but the raw oysters were really really milky and too tough. My friend from Seattle wouldn’t even try them. The french fries were soggy and therefore barely even touched. :(Let’s not even talk about what my stomach felt like after all of this. Normally if the seafood is decent, then I can handle the fried food every once in a while, but this platter made for a not so pretty smelling afternoon (if you can get what I mean…).
Now onto the drinks we were so looking forward to sipping on in the sunshine… tonic was flat so we only had one drink each. We left as soon as possible to find another spot to spend our time and money at until the ferry could take us away from this very touristy area.

After a great bike ride around the island, I just wanted good food and some beer. Got it at this place. Service was good, view was amazing and the Fish Tacos — totally awesome :-).
I messed up on ordering and forgot to tell them about my wife’s milk allergies. They drizzled sour cream on top. I told them about it and Nick in a second was making a new order and thought I told them I would pay, he said no and insisted that I don’t pay. Wow, way cool. Left a nice tip in the jar :-)
Open air, view of the harbor and water, up high so you can people watch. Definitely a must go.