How much crawfish do you need per person?

If crawfish are the whole meal

Budget two to three pounds a head for an adult eating crawfish as dinner, with sides. That sounds enormous until you remember most of the weight is shell. Three pounds is a person who is genuinely there for the crawfish; two is a person who will also eat corn.

If it is a mixed boil

Once snow crab, lobster tails and shrimp are on the table, the crawfish number drops to about a pound a head and the total protein is what matters. This is what the seafood sets are already sized for — a set for six is built for six people eating a mixed boil, not six people eating crawfish alone.

The three-pound minimum on live

Live crawfish have a three-pound minimum. That is not an upsell; below three pounds the delivery run costs more than the order does, for you as much as for us. If you want less than that, order them boiled as part of a larger order.

When to go up a size

Go up a size if there are no sides, if the table skews adult, or if the boil is the event rather than one dish at it. Nobody has ever complained about cold crawfish the next morning; the other failure mode is a table of people looking at an empty tray at nine o'clock.