Hocker’s Family Restaurant & Crabhouse
We typically give new restaurants months to gain their service and culinary footing before publishing a critical review, after all, it takes time for a kitchen to achieve the rhythm and cadence of service and output needed to serve patrons enjoying the tempo of dining in a 15,000 sf restaurant. But our experience one month after opening was so bad that another visit is not warranted, except perhaps next year, if Hocker’s is still serving. Let’s start with the restaurant itself, occupying the former Hocker’s grocery store and sharing a wall with Hocker’s hardware store. The cavernous place has no ambience or feel, just numerous tables spread out on a hard slippery glazed-over cement floor that seems more equipped to house a mess hall (remember, the next-door hardware store sells guns and ammo). Artificial barriers separate the bar area from the restaurant and also cut the dining hall in sections, because not all of the large floor space is filled with tables – think about how indoor football stadiums divide, separate, and curtain the oval seating to accommodate a basketball game, hoping to make the stadium appear full even though only half is being used. There is no ambience that makes you feel like you’re in a restaurant; instead, you know you are in a converted warehouse space where not much effort was invested to make it feel like a homey restaurant.
O.K. fine, you say, nobody visits Hocker’s Restaurant expecting a fine restaurant look and feel, and a dining hall itself has a certain ambience -- how about the food? Worse, we say. Hocker’s grocery store serves fried chicken, cooked vegetables, macaroni-and-cheese, and similar pre-prepared and to-go foods in plastic containers that you open and re-heat when you arrive home. You don’t expect restaurant quality, and are not disappointed because you didn’t pay too much. While we do not know, it seems the same approach is used in the Hocker’s Restaurant kitchen, because the meal we ordered seemed pre-prepared and heat lamp warmed, served within minutes of our ordering. The crab soup was inedible; fried chicken was stadium quality, and even salads were a curious combination of lettuce and . . . not sure. The chicken sandwich was a piece of elongated semi-grilled chicken on a roll, nothing else. Crabs were available only as medium size, but from the look of them, small would have been the better description – we took a hard pass. Our server delivered the repeatedly-requested waters after the meal arrived from auctioning runners, and then curiously asked us if we wanted a box to take home our barely-eaten food – another hard pass. Having walked several laps around the restaurant to observe others in dining mode and to assess the pace of the new place, wondering if we simply made bad ordering choices, we observed that nothing else looked too interesting, though chicken wings – hard to ruin – seemed tasty.
The Delmarva Foodie Elitist often cautions restaurants in these pages to stay in the lane of what they know, and never try to be all things to all diners. The same advice may apply to Hockers – stick with selling groceries and hardware, and leave the restaurant business to those whose attention is not also drawn towards ordering and selling tools, paint, and garbage cans (yes, a metaphor for restaurant). Just avoid Hocker’s Family Restaurant, and let it slip into the category of a bad idea when the family decided how to best utilize the extra space. Or, simply buy much of the same food at Hocker’s nearby grocery store, where the expectations are never dashed.
Hocker’s Family Restaurant & Crabhouse
30244 Cedar Neck Road
Ocean View, DE 19930
302-537-8900
