On a winter Thursday evening at the Mad Crab in University City, the smooth-as-Tupperware voice of Bruno Mars rattles the nautically decorated walls. Servers tear butcher paper from a roll and slap it down on tables; they carry buckets of clinking bottles of Bud and Bud Light. Customers hunker over steaming plastic bags filled with crawfish and crabs, twisting tails, cracking claws.

The Mad Crab is less a restaurant than a party with food. The more people you bring with you and the more food you order, the happier you’ll be. Then again, I was perfectly content to dine by myself one visit, though that might be because not everyone near and dear to me shares my love of sucking the matter out of shrimp heads.

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Victor Ho opened the Mad Crab last July inside a drab standalone building (the former Vietnamese restaurant Kim Son) along Olive Boulevard a mile east of Interstate 170. Though a new concept for St. Louis, the Mad Crab follows a template that has become popular in Texas and California.

I encountered a version of the concept first-hand in Houston about a year ago. Specifically, I ate at Crawfish and Noodles, one of the most prominent of the Viet-Cajun restaurants that have blossomed in that city over the past decade or so, places where spicy boiled crawfish shares the table with pho and other traditional Vietnamese fare. My meal there was so great that I waited longer to visit the Mad Crab than I usually would have so as not to compare it to a single other (and not identical) experience.

The Mad Crab concept is straightforward. First, you pick the seafood: crab (a whole Dungeness or snow or king legs), crawfish, shrimp (head on or off), lobster (whole or tail), clams or mussels. If you want, you can add corn on the cob, potatoes, or beef or pork sausage. You probably should. The corn offers a snappy textural contrast to the seafood, and the potatoes soak up the boiling sauce. A side order of light, crisp fries ($4) also makes for a fine sop for all the excess sauce.

Which sauce you choose is nearly as consequential as the seafood: the peppery Cajun, the buttery lemon-pepper or the exceptionally garlicky garlic. You can also combine the three as Whole Sha-Bang. Finally, you pick a spice level from not hot to mild, medium or XXX. Medium is plenty hot. My lips tingled for a good hour after the meal.

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Prices are variable. A monitor above the bar displays the current cost. I paid $9.99 for a pound of frozen crawfish (fresh weren’t available). A pound of head-on shrimp was $11, headless were $13 and deveined were $15. A pound of snow-crab legs were $22; a pound of king crab legs were $45. Combination meals are also available: A pound each of crawfish and head-off shrimp with sausage, corn and potatoes for $26.99; the same with a half-pound of snow crab and chicken wings for $45.99.

Your boil arrives at the table in a plastic bag. There are no plates, no utensils aside from shellers and crackers. There are plastic gloves, but if your aim is to keep your hands completely clean, you’ll need more than one pair.

The quality of the seafood I ate was good. The head-on shrimp, especially, were plump and tender, and the snow-crab meat was abundant in the shell and sweet. I wasn’t surprised to find a couple of duds among the frozen crawfish — nothing gross, just chewy— but it was literally only a couple.

Maybe the best compliment I can pay to the seafood is that even through the intensity of the medium-spicy Cajun seasoning, I could taste their individual flavors.

You’re here for the seafood boil, but if someone in your group just can’t handle it — say, oh, I don’t know, your 4-year-old daughter — the fried shrimp (with fries, $11) is a decent option, the meat sweet and yielding under its crisp batter jacket. Also don’t overlook the gumbo ($6.50), with crawfish, sausage, an oyster or two, and fresh okra in a broth so rich I imagine its roux was the color of pure cacao.

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The chicken wings (six for $6.50, 10 for $9) are available with each of the three boil sauces, but if you want the flavor of those sauces, you should just order one of the seafood boils. I was intrigued by the crawfish fried rice ($10), but this is literal to a fault: ordinary fried rice with crawfish. I recommend it only if you want crawfish without getting your hands dirty.

Better to ignore the distractions, though, and dig into the steaming, staining mess.

Where The Mad Crab, 8080 Olive Boulevard, University City • Two stars out of four • More info 314-801-8698; facebook.com/madcrabstl • Menu Seafood boils featuring shrimp, crab and crawfish • Hours 3-10 p.m. Monday-Friday, noon-10 p.m. Saturday-Sunday