The Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Restaurant and Market @ The Curve

The Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Restaurant and Market is a chain of seafood restaurants inspired by the 1994 film Forrest Gump.
The restaurant is named after the movie's main characters Benjamin Bufford "Bubba" Blue and Forrest Gump who talked about going into shrimping business.

Well here's another of those franchise chain restaurants thats hitting our shores. “Mama always said life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what your gonna get” That’s exactly what was going through my head when I walked into Bubba Gump’s.

Unfortunately this one was no where near my expectations. I've been to many so called themed restaurants and have been predictably dissapointed by most of them. It's a theme restaurant so you have to expect that its going to be busy, noisy and more expensive than it's worth.

It's new so you can expect over enthusiastic waiters that annoy the daylights out of me. So it was good that they had that unique paging system consisting of two license plates on the tables marked "Run Forrest Run" from Jenny's famous quote and "Stop Forrest Stop" based on the signs used to help Forrest when he played football at the University of Alabama. The red "Stop Forrest Stop" sign is used to signal that a table needs service and the blue "Run Forrest Run" means that all is well.

I also had the unfortunate pleasure of sitting next to 2 tables that were celebrating birthdays. You can imagine the racket the staff made with their incomprehensible singing, clapping, foot stomping and booty shaking.

The menu consists mostly of shrimp dishes, but also other seafood, as well as Southern and Cajun cuisine. On the menu, was (quoting from the movie) that "shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, saute it. Dey's uh, shrimp-kabobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo, pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried, there's pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich. Th-that's about it.

We basically ordered the house specialities of Bubba Dip of artichoke and cheese with tortila chips and Shrimpers Heaven a combination of 4 varieties of prawns and sauces which was nothing to shout about. Only positive was the drinks.

To put it simply, the menu was disappointing, music was too loud, high prices, good service. Not sure if we'd go back next time.