Flour. Oil. Timing. That is the whole dish. And yet you can walk into half the restaurants in this city, drop $22, and get back a plate of tough, greasy rings that taste like the fryer gave up before the cook did. This is not a mystery. It is a choice.
Squid is unforgiving. You have roughly a minute, maybe two, before the muscle seizes and turns to rubber. There is no fixing it after that. So when calamari hits your table chewy, the failure happened long before anyone walked it out of the kitchen. Usually at the fry station. Oil not hot enough. Too many tickets at once. Nobody watching the clock. Or the squid itself was cheap, poorly thawed, abused before it ever touched the fryer.
Here is the part nobody in the industry wants printed. The US imports over 70 percent of the seafood it consumes, and squid is almost entirely an import game. China, Thailand, Peru, and India dominate global squid exports, which means most of what lands on a New York plate traveled frozen from across the world before it got breaded. When import costs jump, most restaurants do not adjust the menu honestly. They downgrade the product, stretch labor, and bet that nobody notices because calamari is a "safe" appetizer people order on autopilot. You pay $18 to $24 for the privilege of not noticing.
The places getting it right are not a secret. Busy Italian rooms in Queens. Old-school seafood houses in Brooklyn. Kitchens where volume is not an excuse, where someone actually owns the fryer like it matters.
Because it does.
Randazzo’s Clam Bar
Randazzo's Clam Bar on Emmons Avenue has been in the Sheepshead Bay seafood business in some form since the family moved from the Lower East Side in 1932. The Clam Bar itself launched in 1963 Wikipedia, and four generations later they still fry calamari the way it should be fried. Light. Crisp. Tender. No reinvention, no gimmicks. They move serious volume and the fryer never slips. The restaurant made the New York Times Top 100 list in 2023, 2024, and 2025 Wikipedia, and it is still run by the Randazzo-Geraci family. That is not an accident. That is discipline.
So here is the test. Order the calamari first. If it comes out rubbery, greasy, or both, pay for your drink and leave. Do not order the pasta. Do not order the fish. Especially do not order the specials, which are just yesterday's inventory with a new hat.
New York has too many kitchens doing this properly to keep rewarding the ones that cannot handle the cheapest, simplest, most margin-protecting dish on the menu. A bad calamari plate is not a mistake. It is a confession.
If it is rubbery, run the other way.
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