If you’re craving crab and have a pocket full of dough, head to Truluck’s (2 stars)

Florida stone crab season ends on May 16, which means that if you're reading this review around the time of publication, you still have a couple of weeks to partake of the prized crustacean. To my knowledge, the best place in town to do that is Truluck's, the seafood house that reopened in splashy new digs in Uptown in early March.

The chilled meat you pull from the hard-shelled, chunky, black-tipped claws is a treat: firm, sweet, succulent and almost lobstery. Ease the meat out with a dainty cocktail fork, dip lightly in creamy mustard sauce — very good. Now try a bite with nothing more than a squeeze of lemon: even better. Best of all is the sweet meat eaten on its own.

It’s a luxury, to be sure: A single jumbo claw (5 to 8 ounces, including the heavy shell), will set you back 25 smackeroos. Large ones (3 to 5 ounces) are $15 apiece, and medium claws (2 to 3 ounces) go for $6.50.

The original Dallas outpost of the Houston-based restaurant, which opened on the corner of McKinney and Maple in 1998, was recently demolished to make way for an entirely new building at the same location. The ground-floor lounge, with its horseshoe-shaped bar and live music that plays every evening beginning at 6, became an instant hot spot.

Upstairs in the dining room, floor-to-ceiling windows offer views of the snazzy quarter of Uptown. Plush white tablecloths, cushy booths, polished woods and a glassed-in wine cellar add up to a handsome, comfortable setting where deep-pocketed diners celebrate birthdays, talk business or make merry two-by-two over plates of pricey seafood.

King crab legs, offered in half-pound increments starting at 1 pound ($69), are served warm, basted in garlic butter, delicious when I had them (our server said they had been flown in that day). Dungeness crab, probably my favorite, with a more assertively crabby flavor, is a real event — the crab you want if you’re the type of person who loves to tear into a Maine lobster. The claws look like the choicest parts, but the best and sweetest meat is found in the chambers of the body’s inner shell. You’ll have to pull off the outer body shell to get to it — and it’s messy. Your efforts will be rewarded, but at a high price: The 2- to 3-pound crab goes for $30 per pound, and the management discourages sharing it. That’s too bad because even a 2-pounder is a lot of crab for one person.

The crabs come with sides: Broccoli and Parmesan mashed potatoes are the default. I find the combination of those potatoes and crab unappealing, but the waitstaff is happy to swap them out (sometimes with an upcharge) for other sides. There’s nicely grilled asparagus (cooked long enough, which is unusual), served with béarnaise sauce, which is odd. (Call me old-fashioned, but I think hollandaise suits asparagus better than its tarragony cousin.) Crab fried rice, on the other hand, was awful — weirdly sweet, with pieces of crabmeat laid on top rather than cooked in.

It wasn’t the only objectionable dish. A chopped salad didn’t taste much better than it looked — like something scooped from the garbage disposal. Honestly, I don’t know how the kitchen had the nerve to send it out, nor how the server had the courage to present it. “Crispy” calamari was flat-out soggy, and served lukewarm, as were many of the dishes on one of two visits. A wedge salad was topped with crumbles of burned bacon. Lobster bisque was heavy on the cream and black pepper, light on the lobster flavor.

An $88 chilled seafood platter for four, on the other hand, was mostly very good, offering four each of jumbo shrimp, oysters on the half shell (wonderfully briny little Riptide oysters from Massachusetts recently) and stone crab claws. There were also cherrystone clams filled with chopped raw clams mixed with salsa, whose flavors went a bit awry, and a misbegotten crab cocktail: underseasoned crabmeat overwhelmed by creamy Sriracha sauce. Curiously, this is more than the $85 you’d spend if you ordered the seafood separately.

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The main courses are generally fine but undistinguished. There were nicely turned-out blackened redfish Pontchartrain smothered in a mix of crawfish tails, shrimp and blue crabmeat in Creole sauce; and a giant bowl of cioppino — mussel-happy, with plenty of seafood (shrimp, calamari, fish, crab), but not particularly soulful. A $39 plate of sesame-seared tuna was a bust: The big slices, barely seared, were raw, so it was like eating a giant portion of ho-hum sashimi.

There are steaks, too. My friend Greg, intrigued by but a little afraid of a $12 shrimp-and-crab “bearnaise royale” enhancement for his $49, 16-ounce New York strip, asked for it on the side. When the steak landed, smothered in the stuff, Greg didn’t mention the error to the server, but he did note that he had asked for spinach, not the green beans he was facing. “You ordered the green beans!” blurted the (otherwise genial and attentive) server, before recovering and swapping the dish.

On another evening, we had an unpleasant reception at the desk when our Open Table reservation somehow hadn’t gone through. First we were told it would be a half-hour wait (“We have a lot of walk-ins tonight,” said the hostess) and sent to the bar — where every seat was taken. We were about to give up and leave, when the hostess said they’d found us a table. She led us upstairs, to a half-empty dining room. Perhaps all those tables had been reserved, as they filled up quickly, but the mix-up was not handled nicely.

Truluck’s desserts, presented on a tray, are giant, very sweet and mostly forgettable. A $19 chocolate “bag” — on the menu since the restaurant first opened — was most strange. Our waiter described it as being filled with almond cake, which sounded wonderful, so we went for it. He knocked it over on a plate and sort of excavated it until it was a strange mess of poundcake (I couldn’t taste almond), strawberries, chocolate shell, whipped cream and waxy chocolate chips, then poured chocolate ganache over it. (“We should have asked for a side of insulin,” said Greg.) By far the best was a tall and fluffy chocolate malt layer cake.

So, no, not everything’s great, and yes, an evening here can be very expensive (the wine list has typical Dallas markups; there are few whites of interest under $50). But in a city where options for seafood lovers are slim, it’s nice to have Truluck’s — and its terrific crabs — in the mix.

Truluck's (2 stars)

Price: $$$$ (dinner starters $6.50 to $25, seafood platters $44 for two or $88 for four, main courses $19 to $90; desserts $11 to $19)

Service: All over the place - often friendly and attentive, but sometimes unpleasant (at the hostess stand) or slow

Ambience: A handsome second-floor dining room with floor-to-ceiling windows offers views of Uptown.

Noise level: Piped-in live music from the downstairs lounge can sometimes compete a little with conversation.

Location: 2401 McKinney Ave., Dallas; 214-220-2401; trulucks.com

Hours: In the dining room, lunch Monday-Friday 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., dinner Monday-Thursday 5 to 10 p.m., Friday-Saturday 5 to 11 p.m., Sunday 5 to 9 p.m. The lounge remains open throughout the day, offering late lunch.

Reservations: Accepted

Credit cards: AE, D, MC, V

Wheelchair accessible: Yes

Alcohol: Full bar. A two-page wine list offers plenty of enticing choices (especially whites from France) for the deep-pocketed, and fewer vintages of interest under $50. More than 60 selections are available by the glass.