The table full of friends looks hungry but a little wary as they eye the spread before them. On the table — which is lined with brown paper — are a few claw crackers, a bucket and sets of blue gloves that one person says make him feel like TV’s murderous Dexter. A waiter has already come by to affix white plastic bibs around their necks.

“Since the beginning of time, man has been eating with his hands,” Larry Curran, 43, assures the group.

To demonstrate, he dips his gloved hands into a steaming bag of shellfish and holds one crayfish between his fingers.

“You take the tail and twist it off,” explains the Upper East Sider as the brown crayfish husk cracks and opens. “This is all meat right here. With the head, you bite and suck.”

His four friends follow suit. They’ve got 10 pounds before them on the table, after all, and soon they’re cracking and sucking like naturals.

“When I heard they opened this place, I grabbed all my friends,” Curran says. “The fact that this was here is a big deal.”

“Here” is The Boil, a bayou-style crab and crayfish joint that opened on the Lower East Side six months ago. The restaurant’s growing popularity illustrates what New Yorkers never knew they were missing in a city increasingly dominated by meathead barbecue joints and new wave French bistros: some good ol’ claw-crackin’, tail-sucking, communal dining fun.

Curran is the experienced crayfish cracker of his bunch: He’s a huge New Orleans Saints fan and makes annual pilgrimages to Louisiana to feed his football — and crayfish — addiction. But with The Boil, Curran and his pals — old friends from college — have the chance to get that New Orleans flavor right here in New York City.

The sights and smells of The Big Easy are here: buckets of seafood served by the pound, air thick with the aroma of garlic and butter, and hard-to-find New Orleans favorite Abita beers on tap. But the restaurant’s got distinctive New York touches: an exposed brick wall that adds a rustic but classy look, an ordering system run by iPhones and

iPads, and the blue gloves, which cater to stylish Gothamite customers who aren’t afraid to dig

into a messy bucket of chow while still wearing their Saturday night outfits.

The gloves have, in fact, turned out to be one of the restaurant’s most popular features for urbanites who want to keep their manicures clean while they munch.

“Usually in LA [seafood restaurants], I end up smelling like garlic for four days, and it’s not a good look,” says Shawnie Anderson, who recently moved from Los Angeles to Chelsea.

The Boil also counts among its fans actress Rosario Dawson, Mary J. Blige, singer Marcus Canty and celebrity chef Justin Warner — along with its keen local following.

“We didn’t think it would take off so soon,” says co-owner Mike Khuu while standing outside the restaurant at 6 p.m. last Saturday, when the hour-long line had spilled over onto the sidewalk.

At The Boil, the spirit is one of big, shared eating, reminiscent of a family reunion in a backyard in New Orleans. Diners order up crustaceans by the pound — crayfish ($13/lb.), snow crab legs ($18/lb.), clams ($13/lb.) and shrimp ($12/lb.) — and select a sauce (dry, garlic and butter, lemon herb or Old Bay) and a spice level.

Orders of more than 2 pounds come with added corn and potatoes. The place has some exotic touches, too, which come from Khuu’s experience with his other restaurant, the Saigon Shack in Greenwich Village: The “lobster roll” on the appetizer menu, for example, more closely resembles a spring roll than a sandwich.

Khuu also took trips to crab shacks in Ocean City, Md., for input, scouting out the many small bayside joints that Marylanders flock to in the summertime.

The New York take on NOLA cuisine is already winning over authentic Southerners, including Katie Longo, a 26-year-old Williamsburg resident originally from Jacksonville, Fla., who is finishing up a pound of shrimp and the last dregs of an Abita.

“Honestly, it was better than what I’ve had in Jacksonville,” she says. “This was amazing, and nothing like I’ve had before.”

She acknowledges that her friends back home in Florida would be appalled to hear her heap praise on it like melted butter, but she remains impressed by the thick sauce the shrimp is cooked in.

“Normally I don’t go for seafood up here, because it’s not a fisherman’s spot, but I was shocked at how good it was,” she says. “There was huge big shrimp that was fresh, delicious.”

Across the table, Haidax Lam is picking at the end of a couple of 2-pound bags of clams and shrimp. He’s been on the lookout for something like The Boil since having crayfish broil in Houston.

“This is probably on par with Houston,” says the 29-year-old Bronx resident. “This is like a backyard-boil-type thing. We were waiting for this place to open. We just didn’t know it.”

tdonnelly2@nypost.com