Location: Superstar Seafood Restaurant (鴻星),
Unit 1005, Times Square (時代商場) in Tung Loi Wan,
Hong Kong
Superstar Restaurants
Author: My Husband
As a follow up to the post on Lei Garden in Singapore, I thought it might be interesting to delve a little deeper into the delicacy that is the little crustacean also known as the Shanghai Hairy Crab.
These crabs are smaller than the typical Dungeness and are characterized by thick dark hair on their claws. As expected given their smallish size, hairy crabs do not have much meat on them. But their meat is really secondary to what connoisseurs prize most – their rich, sweet, and unctuous roe.
As Christina and I usually travel to Asia in November, our trips often coincide with the period that hairy crabs are in season. And since I am a huge fan of these crabs, we usually end up having at least one hairy crab meal. In Hong Kong, there are lots of restaurants serving these crabs; in fact, when they are in season, the live crabs are often displayed in tanks or refrigerators strategically placed on the sidewalks outside the eateries. During our last trip, we chose to dine at Superstar Seafood Restaurant because they were running a superb deal on a multi-course dinner that featured the crabs.
A picture of the interior of the restaurant – it’s all rather frou frou, but it seems to work.
Here are the tools required for the meal. All diners are also provided with disposable plastic gloves with which to work on the crabs. If you choose not to use the gloves, you will not be able to wash the color or smell of the crab roe out of your fingers for a couple of days.
The meal we ordered included 3 crabs per person, but since I like them more than Christina does, I ended up eating 4.5 of them. 
Here’s what it looks like with the carapace taken off. The orange/red stuff is the roe – it tastes like the semi-liquid yolk of Chinese salted eggs with a dose of crab “essence”. It has a rich, luxurious mouthfeel that instantly rewires your synapses and makes you remember the taste for life. That is not just hyperbole dear readers – taste the roe and you will not soon forget.
So here’s how we eat the crab. Pull off the carapace, spoon out the roe and enjoy. Then, using the scissors cut the body in half. Trim off all the legs and the claws and set aside for later. Then, bite into the body and – for lack of a better phrase – suck out the roe. Next, use the scissors and crab pick to liberate the meat from the legs and claws and gobble it up; the meat, while lacking in quantity, is actually pretty tender and sweet. Repeat until all crabs have been eaten.
Hairy crabs are supposed to have a ‘cooling’ effect on one’s body. Eating too many of the crabs in one sitting will upset your digestive system and make you faint, so it is important to balance out the meal with the ‘warming’ effect of a cup or three of spicy & sweet ginger tea. This whole yin and yang deal must have worked for me because after eating the crabs and drinking the tea, I felt just fine.
It is said that the best quality hairy crabs are harvested from Yangcheng Lake in Suzhou, China. However, given the ever increasing demand for these crabs, they are being farmed and harvested from other locations in China as well. Foodies claim that the non-Yancheng Lake crabs are nowhere as good as the real deal, but I can’t comment on this until I know conclusively that I’ve tried both types (apparently, some crabs labeled as the Yangcheng Lake variety are fakes).
Unfortunately, because of the invasiveness of hairy crabs, they are specifically banned from importation into North America. So unless there are restaurants in the US or Canada secretly serving these, your best bet for getting a taste is to stop by Asia during the months of October thru January. Bon appetit!
