Crab Culture

When it comes to food, Singapore will not disappoint you for sure. Whether you are a non-vegetarian or a pure vegetarian, the city offers you a large variety of local and international cuisines and dishes to suite, literally, every budget. However, if you are a sea-food fan, like me, this place is nothing short of 'Paradise on Earth'.

Ask around for some local specialties and you will be recommended to have the "Fish-head curry". Now, when it comes to buying a fish, the body and the tail is always in large demand and hence, the head is either disposed off to sold really cheap. So, what the Singaporeans' did was to take this head and conjure up a curry around it, with the addition of a few vegetables like ladies-finger, brinjal and tomatoes, and create a local specialty.

However, if you are going out as part of a corporate group, the local Sales guys will not stop short of taking you to one of the Top-5 sea food restaurants in the world - "Jumbo Sea Food"!!

Before I get into the details of the Menu, let me say that there 3 famous brands which serve crabs in Singapore. There is the "Jumbo Seafood", which claims to be the founders of the yummy chili crab. Then there is "Long Beach" which claims to be the first to come up with pepper crab and a third one, responsible for white-pepper crab, that simply goes by the name - "No Signboard Seafood" (Yes, when they first started out, they did not have a Signboard and that name just stuck!)

As the marketing guys put it - with multiple branches of each brand, in Singapore, you are never far away from enjoying some delicious crab delicacies.

We first ordered starters' which consisted of Deep-fried Squid and Clam fish, followed by some Cereal-crusted Crayfish or Prawns. Ideally, you are supposed to have the prawn with the shell, which I did try, but I ended up removing most of the crust as the prawn underneath was really tasty.

For our vegetarian friends', there was some tofu infused fillet, which looked like a fish. This was a little to sweet for my taste buds, but what made all of this very interesting was the fact that we ate it all, with chopsticks...

While we were still relishing these special dishes, the main stars of the evening arrived on our table.
First, it was the Pepper Crab -  A whole crab marinated in some black pepper sauce, which, I was told is very good for digestion. I did wonder why anybody would think of digestion, when they are feasting on this spicy crustacean.






And lastly, my favourite - the Chilli Crab, served in a large flat hot container with the shell left on, for decoration!

The best part about this Crab, apart from the actual meat, is the yummy garlic based gravy which can be had with small servings of hot buns - Yummmyyyy


Now, with people using all their energies to crack the claws open and making full use of their fingers to extract every last piece of meat, there is a very good chance of little shells or some gravy flying all over the place and hence, if you end up in the restaurant wearing a white shirt, you are given special protection to ensure that the visit there remains - Picture Perfect!