Blind date on a plate
By Alicia Teng
A Japanese exchange student who has never heard of chilli crab, 21-year-old Kyoka Nishimura approaches the dish for the very first time.
Kyoka arrives at the Jumbo Seafood in Dempsey Hill, and takes her seat facing the restaurant’s wall-to-wall seafood tank. The room buzzes with conversation and the clatter of dishes being stacked.
She is here for chilli crab.
When Jumbo first opened its doors in Japan, under the Singapore Seafood Republic in collaboration with three other partners, the restaurant sold over a tonne of mud crabs within its opening month.
At Roland Restaurant, Diana Lim recalls how Japanese tourists arrived in droves, drawn by the articles written by various Japanese travel publications. They would take out magazines to show us, says the 47-year-old, who is currently assisting her brother Roland Lim with running the family restaurant.
But when asked if she has heard of the dish, Kyoka shakes her head. We smile. This is going well.
Two hulking chilli crabs arrive at the table, arranged in their platters and accompanied by a basket of fried mantou.
Ready, set, go.
For 15 seconds, Kyoka stares at the dish. Then, she tentatively pokes around the crab with the metal serving spoon, before fishing out a pincer. She puts it on her plate. More seconds pass.
Kyoka rolls her crab claw over with her chopsticks. “How do you know that this is the best part?” It usually takes time and effort to get all the sweet crabmeat out when deshelling mud crab, we explain. But for the claws, the meat slips out neatly in one piece.
To encourage her, we help ourselves, arguing lightly about who gets the legs and who gets the claws.
Chilli crab is no knife and fork dish. For a moment, seated at the cloth-covered table, everyone transforms into a savage. The experience of ripping into a hulking crustacean with gloved — or ungloved — hands transcends the need for utensils. Licking the sauce off your fingers is an essential part of the experience.
Kyoka is familiar with tackling crabs at the dining table. In Japan, they are commonly cooked in hotpots, she says. The difference is that the crabs are served already cracked and cut into easy-to-eat pieces.
With the claw cracker, Kyoka wrestles with the sauce-slicked claw, before finding a grasp. In a snap, it cracks open. Pieces of shell clatter on her plate.
Kyoka is victorious. Now, the rest may begin.
Sauce splatters as we wrestle to get at the sweet meat, and conversation grinds to a halt as each person devours their portion. The only sound in the air is the grisly crunch of claws being cracked and legs being twisted apart.
On to the next stage.
When there is chilli crab, there will be mantou — pillowy nuggets of soft, sweet Chinese bun that are either steamed or deep-fried until crisp and golden. A vessel for the pool of sauce left behind.
Kyoka looks stupefied. She picks up a piece and turns it over in her hands, a small frown creasing her forehead. No one will give anything away.
She points to the washing bowl of lime water, a question in her eyes. Quickly, we redirect her to the chilli crab in the centre. A minute passes, but Kyoka still does not make her move.
We drop a hint — mantou to chilli crab is what white rice is to Japanese curry. Eventually, she breaks the golden mantou in half and hesitantly dips the fluffy end in the sauce. A cheer goes round the table. In minutes, the basket is empty after everyone snags their share.
Conversation restarts as hands remain busy deshelling, scraping and dipping. Laughter is punctuated by snapping and cracking. Tips are shared on how to bite down on the end of the crab leg so it shatters to expose every last morsel of meat.
"It is so different from anything in Japanese food," says Kyoka. "We don’t have this kind of spice."
At last, the crabs are picked clean. Sauce remains on the platters, so we order a second round of mantou.
“It was a confusing dish to approach,” Kyoka says. “I wasn’t really afraid — more confused.”
“I don’t really like to get my hands dirty. As Japanese, we are told not to eat with our hands as much as possible. We always use chopsticks. And how we eat, it has to be polite,” Kyoka adds with a laugh.
Her parents are visiting during the summer. Perhaps, she says, she’ll take them out for chilli crab.