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It\u2019s a perplexing time in the world of luxury ingredients. Prestigious products have become inextricably tied to fast food. Caviar\u00a0now adorns chicken nuggets;\u00a0truffle features in supermarket hummus\u00a0and\u00a0Starbucks egg bites; wagyu beef is getting\u00a0smashed into burgers\u00a0and has\u00a0made the menu at Burger King in the UK. Even lobster\u2014bright red and festive\u2014has gone from attention-getting centerpiece to mac-and-cheese mix-in.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yet crab retains\u00a0its mystique. It\u2019s beloved for its delicately flavored, finely textured meat\u2014and for its fatty, rich roe and tomalley,\u00a0culinary categories unto themselves. Now\u00a0large, live specimens from the far corners of the world, like snow crab from Japan and red king crab from Norway, are this season\u2019s luxury signifiers.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven the cheapest crab that we sell is typically double the price of what Maine or Nova Scotia lobster costs,\u201d says Ian Purkayastha, founder of\u00a0Regalis Foods. \u201cKing crab pricing is definitely at an all-time high.\u201d Because their stocks and availability have been harshly affected by\u00a0political and ecological upheavals, the crustaceans now wholesale\u00a0for $70 to $85 a pound, he said. Retail consumers could\u00a0spend upward\u00a0of $1,200 to have a\u00a0single, live 10-pound Norwegian red king crab\u00a0delivered to their homes from Regalis. That, believe it or not, is the good news, he adds:\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s just going to continue to go up and up and up in price. It\u2019s not like you can farm a king crab.\u201d He won\u2019t be\u00a0surprised if\u00a0wholesale king crab prices top\u00a0$100 a pound within five years.<\/p>\n
Take stock of current splurge-worthy dishes and dinners, and you\u2019ll see: American diners and restaurant operators are embracing the luxury of crab. With the explosion of\u00a0omakase-style dining, quality is trumping quantity more than ever. Take, for instance,\u00a0Sushidokoro Mekumi. Newly opened in New York\u2019s Hudson Square, this outpost of a two-Michelin-star restaurant in Kanazawa, on Japan\u2019s west coast,\u00a0offers\u00a0a crab-centric omakase dinner for $888 per person, excluding drinks, for a few weeks this winter.<\/p>\n
The meal\u2019s current star is male snow crab, transported from Kanaiwa, a port town in Ishikawa prefecture, to New York in two days,\u00a0at a wholesale cost of as much as $675 each. Three are needed for each evening\u2019s seating of eight people. All December seatings are sold out, but\u00a0January spots are available.<\/p>\n
Mekumi\u2019s chef Hajime Kumabe keeps\u00a0it simple to convey just how good the ingredient is:\u00a0\u201cWe almost never add anything else\u2014just a little salt as seasoning.\u201d Among the 18\u00a0to 20 courses are kani gayu, a delicate rice porridge made only from crab, crab broth, rice\u00a0and salt; mokuzugani, or\u00a0Japanese mitten crab, simply grilled over binchotan charcoal; and kobako gani, a\u00a0female snow crab boiled immediately after it\u2019s caught by fishermen in Japan, trained to do it to the restaurant\u2019s specifications. Its meat is arranged with both its internal and external roe and served in its shell.<\/p>\n
(An even more\u00a0precious, and expensive,\u00a0crab\u00a0will splash into New York at the end of the year. Taiza gani, a snow crab\u00a0from the cold waters off Kyoto is\u00a0so rare that even in Japan\u00a0it\u2019s known as the \u201cphantom crab.\u201d Only five boats are permitted to fish it. It will be served for two nights at the\u00a0new Tribeca kaiseki restaurant\u00a0Muku; the\u00a0$1,295 menus quickly sold out.)<\/p>\n
Crab\u2019s preciousness doesn\u2019t just stem from its pristine state or the distance it\u2019s traveled; it\u2019s also in the labor it takes to bring it to the plate. At\u00a0Yamada, the New York kaiseki restaurant\u00a0that just scored four stars from the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, it can take chefs 45 minutes of concentrated work to extract the meat from just one 2-pound kegani, or horsehair\u00a0crab\u2014just one of the crustaceans likely to appear in its $295, 10-course early winter menu. You might also find Hokkaido snow crab on the chawanmushi, a savory egg custard, and Dungeness crab in the closing donabe course.<\/p>\n Outside New York, crab\u00a0features at the twice-a-week kaiseki-inspired Crab Experience at\u00a0Kinkan, a Thai-Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles. \u201cCrab is my favorite thing,\u201d says chef-owner Nan Yimcharoen, who grew up cooking and eating it with her grandmother in Bangkok. Over the course of the 11-course, $250 dinner, she serves dishes like sake steamed live Hanasaki gani\u2014a spiny king crab from Hokkaido\u2014and open-face scallop-shrimp shumai, topped with snow crab and sawagani, a tiny Japanese river crab, fried and eaten whole.\u00a0<\/p>\n At\u00a0Angler, the live-fire seafood restaurant on San Francisco\u2019s Embarcadero, savvy diners know to order the $100 off-menu crab rice. The course is composed of two dishes; a crab shell filled with the meat covered in Angler\u2019s XO sauce, and koshihikari seaweed rice with crab butter, sake-cured salmon roe and crispy garlic chips. The crab variety changes seasonally and with the day\u2019s catch: King crab is on the horizon; box and Dungeness crabs have featured recently. (If they can\u2019t get good ones from California\u2019s waters, the dish just isn\u2019t available.)\u00a0<\/p>\n Dungeness, which James Beard called \u201ca meal that the gods intended only for the pure in palate,\u201d is also a marquee attraction (and the highest priced menu item) at two of the country\u2019s notable regional Indian restaurants. At Unapologetic Foods\u2019\u00a0Semma\u00a0in New York\u2019s West Village, diners are advised to preorder the $145 Kanyakumari Nandu Masala for two, which features a 1- to 1.5-pound crab cooked with cumin, black pepper, coriander seeds\u00a0\u201cand other spices too numerous to mention,\u201d says\u00a0chef Vijay Kumar. <\/p>\n The crab comes with coconut rice and crisp-edged parotta, for sauce sopping and textural contrast to the silky crabmeat. (Crab is\u00a0an obsession\u00a0across\u00a0Unapologetic Foods\u2019 restaurants.) Meanwhile at\u00a0Nadu, chef Sujan Sarkar\u2019s new Chicago restaurant, about 15 diners per week order the Keralan Crab Milagu Fry, available in big and bigger sizes for $135 and $185. For it, a whole Dungeness crab is cooked with Tellicherry peppercorn-tomato sauce and served with ghee rice.<\/p>\n And then there\u2019s the ceremony around live king crab. This fall at\u00a0Octo, a Korean-Chinese restaurant in midtown New York, Steve and Christina Jang (owners of nearby Koreatown stalwart New Wonjo BBQ) began offering a feast featuring the creature in three parts: steamed with butter, garlic, soy sauce, cabbage and mushrooms over vermicelli noodles; dry-fried Sichuan style;\u00a0and as fried rice,\u00a0with the tomalley. An 8-pound crab, enough for five\u00a0or six\u00a0people, recently went for $850, they said, adding that they\u2019re keeping the price low while they\u00a0get the\u00a0word out.\u00a0<\/p>\n At\u00a0Carbone Riviera, which opened in the Bellagio, Las Vegas, in November, food has to work overtime to compete with flash: along with artworks by Mir\u00f3, Picasso\u00a0and Renoir,\u00a0the restaurant has Fortuna, a 33-foot-long Riva yacht\u00a0to give select guests a better view of the hotel\u2019s famous fountains.<\/p>\n The restaurant\u2019s king crab might just be the crustacean for the job. It comes prepared \u201cMulberry Style,\u201d to reflect\u00a0the abundant Italian and Chinese flavors\u00a0on Mulberry Street, running\u00a0through New York\u2019s Little Italy and Chinatown. Priced from $175 to $200 per pound, a large one could tip the scales at upwards of $2,000. It is, potentially, the most expensive item at a place that is, for many people, what luxury is all about.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Move #caviar #hottest #luxury #ingredient #crab<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s a perplexing time in the … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6456,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[5666,5668,5664,1481,5665,5667,271,233],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6455"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6455\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The $100 Rice\u00a0<\/h2>\n
The $2,000 Crab Deal<\/h2>\n