The West’s native crab has helped build the reputations of San Francisco seafood institutions, such as Swan Oyster Depot on Polk Street and Scoma’s at the wharf. It fills your mouth with flavor and then stays there for a while.”Ĭhefs incorporate Dungeness into all manner of dishes above, ramen swims in crab broth enriched with miso, corn, and chiles. But Heidi Cusick, author of Mendocino: The Ultimate Wine and Food Lover’s Guide, needs no coaxing to state flatly: “I don’t think there’s anything that comes close to Dungeness. “When crab season opens,” says one restaurateur, “people like it that way, but later they get lazy and want it cleaned.” She obliges with crab cakes a cocktail made with mango, avocado, and lime-cilantro vinaigrette and capellini topped with crab sautéed in butter, olive oil, garlic, chiles, and wine (a recipe for which, she says, we may thank a once-renowned, now-defunct Eastern establishment: Mamma Leone’s in New York City).ĭespite all this evidence supporting the superiority of Dungeness, I still encounter the opinion in erstwhile compatriots from the Eastern Seaboard that theirs is the blue blood of crab. While chefs incorporate Dungeness into all manner of dishes - from quiche, omelets, and pastas to fish stews, soups, and salads - many diners opt for the fun, if messy, bib-and-nutcracker ritual of extracting the prized meat from its shell. At the table, I pushed aside the requisite drawn butter, finding it criminal to adorn meat whose taste and texture defined all the goodness of “fruit of the sea.” Savoring my crab with a baguette, lightly dressed greens, and chardonnay, I believed I had never eaten more luxuriously. Their freshness combined with immediate cooking could only render a memorable feast. The two wriggling specimens, both heavier than others their size, must have been pulled from the sea only hours before. One crab encounter in particular has gone down in the history of my senses. Living near the wharf makes it easy for me to buy Dungeness from Alioto-Lazio’s warehouse near the Hyde Street Pier. It’s rich and delicious.” Speculating on what a crab that owes its flavor overwhelmingly to Old Bay seasoning might really taste like, she admits, “No offense, I’ve never eaten a blue.” “Dungeness,” says Annette Traverso, an owner of Alioto-Lazio Fish Company at Fisherman’s Wharf, “is the Pacific Ocean’s treasure. If that heritage doesn’t establish Cancer magister as the gold standard for premium crab, I know plenty of cooks and purveyors who share its turf - surf, rather - who will make the claim on its behalf. What a delicacy it must have seemed to the gritty Argonauts when they sucked the moist white flesh from its shell, enjoying it with - what else? - a slab of freshly baked sourdough. Dungeness, caught from Morro Bay to the Aleutian Islands, came into vogue commercially during gold rush days, among those most rugged individualists, the forty-niners. Tell that to adherents of the majority opinion who, I’m guessing, think blue crabs arrived on the Mayflower. Some 25% of that weight is ambrosial leg and body meat so divine it brings smiles and tears of pleasure to those with enlightened palates. I may have blown my horn once too often to the family back East about how everything out West is better - from our mountains to our fog to our ocean, from which an average 38.5 million pounds of Dungeness are pulled annually. “I live on Chesapeake Bay - we have better crab.”īetter? Maybe better than the crabs we pulled from Barnegat Bay at the Jersey Shore as kids, I thought.
“Get the crab,” I told her in no uncertain terms.
Sign up for The Bold Italic newsletter to get the best of the Bay Area in your inbox every week. Visiting San Francisco, Lisa was about to order lunch with her husband and two kids. I knew this down to my bones when my sister Lisa, who lives in Maryland, called me from Fisherman’s Wharf. “For many West Coast seafood lovers, including me,” writes Mark Bittman in his book Fish: The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking, “this great-tasting Pacific crab… is better compared to Maine lobster than to blue crab it’s that good and that meaty.” I have found no evidence that you could say the same for other types of crabs - blue, for instance. The sweet, briny meat can actually improve your garlic and butter. On the other hand, Dungeness, the crustacean indigenous to the West Coast, needs absolutely nothing - not even a pretty French name - to elevate it. It would be nothing but a garden pest without a megadose of garlic and butter. Photo: Fred Hsu via Wikipedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 3.0Ĭonsider a mollusk such as the escargot.
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