| The Fat Crab, Clapham | | by Chris Pople Feb 28, 2023 |
One of the best things about being a food blogger in London, and especially as one that has been going as bloody long as I have, is that you generally get to see each of the great global cuisines, or at least global restaurant styles, tackled increasingly successfully. There's Padella nailing pasta, for example, after years of places serving overcooked mush; the Meatwagon finally showing the UK what a proper West Coast burger looked like; Hawksmoor proving that it is, after all, possible to run a top-end US steakhouse using the best British beef. All of the elements on my personal wish list have been more or less ticked off over the years, most recently Tacos Padre and their brilliantly authentic Baja fish tacos.
But there's one style of cuisine, a personal favourite of mine, that we have so far been missing in the capital. The Southern American boil is an ostensibly straightforward, rustic affair - mixed seafood, seasoned (usually with Old Bay but sometimes house spices) and boiled in a plastic bag with potatoes, sausages and corn, opened theaterically directly onto your tabletop and to which you tuck in (suitably bibbed up of course) with your bare hands. It's great fun, and though I've never been to the Southern States I've been told the Crab Hut mini-chain, based in San Diego, is a very authentic reproduction. I loved it, anyway.
On paper, Fat Crab is doing nearly everything right. Of course, the prices are necessarily higher than they are in Louisiana, but you should not be paying bargain prices for things like lobster, crab or crayfish under any circumstances. It seems to wear its authenticity lightly at first, but despite offering langoustine and Norwegian snow crab the method and the approach seems very Southern, with everything cooked in plastic bags and with a customisable level of spiciness in the seasoning.
Things started well enough. Fried Baby Rice Crab is not something I've seen out of North America (and yes I am aware they're all over SE Asia too), so was a delight to be able to try them in London for the first time, the experience of crunching down on an entire deep-fried crab not to be missed (honestly). They arrived smartly, were piping hot, seasoned correctly and great fun to eat. And they were the very last thing that went right in the entire lunch.
I thought it was a good sign that the crayfish (sorry, craw fish) had 'Seasonal' stamped next to them on the menu - surely they would be boiled from live, like in the States? Well, no. Clearly these had been cooked, and frozen, a long while ago, then reheated for far too long, their sad, squishy shells only reluctantly giving up woody, tasteless flesh. The house hot sauce tasted - bizarrely - lovely, buttery and lemony and with a nice cajun kick, but the thin liquid sat in a pool at the bottom of the bag and didn't work as a seasoning at all, just as a kind of dip.
"Local" brown crab (from Dorset actually, which is the kind of definition of "local" that only makes sense in the USA) was a little better, the claws plump and the body containing plenty of lovely soft brown meat. And the clams we had optioned into the mix were tasty too - the shells caught plenty of the house seasoning and survived the reboiling process much better than everything else.
But unfortunately, with the mains we were served frozen fries. And I don't mean they were previously frozen fries served hot, I mean they literally arrived frozen, frosty to the touch. We sent them back, and then eventually once we had finished off the crab and clams and however much more of the mushy crayfish we could stomach, they came back. They were fine.
It should be no surprise, given everything that happened, that I'm not going to recommend the Fat Crab. But what's frustrating is that beneath the incompetent service (at one point they left a bottle of warm, cork-sealed wine on the table for a good 10 minutes with no way of us getting into it), the shoddy cooking and the weird cramped surroundings (there's nowhere near enough room to properly empty the bags out, US-style, so you end up picking food out of the plastic a morsel at a time, like a packet of crisps) there's the germ of a real Southern US concept, albeit one they're quite a way away from realising. All they need to do is improve every aspect of the restaurant experience they offer, and they'd be on to a winner! There's my advice for them.
Anyway onwards and upwards, and the search for a proper seafoid boil most definitely goes on. Perhaps someone can persuade Bea Vo of Stax Diner to relaunch the crayfish boils she did a few years ago under the arches at Borough, using lovely live crayfish from Crayfish Bob. They were great fun. But maybe the logistics of running a crayfish restaurant in the UK are just too prohibitive, and we just need to travel 4000 miles for our boils? I hope I'm proved wrong.
You'll notice they didn't take the frozen fries off the bill - disappointing, perhaps, but not surprising. We paid the £122 for a rather stressful and unrewarding lunch and went off to drown our sorrows in the Fox & Hounds, where there was a lot more table room and a lot less frozen food. Maybe one day, I will sit down to a steaming bag of crab and crayfish and cajun fries and tuck my bib in and spend a happy hour tearing apart perfectly cooked seafood and ending up covered in crab meat and clam juice and walk away from the experience happy, but this day is not that day. And until that day, you'll be best advised to avoid the Fat Crab.
4/10 | | | |
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