92 Wigmore Street, London W1U 3RD (020 3096 9484). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £150
Eating crab, like building kitchen extensions and sex, is very messy when done properly. You have to roll up your sleeves and abandon yourself to the mucky business at hand, with hammer, crackers and pick. The white meat must be hard won, the brown meat scooped from nooks and crannies. I’ve always thought of it as being akin to that myth about eating celery: that you burn as many calories breaking the bastard down as you gain from the seafood with which you are rewarded.
Fancy Crab, which sounds like an unnecessarily extravagant yoga position, is designed to take the mess out of crab, which is like trying to take the rum out of a mojito or the meaning out of life. It’s a crab restaurant for recently married couples who hope they’ll get divorced before they ever reach the companionable stage in which one of them brushes their teeth while the other has a pee. It’s an extraordinarily expensive way to wonder about the point of it all. You could get the same effect for free by staying home and watching Love Island.
The restaurant’s shtick is the enormous red king crabs, fished from the cold waters of the North Pacific around Alaska, which can grow to be five feet across, and have legs like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime. The leg meat is the whole point. It is meant to be the sweetest and the best, the Bugatti of the shellfish world. At the start of the meal our waiter, who is by far the best thing here, brings out a whole king crab on ice for us to look at, its legs curled under. When confronted by these at Beast, still alive in tanks and backlit in icy blue, I was reminded of the facehugger in Alien. Now I recall the scene from Douglas Adams’s Restaurant at the End of the Universe, in which a genetically modified cow is brought out to the table still alive, so it can recommend its own primest cuts.
Let me dial down the snark for a moment. I can see the point of a restaurant dedicated entirely to one glorious ingredient. I can admire the way the menu goes all in. Sure, there’s a steak for the shmuck in your group who didn’t quite understand the point of the outing. They have some oysters. But for the most part it really is all about king crab. They’ve put effort into the decor, from the huge blow-up of a king crab on one wall to the way the beast has been subtly included in other works of art, in a Where’s Wally? sort of way. There are bare brick walls and high ceilings and those lovely waiters wear real bow ties, which they had to learn to tie from YouTube videos. Obviously you know it’s going to be nose-bleedingly expensive. That doesn’t mean it can’t also be good.
Fancy Crab isn’t good. It’s a terrible waste of their money and our money and everybody’s time. It starts with the smallest thing. A plate with two warmed bread rolls, dull and springy, come with discs of seaweed butter. They have been dredged carelessly from a bowl of iced water. Accordingly, there is a puddle of cold water all over the plate, soaking into the rolls. The butter is unsalted and, like me, tastes only of cold, hard fat. A wine waiter doesn’t take our order until just before the starters arrive, and returns with entirely the wrong bottle, a massive red. The starters are half finished before the correct bottle of Spanish white at an excruciating £40 turns up.
A “tempura” crab claw costs £12 and isn’t. Tempura refers to a particular kind of lacy batter. These look like inflated versions of the ones you can buy at Iceland for pennies, and come coated in exactly the same sort of DayGlo orange breadcrumb shell. Three bites and it is gone. An accompanying “chipotle” mayo tastes like Marie Rose sauce. There is no heat. The crab is also offered cold on ice, or grilled. We go for a leg cut of the former, the shell already sliced through so there is no effort getting at the meat: £24 worth disappears in about 90 seconds. A squid ink mayo is salty and blunt. A mango dip is fruitier and rather pleasing.
Outside of eating it cold with mayo, Singapore chilli crab is one of the very best dishes using both meat and shell ever invented. It should be salty and sweet and spicy. Eating it should get sauce on your ear lobes and sweat on your brow, and a massive burst of endorphins into your bloodstream as your body recovers from the burn. So surely, how much better if it’s made with this king of all crabs? Here it costs £34, which does rather encourage expectations. It’s a slippery, sugary mess, with no heat at all. This is because they serve chopped red chilli on the side. It’s like serving pork belly without the fat, or smoked salmon without the smoke. It’s missing the point entirely. There’s also a sugary, toasted sesame seed bun of the sort burgers come in at Byron. The sweet notes continue in a sashimi of sea bass. The knife work is good, but the dressing is all sugar and carelessness and a shrugged teenage “whatever”. It only gets finished out of hunger.
Chips come doused in truffle oil, are tepid and remain unfinished; a garden salad is dressed well enough but contains fridge-cold slabs of tomato that taste of nothing. The desserts include something called “king crab” cheesecake, which obviously has to be ordered. It’s a loose oblong of crushed biscuit base, topped with a foamy vanilla cream sprinkled with pink stuff to make it look like a king crab leg. Which is, I suppose, better than a cheesecake that actually tastes of king crab. The best dish of the night is a luscious salt caramel ice cream with a perfectly serviceable chocolate fondant. It’s nothing special. It just manages not to be actively offensive.
Who is Fancy Crab for? I have no idea. It occupies a stretch of London’s Wigmore Street crowded with shops selling stupidly expensive kitchens to people who probably don’t cook. It feels of a piece with that. It’s a restaurant predicated on one idea: that a single really expensive ingredient will make your life better. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but it won’t.
Jay’s news bites
■ It’s been a while since I mentioned the Crab House Café on the approach road to Portland Bill in Dorset. This is the perfect opportunity to do so again. As with all the best seafood places, it’s a rough and ready affair: a wooden shack with picnic tables outside. It’s great for oysters at £13 the half dozen. Better still, whole spicy Chinese crab for £21 (crabhousecafe.co.uk).
■ From 6 September for a month, the small London chain Pizza Pilgrims is joining forces with British charcuterie company Cannon and Cannon to offer a meat feast pizza using only native products, including a seaweed and cider salami from Cornwall, and a rosemary and garlic salami from Kent. The pizza will cost £13 (pizzapilgrims.co.uk).
■ Simon Rogan of L’Enclume in the Lake District, who closed his restaurant at Claridge’s earlier this year, is returning to London with Aulis, though
no one knows quite where. Diners at the eight-seater will only be given the location on confirmation of their booking. The set tasting menu will cost £250 a head.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
