Taxi Crab

It's November which means it's Hairy Crab season here in Hong Kong. Yes, the name is unfortunate, but these little buggers rank alongside shark's fin and bird's nest soup as top delicacies in Chinese cuisine.

True hairy crabs, so named because their claws actually have mossy, muddy looking hair growing from them, originally hail from Yang Cheng Lake outside of Shanghai. But huge demand for the crabs outstrips the lake's supply so now they are farmed across China in less esteemed waters, and often they are passed off in markets and restaurants as Yang Cheng Lake crabs to unsuspecting buyers at huge premiums. But the Yang Cheng Lake crabbers have gotten wise and now protect their franchise by imprinting each crabshell from their lake with a distinct laser scan and serial number. They take it seriously here.

This time of year you see large plastic crabs atop selected local taxi cabs to herald the hairy crab season. I took my first taxi crab this morning. I had that giddy feeling I first had when flying aboard a Southwest Airlines Shamu plane on the way to San Diego.

The taste? They are pretty good, albeit undersized compared to the dungeness I'm used to. True connoisseurs eat them for the roe, not the meat, and who knows what medicinal effect they are looking to achieve. In my book, the tedious shell cracking labor and the risk of a splattered work shirt outweighs the benefit of the actual crab. But then the ones I've had were impostors and not the real deal laser scanned Yang Cheng Lake variety.