Crustacean creation

By Ye Jun (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-10-13 07:58

The Puyuan Shanghai Restaurant will show how the Chinese eat the river crab, with a specially designed crab banquet featuring 20 options. Their crabs are organic crabs from Suzhou's Yangchenghu Lake, famous for its high-quality Dazhaxie.

You can eat the crab the traditional way: steamed, with an accompanying saucer of vinegar and ginger slices, and a bottle of warmed yellow rice wine. But there are plenty of other crab dishes worth trying. The restaurant shows its creativity in the preparation of a "snow flake crab", in which egg white is steamed like snow to stack on the top shell of a crab, with crab roe at the bottom of the shell.

In another dish, crab roe and crab meat is used to steam inside wax gourd to make a beautiful and delicious dish. Fried crab with yellow rice cake and soy sauce is a traditional dish in East China's Shanghai and South Jiangsu. The crab is tender and tasty, while the rice cake gives it a pleasantly chewy taste. Finally, one can try their crab roe baozi, steamed bun with fresh crab roe stuffing.

The restaurant is elegantly and neatly decorated in modern Chinese style. The service is on a par with that of a four-star hotel. Average spending is 200 yuan per person. The crab banquet is available for two months after October 1. With this paper one can get a 12% discount.

Daily 11:30am-2pm, 5:30-10pm. 169 Guang'anmen Dajie, Xuanwu District. 8317-2288 ext 2331.

(China Daily 10/11/2008 page8)