Small Potatoes Make The Steak Look Bigger

This place is seriously crabbed. Almost everything edible on the menu is crab or contains crab meat. Crab Shack is located along a stretch of shophouses along Thomson Road and the unit that houses this eatery looks to be previously a coffeeshop that has been through very brief renovation, leaving hints of what it used to be before it became the "crabery" it is today. I came to know of this place from a good friend of mine (whom I had dinner with tonight) who are pals with the owners of this place, so decided to check this joint out for evening chow.

These above the crab croquette. Coming from a place that specialises in serving crabs, I kinda expected a lot more out of the croquettes. In fact, I was thinking somewhere along the lines of the delicious crab cakes that I had at Riciotti, but it apparently wasn't close. These croquettes, apart from having the usual breaded texture from the exterior have creamy insides which contains, well, a faint hint of crab like flavour. That is pretty much it for this. No morsels of meat detected, just hot creamy insides. I'm actually quite disappointed.

The soft shell crab with chicken floss was quite decent. I noted that the crabs used for these are actually rather small. I usually encounter larger sized crabs which are chopped into smaller pieces, but these are small enough that you can finish each crab in about 2 large bites. The chicken floss is a nice touch and comes slightly crispy.

What's in the basket above are some members of poor stone crabs which will never pinch anything again even if they're still alive. The stone crab claws are a fairly unmessy affair if you're armed with a cracker and a suitable fork. The shells are not as tough as the larger mangrove crabs and do not contain much sharp ridges like flower crabs. So they're fairly easy to crack open to get to the sweet tender meat inside which I thought was pretty good. I've had good and bad crabs and these frankly are not bad. But I feel that they're a tad small, which means that there isn't that much of meat to be had. Beats eating flower crabs though.

This is the crab spaghetti and is one of the mains of Crab Shack along with crab baked rice and the piece meal crabs. Everything else before was actually appetizers. Seriously. The portions of this spaghetti isn't big and neither is the taste. What you get is a very boring tomato based sauce, probably jarred ones with herb and garlic and a very similar shredded crab meat sauce on top of the pasta. The menu says that it comes with sundried tomatoes. I've had sundried tomatoes, I love them and I'm quite positive these in the spaghetti aren't those. The pasta simply isn't remarkable. Pasta Mania does them better, so I don't really think much of this. For less than $8 I can think of better places for pasta, albeit without shredded crab meat sauce.

All in all, I would say that Crab Shack serves averagely decent food at affordable prices. It's decent at a point where you can probably come by and get some tasty bites (beware the small portions), however nothing really stands out as exceptional. And since what was ordered tonight was more than half the selection of the menu, there isn't really anything else enticing about the offerings. Unless you enjoy the arduous process of picking out tiny scraps of meat off flower crabs where I personally find that the effort negates whatever joy gotten from eating them.

Here's a little trivia from the waiting number from the table.

Regurgitated by LiquidShaDow at 10:38 PM    

Digested Pages : from Davey Jones' locker