This weekend, I went to an Italian place that offered a pasta special with ‘local’ dungeness crab. I was a bit surprised since I hadn’t read anything about the crab season opening and asked the server about the season. The reply was that the season opened just a few days ago.
After the server left to let us ponder our choices for a few minutes, I looked for news about dungeness crab season in California on my phone and didn’t see any recent news pieces about it. That leads me to wonder- is it common to see non-local crab advertised as local like that? Have you seen it?
Saw it once at a now defunct sushi bar. I knew it wasn’t local, ordered anyway and was disappointed. Why did I bother? Overly optimistic, it was a learning experience…
That sure is shady to me which would make me question the rest of their menu. Maybe they say “handmade pasta” since someone’s hands dropped the dry pasta into the cooking pot? Fresh garden greens because the Sysco truck just dropped off a bag of pre-cut, pre-washed greens.
I don’t know about the fake, but I’ve had the real four times this year, and the taste is excellent.
The best of the crop might have been last sunday. A friend bought crab at the Menlo Park farmer’s market, there’s one particular guy there who has big and heavy and LIVE not steamed, so I busted out the turkey frier and steamed em myself. Fantastic.
I had another at HMB last friday, played hookey. Went to princeton Seafood and, like an idiot, got the crab from the restaurant and not the fish store around the back ( they’ve changed how the old window used to work so I had a bought of momentary confusion ). Good taste. A commercial steamer where the water is old and full of crab taste is a good thing.
