The appeal of the crab eludes me: it's great food if you are lost in the wilderness and eating to survive, but at dinner it's less a dish than a test of one's dexterity and perseverance.
At the Crab Shack, the Professor and I donned big bibs and set to with the crackers ("They should provide hard hats, too," she said, as I sent a chunk of claw whizzing past her) and scrapers, like the ones street traders in India offer to clean your ears with.
The result of our combined labours on four claws of the Atlantic Jonah crab (the cheapest, at $33, of the four "crab pot" dishes on the menu) was a heaped tablespoonful of flesh that, without the lemongrass and chilli sauce, would have tasted of nothing much at all. Most of the sauce was lost in a gloopy clump of shredded lettuce in the bottom of the bowl. A kilo of Nelson paddle crab at $40 would have delivered four times the feed (and four times the cracking and scraping), but the fact remains that eating crab is more about crab than eating.
The Crab Shack, a feature on Queens Wharf in Wellington since mid-2013, opened an Auckland branch last week where the Leftfield Bar was. It's the new venture of the prolific Simon Gault and it's plainly a good-time place to hang out.
