The Big Brown Crab
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re in Bangkok, hanging out with Toby and our friends Laura and Dan. This is another essay I wrote while we were in Taiwan, because I had a mole removed this week and then had a colonoscopy, so writing has not been on my priority list at all. Food, however, has been foremost on my mind, for obvious reasons.
The Big Brown Crab
Some friends of ours [the above-mentioned Laura and Dan] recommended that we eat lunch at the fish market in Taipei, so we did (I’m mostly vegetarian, but can occasionally be convinced to eat a bit of seafood—on that particular day, I was feeling both hungry and adventurous). It’s busy, buzzy, crowded, and a bit labyrinthine. Right after we arrived, we got separated, and I wandered around by myself for a few minutes, understanding very little of how it worked. Finally Lee texted me and said he’d found a place that seemed like something we’d a) understand, and b) like.
We sat down, the waitress brought us a menu, and we set to work translating. Lee said I could choose, which he often does, because he’ll eat mostly anything, and I’m the picky one.
The problem with that scenario is that ordering is sometimes complicated, or challenging, and I get tired of being the one who has to figure it out. Also, like I said, I’m picky.
Plus, sometimes I just freak out a little. The first time we went to Paris together, a few months after we got married, we went to a random seafood restaurant. The very proper French maitre d’ seated us at a tiny table wedged between two other tiny tables, and gave us menus that were (unsurprisingly) in French. A waiter brought over a bowl of small black snails and some tiny toothpicks, and asked a few questions. In French.
Now, I minored in French in college, and had been to Paris once before, so I wanted desperately to sound as if I knew what I was doing, even though I patently did not. In my experience at that (younger-than-you-can-imagine) stage of my life, the peak of seafood sophistication was fried popcorn shrimp. For a more casual meal, put those same shrimp on a bun and call it a shrimp burger. (Big asterisk here: NC shrimp may not be fancy, but fresh off the shrimp boat, they’re freaking fantastic.)
I didn’t understand the menu, we didn’t have Google translate, and I felt stupid in the face of that rapid-fire French. The fact that our table-neighbors were practically sitting in my lap made me more self-conscious than I could bear, and those little black snails were just sitting there reproaching my pickiness, like my worst mollusk nightmares. We got up and walked out.
Fast-forward to the seafood market in Taipei, and I’m a very different person than I was in 1990. I’m still a picky eater, and nowadays there’s almost always a language barrier in my life, but I no longer care what anyone thinks if I bork the ordering (which I often do). If I don’t like it, I don’t have to eat it.
Scanning the menu through the little translation camera on my phone, I picked out the word ‘butter’ in one item and pointed, still feeling competent. The waitress then made me accompany her to the kitchen, where the chef pulled a big brown crab out of a bin full of crabs, and looked at me questioningly. I nodded. I mean, what else was I going to do? It was the only thing on the menu that had butter. Butter is a word I understand. Seafood requires butter.
When I got back to the table, Lee asked what I had ordered.
“A big brown crab.”
He looked around. He seemed concerned. The waitress brought over a pile of torture implements. Lee’s concern was growing. I shrugged.
“It comes with butter. If we don’t like it, we’ll go to 7-Eleven.”
We don’t know how to eat crabs. We can manage crab legs, if they’re been removed from the messy bits. Stone crabs, snow crabs, Kamchatka crabs (aka Alaskan king crab), Irish crab ‘toes’—all yum. But whole crabs are a whole different challenge. They require knowledge. You Maryland people know what you’re doing—I don’t.
The waitress brought over a pile of charcoals in some kind of brazier. If I don’t know how to pick crabs, I sure don’t know how to cook them, but at that point, we were all in.
For once, Lee was more freaked out than I was. He took pictures of the torture implements. He fretted. He texted distress messages to a friend. He stared at other people’s tables. He watched them eat. He ordered a beer.
Our crab eventually came. It had already been broken up (yay!), and was immersed in … a bowl of soup. Buttery soup, but definitely soup.
We ate the crab. Did we love it? Not really. But we were happy to have had the experience.
Someone asked me recently how traveling had changed me, and I think the answer is—big brown crab.
We’re going back to the seafood market today.* This time we’re going to try the sushi place. I’m pretty sure I saw some vegetarian options. But if I’m wrong … there’s always 7-Eleven.
*The day I wrote that turned out to be the first day of the winter rain, so the rest of our meals in Taipei were in places we could reach via the vast network of under- and overground walkways. Getting to the market would’ve required getting very wet, so we never made it back. Oh well—there’s more vegetarian sushi in the world, and I’m sure I’ll find it eventually.
Also, it is absolutely reasonable to consider 7-Eleven a viable back-up plan for a lunch failure in Asia.
Take care,
Lisa
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