News

Whoa! That's not an alien, that's my supper.

We have arrived at Sun Sui Wah Seafood Restaurant just as the show is about to begin.

The hostess at the front door thrusts us into the path of a waiter who is pushing a trolley toward our private dining room. The waiter digs into his bucket, grabs one of the writhing orange beasts by the tips of its enormous spiny-knobbed legs and dangles it like a gruesome puppet.

Children scream. Parents pull out their digital cameras.

It's Alaskan king crab season and the feasting is sweet - or kind of scary - but still incredibly cheap, provided you know where to reel in the deals.

Sun Sui Wah's annual king crab festival runs until the end of the month.

Go. Now!

Where else in the world are you ever going to find this royalty of the sea, lusciously prepared, for only $13.80 a pound? (The restaurant's off-season price averages $30.) Sure, T&T Supermarket is selling live crab for about $8 to $10 a pound this month. But honestly, who has the equipment to boil these gangly metre-long suckers at home? I'd have to corset one to fit in my stock pot.

Alaskan king crab is a hugely popular Chinese delicacy. During the month of March, the Sun Sui Wah Richmond location sells approximately 3,000 pounds a day.

The non-Asian restaurants can't possibly compete and don't even try.

I called this week and checked. The prices at downtown seafood restaurants range from $55 a pound (Joe Fortes) to $68 for five centre-cut legs (The Cannery).

When indulging in the whole-meal deal, the rule of thumb is to order two pounds for each person. The smallest crab at Sun Sui Wah is about six pounds; the average is 10. The bigger the crab, the thicker the gams. I suggest you go with a large group and make the most of it.

We had 20 in our party, plus an additional table of ankle-biters, none of whom were interested in the crab for any reason other than its obvious show-and-tell factor.

About 30 minutes after our wriggling buckets of four 10-pound crabs were ceremoniously wheeled away from our tables, the legs were returned on three huge platters, steamed, split and heaped with minced garlic.

This dish was so delicious - so imperious - I honestly don't know if I can ever go back to lowly Dungeness crab again.

Alaskan crab obviously gives you more bang for the buck. The legs on our sea critters were as fat as Churchill cigars, and slid out of their shells in full, round tubes. It's so nice not having to crack, pick and scrape for your meat.

The texture was lush, almost creamy.

And the flavour? Oh! The legs were so sweet I thought they must have been doused in butter. Nope. They were just steamed in their natural juices and smothered in

garlic.

What I appreciate most about the Chinese crab preparation is that they give you the claws.

(Most seafood restaurants only serve the thickest midsections of the legs and reserve the rest for crab cakes or stock.)

The claw meat isn't as succulent, but it is dense, a bit more briny and well worth fighting for.

Next up were the knuckles, deep-fried in peanut oil with spicy salt, garlic chips and slivers of hot peppers. This section requires some gnawing, kind of like chicken wings. But what a tasty treat.

Steamed legs and fried knuckles is the standard

two-way order for $13.80 a pound. I recommend you

upgrade.

For an extra $5 to $10 (depending on how much crab you eat), the kitchen will take all that lusty leftover juice from the steamed leg platter and toss it with noodles.

Spend another $13.80 and the kitchen will take the round shell from the body and stuff it with a creamy, Macau-style coconut-curry fried rice.

After all that yummy crab, there's really no need to order anything else.

But our host went further and stuffed us with abalone mushrooms (sautéed with pea tips and gravy), steamed scallops (with crunchy sugar snap peas), tender chekiang spare ribs that melted in the mouth and a mutton hot pot served with fermented tofu (redolent of stinky blue cheese).

We really didn't need all those extra dishes, which merely upped the final bill to $45 a person

A few people, myself included, grunted under the weight of their full bellies. But nobody complained.

Sun Sui Wah Seafood

Restaurant: 102-4940 No. 3 Rd., Richmond; 604-273-8208

Side dish

Cheeky little treats

Pork belly, roll over. The latest cut of piggy to arrive on the local market is cheek. The Oyama Sausage Co. on Granville Island has started making its own guanciale, the full-flavoured hunk of jowl that is an essential ingredient for authentic spaghetti carbonara or bucatini all'Amatriciana.

Guanciale is similar to bacon, but is fattier and not smoked. Quebeckers might recognize it as oreilles de Christ (Christ's ears), the deep-fried pork grills that are topped with maple syrup and served at sugar shacks in springtime.

Oyama uses free-range heirloom pork, which is cured with salt and Italian spices and then air-dried for a month.

The meat comes in full jowl-sized portions, about one pound each, with skin attached, for $6.99. Granville Island Public Market, 1689 Johnston St.;

604-327-7407

agill@globeandmail.com