First printed in metro.pop magazine, I think the January/February 2006 issue.
Chef Zac Pelaccio has plenty of street cred. His restaurant 5 Ninth is a success, and people still talk about his dearly departed Chickenbone Café. He also once lived in Malaysia, picking up techniques and ingredients many other chefs are afraid to touch. Still, it was pretty ballsy of him to open up Fatty Crab, a casual establishment dedicated to the street stall foods of that country. Chinatown is full of Malaysian joints that serve up dishes just as sweat-inducing and funky. Why go to Fatty Crab instead, where the Meatpacking District portions and prices are smaller and higher, respectively?
For one, Fatty Crab uses higher quality ingredients and finer standards of preparation than your average street stall would. Take the crispy pork watermelon pickle salad – cool, tart diced watermelon gets tossed with hot, crisp-fried diced fatty pork and rolled onto an herbaceous bed of ripped holy basil and sliced scallions. It’s a perfectly chic marriage of the cold and the hot, the rich and the astringent, the smoky swine and the pink fruit.
Consider the Rendang beef short rib – no street stall would have the time to lavish this inexpensive cut with so much attention. The dark lacquered braised beef just melts off the bone, each bite so rich and redolent my dining companions considered getting a second plateful. But we were happy to save room for our favorite dish, the impossibly silky snapper in a tepid-temped, lemongrass-infused coconut cream bath dotted with tiny wheels of sliced bird chilies and sprigs of cilantro. The creamy fish is especially decadent draped over a spoonful of aromatic coconut rice.
But the star at almost every table is the signature chili crab – a deep bowl holds a halved Dungeness crab swimming in a sweet, vinegar-tinged red chili sauce that wouldn’t be out of place at a barbecue cook-off. In keeping with barbecue tradition, the gloriously gloppy dish is served with wooden picks for extracting the sweet claw meat, wet-naps, and thick white square toast for sopping the sauce up. It’s not the kind of dish you would want to order on a first date. The fresh crab meat is incredibly moist and sweet, though nobody at my table seemed particularly interested in slurping up the sticky, sweet sauce. And the crab does seem like a lot of work for very little yield, especially considering that, at $28, it is by far the most expensive item on the menu.
Sometimes the highbrow-meets-the-streets approach doesn’t work. Fairy cup quail egg shooters are like swallowing a teaspoon full of warm, spicy sambal-flavored spittle. And a few of the more traditional dishes fell flat. The well-trimmed, thinly sliced Chinese broccoli with salted fish, a dish I generally love, was so intensely salty that it made my temples throb. Lo si fun, a clay pot oozing with bouncy, short mouse-tail noodles and hunks of Chinese sausage in a sweet, dark soy sauce, seemed homely and uninspired.
Unfortunately, service isn’t much better than you’d expect at a night market. Our waiter didn’t bother to write down our order, despite the fact that we ordered ten things. We later had to remind him that we were missing a dish. When we asked what our quail eggs were topped with, he tried to fake an answer; when prodded, he went back to the chef and came back with an entirely different answer. Still, it’s far better than the brusque, zero eye-contact manners of Chinatown Malaysian joint servers.
Unlike many of the other sharing-plate eateries that have popped up all over New York in the last few years, Fatty Crab succeeds without pandering to diners with a something-for-everyone mentality. Its short, simple menu unapologetically embraces the funk and heat of the Malaysian street – and its enthusiasm is infectious. Fatty Crab’s interpretation is less like a lip-sync and more like an intelligent translation that captures the cadences and colloquialisms of the original tongue.
Fatty Crab
643 Hudson St. (at Horatio St.)
New York, NY 10014
212-352-3590
