Thursday, March 15, 2012

RESTAURANT: Long Beach

No culinary visit to Singapore can be completed without a serve of crab.

Along with Jumbo and No Signpost, Long Beach is held up as one of the best known seafood restaurants in Singapore specialising in Singapore chilli crab. All have multiple branches across the city. I choose the Long Beach at Dempsey, purely because it's closest. It's certainly not for the decor.


I couldn't decide between getting a black pepper crab or a chilli crab, so I decided to get both being the hungry/greedy guy that I am.

But first an appetiser. The very phallic geoduck clam, flown in live from Canada, sliced and stirfried with XO sauce. Delicious.

The crabs arrive and the staff are on hand to help out with extracting the meat from the shell, given that seeing someone struggle so badly with a crab is a somewhat saddening experience for them.

There's a rumour around these parts that the crabs get so big and fat because they eat the bodies that are ceremoniously buried in the river in Sri Lanka, where they come from. The system must work, because these crabs rock. Forget cremation. The future is CRABmation.

The black pepper crab is the first to be extracted. The crab is stir fried in a Sri Lankan black pepper sauce. Peppery, spicey, salty, slightly sour. And the crab is covered in it. Said crab is packed with sweet meat and matches perfectly with the sauce. It's excellent.

Next up, the famous Singapore chilli crab. One of the 432 national dishes of Singapore. This time the crab is every sweeter and more succulent. It bathes in huge bowl of tomatoey, eggy, spicey sauce. It's almost so good you could eat it on it's own. But you'd probably die, given how rich it is. Still, smash the crab, drown the side of fried mantou (bread sticks) and eat as much sauce as you need to clog your arteries and see God.

Wash it down with beer. Thank God for such an epic meal. Don't walk towards the light.


Long Beach @ Dempsey
25 Dempsey Road

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