Sometimes, we’re so desperate for new things that we’re willing to settle for old things that have just been painted over.
Take restaurants. If you’ve been dining out for years in places that have opened and closed, and if you pay attention to detail, you’re likely to note that chairs are the one thing that get used over and over again—unless, of course, local chair manufacturers are able to produce only a few designs in perpetuity.
Also, have a look at the areas that get less attention from interior designers and decorators than the main dining room: the areas leading to the bathroom, the point-of-sale stand, and especially the kitchen if you get to peek in. You’ll soon realize that many restaurants are just older ones warmed over.
The need for a fresh look is apparently so important that in Makati, the restaurants and shops have been closing one by one, and reopening with… exactly the same stuff. But the lighting has changed, sometimes not for the better. The typeface of the sign has changed—it’s like Coke switching to tall skinny cans instead of the more familiar shape that we’ve been drinking from for years.
I’m a great fan of things staying the same, but for inner change to happen—like those old Parisian restaurants that have kept the same gold molding that has been in place since it opened, but whose menu continues to differ with each new chef.
Or sometimes you can visit a place where neither has changed. Ling Nam on T. Alonzo Street, Binondo, is one of them: the same interiors, the same waiters who once served Dolphy, the same manual “kabayo” method of kneading the dough for the noodles (basically a second-class lever with the dough ball right beside the fulcrum).
Bouquet of utensils
Another is King Crab House in San Juan. I don’t know how long it’s been there, but it feels like it has always been there. The utensils arrive like a bouquet stuck in a glass of warm water. This isn’t exactly China Blue at Conrad Manila, but King Crab has its own charm.
This is what all Chinese restaurants used to look like: fluorescent lighting, a few round tables of varying sizes, and incense burning away at a small altar behind the tills. There’s a family whose members are on their phones or iPads and have kicked off their shoes; another family with the kids running around; and a group of men drinking BYO bottles of wine in glasses with ice.
On the menu we have the usual moneymakers, like Yang Chow fried rice, but the suahe shrimp and crab are reasonably priced. I asked what kind of crab is available, secretly hoping they would have some coconut crab smuggled in. “Lalake at babae lang,” was the answer.
This was disappointing, as well as puzzling, until we realized that the really prized ones were the “bakla,” or more properly, hermaphroditic crabs.
Male crabs are apparently more muscular, and have the gooey stuff that I can only imagine is a reproductive liquid of some sort, but female crabs have the prized roe.
One of the men from the table of drinkers refused to believe that there were no “bakla” crabs available and demanded to see all that were left. He triumphantly found—outed?— the last one that had apparently been overlooked.
We had one crab in sotanghon and one fried—
which we regretted slightly when the same man who had discovered the gay crab said, loudly, that the only way to go was steamed, with live crabs.
It was true. The fried crab was a bit too much of a good thing—nothing to complain about, certainly, but after a while, the grease was literally everywhere.
Plump crabs
But the crabs were plump, juicy and cooked just right. The crab in sotanghon was less of an oil shock, but the sotanghon was dry and bland. It should be full of crabby goodness, all the stuff that seeps out, caught by the tendrils of the noodle strands, but this was a bit flat. Still, the crab itself was very good.
However, the star of the night was the suahe, a great heaping mound of it, the flesh crisp and firm and still tasting of the sea.
Service is brisk but perfunctory. There are no waiters telling you their name and that they’ll be helping you out for the night, but they get the job done. If you don’t like crab or are allergic, there’s lots more you can eat—the menu has a short selection of noncrab items if you want to balance out the meal.
As you can tell, I’m a big fan of crab. When Ming Kee on Makati Avenue was around, I thought I couldn’t get enough of its crab bee hon, and to this day I don’t think any other establishment in the country gets it quite right. But its problem was consistency.
King Crab House’s supply has never wavered, and sometimes, in the kind of world we live in these days, you want to be able to depend on something that has stayed the same.
There are days you feel like meeting a glamorous stranger, but there are other days you want an old familiar friend you hang out with in shorts and tsinelas. We hope that King Crab House never changes—except maybe the really dodgy practice of sticking utensils in water.
King Crab House, 327 P. Guevarra St. San Juan. Tel. 7238820