Douglas williams/Shanghai Daily news

Of all the dishes to be had in all of Shanghai the one that's probably the most quintessentially Shanghainese in nature, as well as the one natives are most enthusiastic about, must be the hairy crab.

Steamed hairy crab with Shaoxing wine and baby clams. — DW

This is hairy crab season and the delicacy is being offered in all Shanghainese restaurants worth their salt. Much has been written about hairy crabs: the importance of their provenance, the various extensive attempts by purveyors to fob off lesser crabs as originating in the all important Yangcheng lake in neighboring Jiangsu Province and the merits of one gender over another.
Running till December at the Whampoa Club at Three on the Bund is a Crab Feast Tasting menu - and a feast it is with seven courses. Each and every course features the hairy crab in a variety of guises.
As a location to eat a humble bowl of beef noodles the Whampoa Club would be hard to beat but as one of Shanghai's best Shanghainese restaurants looking out over the city's Huangpu life blood, it's the absolutely perfect place to eat exquisitely prepared hairy crab.

The Whampoa Club’s founding chef Jereme Leung.

Chef Jereme Leung is from Hong Kong but he has made Shanghainese cuisine and the Whampoa Club his life. "There are three main strands to Shanghainese food," explained Leung, who spent his first six months in the city learning all he could about this long underestimated style of cooking: "The earlier influx of foreigners into the city created a lot of jobs, mostly associated with the docks. This in turn attracted a great deal of labor which flooded in from the surrounding provinces," said the founding chef of the club.
Melting pot
"The food they ate had to replace the energy being lost in the heavy work hence Shanghainese food tends to be quite sweet and salty," said Leung. "At the same time the existing Yangtze River Delta peasants had their own type of food which was quite oily with intense flavors and then there were the Western influences so Shanghainese really is a melting pot of cuisines."
The stuffed crab claw, as the considerate though perpetually joking chef pointed out, must be eaten with care to avoid the hot soup inside squirting over the hapless diner. This is the third course after the first of drunken crab with shaved ice. The ice is made from the wine that fatally intoxicated the crab in the first case. The second is the crab powder and asparagus ingeniously packed into an egg shell. Complex morsels; visually enchanting; subtle and pure.
"Whilst we want to create food that is a step or two above the traditional," said Leung, "we're not interested in creating a fine dining experience. We don't want a formal experience with a rarefied atmosphere. That's not the way Shanghainese people like to eat. Our customers want to be able to speak the way I am now and not feel self-conscious."
The setting, the furnishing and the decor are tastefully and traditionally Chinese in the Whampoa Club with a number of beautiful, traditional private rooms available.
"We want local people to eat here and not feel this is just a foreign representation of a Shanghainese restaurant," said Leung.
A couple of crab and shark fin combinations lead up to the main event: steamed hairy crab with Shaoxing wine and baby clams. There's really only so much help the various accompanying accoutrements can provide before it's face meets crab. Visions of brown bears on Russia's Kamchatka peninsula gnawing and sucking out every milligram of crustacean goodness springs to mind as legs crunch between teeth and crab stuff dribbles down one's chin. It's primordial and messy but it's so tasty any wastage would be a mortal sin. A crab and vegetable dish precede a noodle dish before a sweet corn and ginger ice cream with honey and ginger tea conclude proceedings.
An eating experience like nothing I've encountered.
The feast costs 888 yuan (US$110).
Address: 3 Zhongshan No. 1 Rd E.
Tel: 6321-3737