To celebrate the new weekend brunch menu at Fancy Crab, they were offering 50% off to taste their offerings. I had nearly been once before but the online reviews were extremely mixed which had deterred me. However the very short menu, the discount and my own need to be in the area one Sunday all coalesced together harmoniously.
The restaurant is quite large, even more so once you go to the bathroom and see the additional downstairs space. The upstairs is very bright with high ceilings and giant crabs are amusingly inserted into many paintings and comic book covers. There's also the actual giant sized crab shell that seems to make its way from table to table.
Luckily the king crab is extremely good, reminiscent of the king crab I had from the expensive markets in Bergen (maybe they are the exact same type). Each sweet tendril of soft crab was a delight and best eaten simply with minimal obscurations.
- King Crab Benedict (picked red crab, toasted muffin, avocado, smoked chilli, Yuzu lime hollandaise) £11.5 - the crab was smothered and overpowered by the hollandaise unfortunately. There wasn't much smoke or chilli noted either;
- Crab & Nori Waffles (hot waffles, picked red crab, poached eggs, wild rocket, gruyere cheese sauce) £9.5 - the cheapest dish was the best combination of all with crab chunks, a soft poached (slightly overdone) egg and a thick black sauce (maybe the seaweed butter from the has dish?) that added extra salinity to the already excellent flavour;
- Fancy Crab Hash (potato & kale hash, marinated heritage tomatoes, duck egg, seaweed butter) £10.5 - from hash I sort of expected fried potato (ie. hash brown) but it was more of a warm salad and lightly flavoured. This dish had the most amount of crab in it which was welcome and in the end I ate sections separately to savour the meat. I'm not sure where the seaweed butter was, perhaps in the waffle dish...
Overall the crab meat is delicious and able to be eaten amply by itself. In terms of the dishes themselves, I'd happily pay full price for the waffles and possibly the hash.