Middle School Food Critic

Loud, exhilarating, delicious and classy. These are but some of the many adjectives you may use to describe the Fatty Crab to a friend. Everywhere you look it’s a party, the music’s pumping, the people chatting, the waitresses and waiters running.

At 7:30 on a Friday night with 5 other friends and family, I decided to stop into one of the Upper West Side’s most hopping restaurants. The restaurant itself is small and very crowded, but the booths with glossy wooden tables are rather spacious. The menu is divided up into 8 categories: Snacks (includes dishes like Pork Buns), Noodles, Soups, Rice Bowls, Fatty’s Specials and Vegetables. To begin, we order a couple of snacks, the pork buns ($9) and the classic fatty sliders with spicy pork beef patties ($9). After I ordered I headed to the bathroom. Wait, is this the bathroom? No… YES! The interior of Fatty Crab’s bathroom is black with one dark red light and spooky sounds. Mmmm bizarre, but back to the food.

The first ‘snack’ to arrive unannounced at our table was the steamy pork buns. A bite into this intense dish was all I needed. The doughy, sweet outside contrasted beautifully with the spicy flavorful meat inside. Just that little bit of spice added a unique edge to the pork buns. The fatty sliders came almost instantly after the pork buns disappeared. Maybe a little too quickly; I was still thinking about the buns. The sliders were thick slabs of meat on small buns with a spicy mayonnaise sauce spread on top. What can I say, they were messy, but tasty. A little filling, though, for a snack.

Now let’s talk entrees or Fatty’s specials. Char Kway Teow, a $21 noodle dish featuring horfun noodles, shrimp, squid and bean sprouts. Countless flavors overrode my senses; soft doughy noodles with a touch of soy, and fresh seafood including a welcome extra, octopus that was not listed on the menu. Just like the previous dishes, the Char Kway Teow had a hint of spice, adding a kick to the dish. We were next served the Singaporean Black Pepper Mussels. At $16 these mussels were mediocre. Not superb, but not terrible. At a first glance they looked delectable, but after a few mussels I felt like the sauce was wrong and the mussels tasteless. Finally, to end on a good note we had the Fatty Crab Duck. The duck was a combination of 40% duck and 60% fat. The meat was savory and tender while the fat was rich and added a necessary flavor boost. Resting on top of a plain white rice that absorbed the flavor of the duck it was definitely a ‘Fatty Crab Special’. When the duck was gone we all sat back and sighed, feeling like satisfied fat crabs.

~ by David Fishman on February 9, 2010.

Posted in New York's Hottest, Restaurant Reviews
Tags: Fatty Crab, Fatty Crab Dishes, Fatty Crab Menu, Fatty Crab Review, Fatty Crab UWS