Fortune Chinese Seafood

Located up in the North Lamar "Chinatown," Fortune Chinese Seafood has opened up to one of the bigger buzzes for an Austin-area Asian restaurant in recent memory.

We've gotten a couple of opportunities to check this place out, once for dinner and the other for dim sum. We liked what we had so far and will definitely be returning for further investigation.

Our first dinner trip followed a grocery trip to MT Supermarket. The Singapore Fried Vermicelli (yellow stir-fry rice noodles with onions and chicken) were pretty good, about as good as you'd expect from a decent Chinese restaurant. But the real rock star was the frog legs: a holy marriage between lemongrass and straight butter. Healthy eaters beware! You'll eat and eat these tender tasty morsels until all of a sudden you feel like you're sweating butter. And yes, they do taste like chicken.

We ended up also going back for a happy hour there where we got to try some of their dim sum dishes, which was also not a disappointment. I believe the dim sum restaurants should be rated like figure skating scores: you get a score for your fundamentals (dishes that all good dim sum restaurants should do and do well) and a score for your "style points" (more adventurous dishes that you would only find at a truly good dim sum restaurant).

The happy hour dim sum they served was an excellent showing of the restaurant's fundamentals: "shao mai" (pork and shrimp dumplings), "xia gou" or "ha gow" (shrimp wrapped in rice paper), and "cha shao bao" (BBQ pork buns). If you are a dim sum newbie, these are three popular dishes to order to get a good taste of what the concept is about.

And, perhaps the owners had a 6th sense for this, but they also served out egg custards, my favorite dim sum dessert from when I was a child. Also thumbs up.

We didn't get a chance to try any of their "style" dishes, but from the looks of their menu, there will be plenty to choose from the next time we go in. Among the ones I'm most looking forward to are the "xiao long bao" (soup-filled shrimp dumplings), chicken feet, and Han's favorite, the taro shrimp balls.

Not to be understated of all this, though, is that Fortune is a really nice restaurant inside with a full bar, and most of their dishes are $12.95 or under (unless you are ordering the shark fin soup), making them an excellent choice, especially if you are dining on a budget.

Fortune Chinese Seafood Restaurant

10901 N. Lamar Blvd, Suite A-1-501

fortuneaustin.com

Mama Ren's famous blue crabs

As a child, this was one of my favorite dishes. I am a huge fan of all things aquatic, I enjoy keeping them, eating them, and collecting replicas of them. I especially love crustaceans, but more to eat than to keep as pets. My mom makes me this simple dish when I go home in the winter, during the prime blue crab season. Chinese people eat blue crab in the winter because that's when the female crabs have the most uh... reproductive goodies. We call it "wang." It's the yellow and orange rich and flavorful pieces found inside the shell, and nestled between the two body sections. Delicious!

Justin and I returned from a visit to Michigan, where sadly we did not eat blue crab. My mother had a hard time finding a fresh catch during our brief visit. Luckily for us, our trip to the Chinese Supermarket (on N. Lamar) yielded some live blue crabs! We have also found them live at Fiesta. There are several tricks to finding good crabs. First, make sure you pick the female ones, the male ones don't have the same "wang," and personally, I don't find their "wang" as good. Crabs are sexed by their flap on the bottom of their body. This is what a female crab looks like.










You also want to make sure that your crab is alive and kicking. Dead crabs lose the springy texture in their meat, and taste pasty and can also smell bad. Make sure that all your crabs are alive when they hit the pot. My mom also says to look for the crabs that are the dirtiest, I guess that means they have been around long enough to reach maturity, and are more likely to have "wang." In addition, make sure that each crab feels nice and heavy, which suggests dense succulent meat. Pick up a few crabs for comparison purposes.

After you bring your crabs home (I suggest 3 crabs per person), keep them in the refrigerator until about an hour before cooking, at which point, you can transfer them to the sink with a few inches of cold water. Soak them for about half an hour. Next, use a small brush and brush them under running water, make sure you get their undersides, that's where they are usually most dirty. Watch out for those pinchers!

While you are cleaning your crabs, boil an inch of water in a large but shallow pot with a few slices of fresh ginger. Once your water boils, you can transfer your crabs into the pot. Cover and turn the heat down to medium. Cook for 10-15 minutes. They should be nice and red when they are fully cooked.

Eating them is the tricky part! First you rip off the flap that covers their belly (the one that tells you they're female), then you carefully separate the shell from the rest of the body. If you are lucky, your crab will be bursting with delicious "wang" and should look like mine. But don't worry if your crab doesn't have "wang," it will still be delicious!


My family's traditional accompaniment is to dip the crab in a ginger vinegar sauce. You simmer about 1/3 cup balsamic (or chinese) vinegar with 2 tablespoons soy sauce, 2 tablespoons sugar and diced ginger (about the size of a quarter). Be careful to not let your mixture boil, you just want to melt the sugar. I like to pour the sauce into the shell of my crab and use that as a built-in dipping bowl. Just snap the body of your crab in half, remove the legs, and use a toothpick to extract the meat. Enjoy!