You can also get it with pork or chicken, or just vegetables. Healthy and fresh-tasting, very warming, and again, ask for bread. Crab is not a tidy thing to eat. Occasionally, restaurants served cracked crab after providing the customers with cutesy aprons, but since those were the days when going out to dinner meant best clothes, cracked crabs were never very popular. It took the Chinese to introduce us to the real joys of lightly cooked crab in big rich sauces, with black beans and garlic or with ground pork and chili peppers, the whole crab on a dish with bits of shell to spit out, the legs to suck, the sauce to mop up and the whole family to share.
Crabs are still at their best in Asian restaurants.
One of my favourites is the Golden Great Wall, at Broadway and Cambie. Then there's the Banana Leaf, at Broadway and Willow. Malaysian cooking, rich and aromatic, tartly spicy, lots of variations on curries, lots of sticky brown barbecued things, good soups but, best of all, crab. Even not on special it's worth the effort, and parking is always fairly easy on that stretch of Broadway. Styrofoam's cheaper, tastes better.