Move over caviar, the hottest luxury ingredient is crab

It’s a perplexing time in the world of luxury ingredients. Prestigious products have become inextricably tied to fast food. Caviar now adorns chicken nuggets ; truffle features in supermarket hummus and Starbucks egg bites ; wagyu beef is getting smashed into burgers and has made the menu at Burger King in the UK. Even lobster-bright red and festive-has gone from attention-getting centerpiece to mac-and-cheese mix-in. Yet crab retains its mystique. It’s beloved for its delicately flavored, finely textured meat-and for its fatty, rich roe and tomalley, culinary categories unto themselves. Now large, live specimens from the far corners of the world, like snow crab from Japan and red king crab from Norway, are this season’s luxury signifiers. “Even the cheapest crab that we sell is typically double the price of what Maine or Nova Scotia lobster costs,” says Ian Purkayastha, founder of Regalis Foods . “King crab pricing is definitely at an all-time high.” Because their stocks and availability have been harshly affected by political and ecological upheavals , the crustaceans now wholesale for $70 to $85 a pound, he said. Retail consumers could spend upward of $1,200 to have a single, live 10-pound Norwegian red king crab delivered to their homes from Regalis. That, believe it or not, is the good news, he adds: “It’s just going to continue to go up and up and up in price. It’s not like you can farm a king crab.” He won’t be surprised if wholesale king crab prices top $100 a pound within five years. The $888 Menu Take stock of current splurge-worthy dishes and dinners, and you’ll see: American diners and restaurant operators are embracing the luxury of crab. With the explosion of omakase-style dining , quality is trumping quantity more than ever. Take, for instance, Sushidokoro Mekumi . Newly opened in New York’s Hudson Square, this outpost of a two-Michelin-star restaurant in Kanazawa, on Japan’s west coast, offers a crab-centric omakase dinner for $888 per person, excluding drinks, for a few weeks this winter. The meal’s current star is male snow crab, transported from Kanaiwa, a port town in Ishikawa prefecture, to New York in two days, at a wholesale cost of as much as $675 each. Three are needed for each evening’s seating of eight people. All December seatings are sold out, but January spots are available. Mekumi’s chef Hajime Kumabe keeps it simple to convey just how good the ingredient is: “We almost never add anything else-just a little salt as seasoning.” Among the 18 to 20 courses are kani gayu, a delicate rice porridge made only from crab, crab broth, rice and salt; mokuzugani, or Japanese mitten crab, simply grilled over binchotan charcoal; and kobako gani, a female snow crab boiled immediately after it’s caught by fishermen in Japan, trained to do it to the restaurant’s specifications. Its meat is arranged with both its internal and external roe and served in its shell. (An even more precious, and expensive, crab will splash into New York at...

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