Walsh Bay Crab house – where to get your Singapore chilli crab fix

Chilli crab is often promoted as Singapore’s national seafood dish or national dish and it has to be one of the richest and satisfying dishes a seafood lover can indulge on. Now you can get your fingers licking dirty at the new Walsh Bay Crabhouse at Millers Point in Sydney an offshoot restaurant of Harry’s Singapore Chilli Crab.

For those who are not familiar with a Singapore Chill Crab dish, it consists of crab in its shell, usually stir-fried and heavily coated in a rich, sweet red sauce made, soy sauce and ginger, among other ingredients, thickened with egg and cornflour. Mud crab, with its generous amount of flaky sweet flesh, is traditionally the crustacean of choice for chilli crab. Walsh Bay Crabhose owner Andy Jeme says, “A good Singaporean chilli crab dish must use fresh mud crab … come I’ll show you”. And showed me he did, handing a live, pretty good looking, mud crab into my hands and feeling its hind legs crawling trying to grab hold of my wrist. I can still feel the sensation of those crab legs.

The last time a good Singapore chilli crab hit my palate was in Singapore at a restaurant called Palm Beach overlooking Marina Bay Sands. It is believed that restaurant first invented the chilli crab dish. Chilli crab is said to have been invented by Cher Yam Tian in the mid 1950s when she added bottled chilli sauce to her dish of stir-fried crabs, instead of using tomato sauce, her usual ingredient. In 1956, she and her husband began selling the dish from a pushcart along the seaside. Business was good and they eventually opened a restaurant in 1962, called Palm Beach, at 514 Upper East Coast Road. In 1984, they sold off some of their shares in the business to migrate to New Zealand. The queues at Palm Beach were long but efficient, the views were amazing overlooking the harbour in Singapore, the food messy, indulgent, generous but incredibly delicious. With medical gloves on and a bib around my neck, I indulged. I had wondered when I returned to Sydney where I could get my Singapore chilli crab fix.

Thanks to Hungry Diner, I tasted a few signature crab dishes on media night at Walsh Bay Crabhouse as well as others on their menu and I would be surely be back with my family for dinner or corporate lunches with work colleagues based in Barangaroo.

Here are a selection of the dishes available at Walsh Bay Crabhouse

Pacific oysters steamed with ginger and shallots

Scallops on half shell with ginger and shallots

Sea urchin steamed with egg

Harry’s Singapore Chilli Crab – the sauce is delicious and on the mild chilli side compared to the version I tried in Singapore recently. It is best sopped up with the fried Chinese buns called mantou.