Seafood is one of nature’s best offer. All you need is for your seafood to be fresh, then the cooking is secondary. All you need is steam and you can get a really good seafood dinner.
Steamed seafood has become somewhat of a trend recently, especially when food distribution in China has improved tremendously and yet many restaurant scandals happed. Steamed seafood becomes a guarantee of freshness, when you can see what you are eating was still alive a minute ago.
Legend Craft is one of the few steamed seafood that has popped up in Shanghai. It is voted to be among the top 10 of this particular genre in Shanghai.
Every one of these steamed seafood restaurants have an impressive collection of live seafood tanks. Legend Craft is no different.
Be careful with these type of dining, when the price can vary with the amount of seafood weighed. Always ask if the price is per 100g or per 500g (call 1 Chinese katy 斤, not the imperial katy which is 600g) or per piece. Also if seafood has been drained, else you would be paying for seawater.
After picking our seafood, they were weighed and sent to the kitchen for preparations – cleaning out the innards, descaling the fish, etc. So we started with a salad. Ice lettuce 冰草 is quite popular these days. A native of South Africa, this lettuce seems to be covered with ice modules that it glistens under the light. Crunch like lettuce, it requires the salad dressing to provide any flavour.
You always start with the items that are easy to cook, like prawns and clams. They cooked under 10 min in this pressurised steam.
Next, shellfish like scallops and bamboo clams. These require a bit more processing, like garlic and ginger, because they are usually quite bland when steamed.
We tried for the very first time Chinese sturgeon steamed with ginger and garlic. Chinese sturgeon in the wild is a protected species. But in recent years, the Chinese managed to rear them in captivity and it has started to appear on the dining table. The flesh is quite firm and fatty, but compared to other deep sea fishes, sturgeons can be quite bland.
Even the vegetables are steamed, so they retained all the nutrients and sweetness.
The last item is usually a boiling pot of porridge at the bottom of the steamer. You can choose to enhance the flavour with more ingredients like pork ribs, chicken or more seafood. This time, we opted for the pork rib and shrimp upgrade. And the porridge was delicious.
While this may not be the best one in Shanghai that I have been to so far, it was above average in terms of preparation and service. The decoration reminded me of The Ship Restaurant in Singapore with its nautical theme. Can be quite crowded during meal time so do call in advance to reserve a table.
Legend Craft 船奇蒸汽海鲜
仙霞路600号 上海
Tel : 021-62091773
Date Visited : Apr 2018
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