I believe the first time I had Crab Rangoon was at the recently closed Szechuan Beijing on South Blvd. It was okay, but there’s no way it was from Rangoon in Burma/Myanmar or anywhere else in Asia.
Crab Rangoon, usually a fried wonton skin filled with crab (more usually krab) and cream cheese, is a widely dissed dish. The inclusion of cheese suggests a non-Asian provenance, as there’s a high incidence, perhaps 90%, lactose intolerance in Asia. Indeed, it seems Crab Rangoon was developed as a kind of faux Polynesian appetizer, part of your standard pu-pu platter, at Trader Vic’s in San Francisco.
Nonetheless, you’ll find Crab Rangoon at many Chinese, Thai and Japanese restaurants in the U.S…but it’s highly unlikely you will ever spot Crab Rangoon in China, Thailand or Japan.
But so what?
Although Crab Rangoon may not be “authentic” – whatever in the world that is – it can still be tasty.
Except it usually isn’t.
Usually, Crab Rangoon is a sad, fried wad of dough filled with surimi (fake crab) and gloppy cheese. It’s frequently an object of ridicule among food enthusiasts (which, in 2015, is most people).
But there’s no reason – no reason at all! – why Crab Rangoon can’t be good, and at bellyQ [http://www.bellyqchicago.com/], another restaurant in the Bill Kim mini-empire, it is very good indeed. Kim’s version varies the standard by using whipped tofu, high-quality Jonah crab, with a light dash of fish sauce, fried in the usual won ton skin.
Lighter, tastier, and prettier than most Crab Rangoon, bellyQ’s version is a major value at $5 for a tray of them. It comes with one of Kim’s new dipping sauces, but honestly, I like it just the way it is, all fried crisp. There are many full-flavored items on Kim’s menu, so it’s kind of nice to start out slowly with an app that doesn’t have the full bore, mouth-filling presence of many of his other dishes (we were also knocked out by the blackened catfish – and, no, blackening isn’t an Asian culinary tradition, either).
About the somewhat surprising tofu filling, Kim told us “I’ll allergic to dairy and I don’t really like the taste of it. Also, I wanted to make the Crab Rangoon healthier.”
Crab Rangoon is a kind of drinking food; good with beer. It’s also, alas, at too many places, the kind of thing you fill up on early on in the meal, which usually means that you can’t finish what comes after, like your entrée, the main event. At bellyQ, not only is the Crab Rangoon with whipped tofu less filling than the traditional cheese-filled versions, it’s tastier, and as Kim says, healthier…so even if you do fill up on them, you won’t feel quite so bad about it.
