Dungeness Season Is Finally Here and A Great Recipe to Best Enjoy It Courtesy of Cafe Fina
When it came time to properly celebrate the return of Dungeness crab to local markets and menus after its fishery has been closed for so long—and share an incredible crab recipe—the place to go came to mind immediately: Cafe Fina on Fisherman’s Wharf. After all, Cafe Fina does Dungeness in all sorts of different ways.
Guests can go for steamed crab; pesto-sauced crab-shrimp ravioli; chilled crab with lemon and butter; cioppino with crab, clams, mussels, prawns, calamari, and fresh fish; crab sautéed with butter, fish stock, wine, and garlic; a paella with crab and clams, mussels, prawns and calamari with sweet peppers, peas, fresh tomato, and saffron rice; or “Sicilian style” crab with a family recipe owner-operator Domenic Mercurio can rattle off from memory and throw together almost as quickly.
Mercurio—born and raised in Monterey, two blocks from the Wharf—has been eating local crab for so long he felt disoriented when it wasn’t safe for crab populations or humans to consume it.
“I guess I’ve been eating crab since I was born,” he says. “You take certain things for granted. I thought everybody did Dungeness crab for Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
While most Earthlings aren’t as cozy with crab as Mercurio, it is a major driver, in epicurean terms, for visitors to Monterey Bay.
In fact, one year Mercurio decided to research how much so. He hired interviewers to ask people stopping by Fisherman’s Wharf if they were coming to eat and what they were most interested in ordering. Clam chowder came in first. But right behind it: fresh crab.
Mercurio looks visibly relieved to serve Monterey Bay crab again after dishing so-so Alaskan crab that just wasn’t as “full and heavy” as what his sources are bringing him now.
He buys straight off the boat from Mike Ricketts of the F/V Sea Hawk and is willing to pay a little bit more than competitors might because he believes in the quality of the catch Ricketts hauls in. He describes the last batch as simply “unbelievable.”
Picking which of his crab recipes to feature here is as easy as selecting Cafe Fina for a crab splurge. Sicilian style is the way to go for three reasons.
One, it’s profoundly easy and features accessible ingredients.
On a sunny afternoon break in the early January rains, Mercurio runs through the recipe—and completes the majority of it—in the space of a few minutes.
He cleans the crab (check out this video from H&H Fresh Fish on how to clean a crab!), setting aside the “crab butter” (more on that in a minute) and deftly cracking it with a broomstick handle. His easy dexterity befits decades of experience doing it.
Then he chops the legs and body thickly to make it easier to excavate the tender meat, tosses them all in a big bowl, and quickly dresses them in olive oil, vinegar, parsley, Dijon mustard, salt, pepper, garlic, and the key ingredient, which is also a 100-percent Italian move.
Crab “butter,” for the unfamiliar, is the rich liver-like organs of the crustacean. To some, crab butter is just too skunky. The hangup there, Mercurio guesses, is at least partly due to crab that’s not at peak freshness. “Try it fresh!” he says. “It’s not potent if it’s fresh crab.” He likes it so much his longtime Fisherman’s Wharf neighbors at Liberty Fish, while cleaning cooked crab, would set aside the butter for him. “They say, ‘Dom, bring your spoon,’” he says. “It was the best! Like custard. I was sort of born to it.”
When it comes to the dish, the flavor provides the backbone of the preparation.
“It gives a unique flavor to that marinade,” he says. “It adds a little intensity of the crab flavor.”
Reason number two for Sicilian style: It’s delicious, with the delicate, rich, and lightly sweet crab brightened and deepened by the interplay of harmonious flavors.
Reason three to go old-school Sicilian, perhaps most importantly, is that’s the way his family has always done it. “It’s the way I was raised to eat it,” Mercurio says, smiling.
Mercurio is many things besides a restaurateur and Fisherman’s Wharf institution. (He also co-owns Domenico’s on the Wharf.) He’s a doting father and grandfather. He’s an avid duck hunter.
He’s a prolific farmer—even after downsizing his farm on the south side of Los Banos, he still grows all the vegetables for his restaurants, including 17 varieties of heirloom tomatoes, plus several strains of zucchini, cucumbers, watermelons, sweet Italian peppers, fava beans, and melons, while cultivating an orchard bursting with cherries, peaches, pluots, apricots, blood oranges, Meyer lemons, limes, and tangerines.
He’s best friends with the late great National Football Hall of Fame coach and announcer John Madden, with a plaque next to Madden’s favorite table commemorating their chemistry. Fair warning: Should Madden walk in, even from the great End Zone in the Sky he gets dibs on table; sorry for the inconvenience.
Mercurio is also a supporter of the Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust by way of working with many of its member boats and fundraising dinners.
The whole time Mercurio insists he’s a cook, not a chef, but when the recipes are this good, that distinction is purely semantics. Here appears one of his favorites, which he calls “an easy standby.”
If some of the quantities sound like more intuition than precision, it’s because he’s been doing them so long they’re second nature, as Fina’s GM Roxanne Roark points out.
“He does it naturally,” she says. “He doesn’t even think about it. Some people can do that.”
Click here to get the recipe!