Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Chef Arno's Crab Cake But Were Too Hungry to Ask

Snow triggers a primal, inscrutable urge in me to make prison-sized quantities of chili or beef stew, or some other such hearty, survival-friendly food. But I inexplicably found myself craving, of all the nonwintry, cost-ineffective things, a crab cake--a proper homemade jumbo-lump crab cake.

What makes crabmeat of almost any provenance taste so good? My theory has always been based on the fact that crabs are opportunistic feeders that eat pretty much anything and everything, and that animals with varied diets have tastier flesh. This is also one of the reasons why crabs are hard to farm, since they tend to eat each other, meaning wild-caught animals are still the standard.

The high cost of jumbo-lump and backfin grades comes mainly from labor costs, since larger chunks must be extracted by hand. A mechanical process, which basically scrapes meat from the shell yields smaller fragments and is usually used in special-grade meat. In addition, sometime this year, local seafood behemoth Phillips is set to roll out a brand-new proprietary grade of meat that consists of large lumps that are assembled from smaller lumps using some sort of naturally derived crab glue. This is not a joke.

We at shelbys love crab cake and we serve them should we have them on as a special, only with some caper aioli and some side salad dressed in soy sauce vinaigrette.

When are you coming to Shelby's to get your fix of our delicious scrumptious cake made of wild crab meat?