Crabbish: My afternoon dining like an influencer

The word “dehumanising” gets bandied around a little too freely for my liking. And yet, how else would you describe the peculiar trend that gripped Liverpool influencers barely six weeks ago? I here refer to the grand opening of Crabbish on Duke Street, which saw prominent Instagrammers and TikTokers take to their platforms to celebrate the arrival in our fair city of, allegedly, genuine Louisiana cuisine: a plastic bag of mangled crustaceans and Cajun dressing shaken inside an inflated condom and unceremoniously dumped straight onto the tablecloth for the diner to slurp up.

It probably seems a little cheap to throw scorn in the direction of the Influencer community, but that’s no reason not to do it anyway. The visions of distended crab legs and half-mutilated shrimp marinating in dark orange slop beneath the grinning faces of Liverpool’s social media finest will take a while to fully disperse.

My overriding emotion was something like embarrassment. Crabbish, you see, did not originate in Liverpool or a Louisiana bayou, but in Manchester. Like Sapporo Teppanyaki — also on Duke Street – it is an import from across the M62. Also like Sapporo Teppanyaki, Crabbish is part of what you might call the Salt Bae-ification of dining, where the food matters less than the performative rigmarole of serving it. You’re paying less for complex and exquisite flavours than you are the ‘Grammable visual of a waiter’s serving theatrics. But at least Salt Bae, with his awful moustache and his awful gold-rimmed glasses, dispenses the salt onto your £1000 wagyu strip loin with something approaching delicacy. The equivalent to Crabbish’s slopped saucy limbs would perhaps be for Salt Bae to empty the whole salt shaker into your hair while laughing maniacally. That Liverpool continually finds itself downstream from such madness hardly inspires regional pride.  

But as I scrolled Instagram, amidst the rising disbelief and simmering repulsion, I wondered whether I was in fact a cultural chauvinist. I’ve never been to Louisiana. I have no idea if this cutlery- and crockery-free cuisine is authentic. Perhaps my whole upbringing of dining off a plate and using a knife and fork has in fact been an imperialist affectation.