« February 2007 Table of Contents 
Product Spotlight: Crab cakes
This versatile product transcends menu categories
By April Forristall
February 01, 2007
It's no wonder crab cakes have become one of the
fastest-growing menu items in recent years. The product is a
very popular restaurant appetizer and its sales performance
ranks up with shrimp.
Contributing to the product's popularity is its recipe
versatility. Chefs and product manufacturers can manipulate
virtually everything about them, from the type and grade of
crabmeat to the "glue" that holds it all together. Recipes
proliferated in the 19th century, originally using mix-ins like
breadcrumbs and spices for economic reasons. Today, however,
the more crabmeat the better, and breadcrumbs as a mix-in have
evolved from classic to worn out. When Phillips Foods and the
American Culinary Fed eration held its "a dozen ways to dress a
crab cake" contest, open only to the American Academy of Chefs,
the entrants used everything from pretzels to roasted pistachio
and chili sauce to carrot ginger sauce to spice up their cakes.
Grand prize winner chef Michael Garbin used celery root and
orange slaw with an avocado drizzle and roasted tomato relish
.
The dipping sauce is just one more way to flavor a crab
cake. Tartar is still the favorite, according to research
conducted by Datassential of Chicago, but restaurants are using
ginger, citrus, vinaigrette, chipotle and other sauces to make
their recipes stand out. Water Grill in Los Angeles serves its
crab cake appetizer with a yogurt-lime cucumber sauce.
Crab cakes have the ability to transcend a restaurant's core
product profile. Customers would be hard pressed to find an
Italian restaurant that serves a burrito, but crab cakes can be
found on every type of menu from Italian to Mexican, each
format altering the traditional ingredients to fit its
respective cuisine.
Fine-dining restaurants still claim the majority of
crab-cake menu mentions. According to Datassential research,
the product can be found on 36 percent of steakhouse menus and
23.4 percent of French restaurants, even making appearances in
coffee houses and bakeries.
More and more casual-dining and QSRs are menuing them: Crab
cakes can be found on 18.1 percent of casual-dining restaurant
menus. Applebees, Ruby Tuesday, Red Lobster and Big Boy are
some of the most recent chains to surf the crab-cake current.
Crab cakes' versatility also allows them myriad menu mentions.
Flip the page of the menu to select a second course and you are
just as likely to find crab cakes on the entrée list. Eight
percent of menus feature crab cakes as both an appetizer and
entrée.
Even supermarkets have opened their frozen food aisles to
include crab cakes. Foodservice providers like Crab Associates,
Phillips, Twin Tails Seafood and more are developing
retail-ready crab cakes. King & Prince released a line of
bite-size gourmet crab cakes in late 2006. Crab Associates in
Pinellas Park, Fla., is scheduled to sell its frozen crab cakes
at Fresh Market and Whole Foods Market. Byrd International
began selling crab cakes to foodservice customers in October
2006.
Fried, deviled, sautéed, roasted, baked, broiled, any way
you serve them, crab cakes are crawling off menus, out of
refrigerators and onto plates across the nation.
Editorial Assistant April Forristall can be e-mailed at
aforristall@divcom.com