On Saturday night, I finally caught up with a Changsha specialty that had eluded me so far this year: 口味虾 (kouwei xia). “Xia” (虾) is a catchall term for crustaceans — for instance, shrimp and lobster are both referred to as xia. Kouwei xia (badly translated as flavor-crustacean) is the Chinese name for crayfish/crawfish/crawdads. According to this article (in Chinese), crayfish are a relatively recent arrival in Changsha, dating back to just the 1990s. But the trend has definitely taken off — there is now a whole street of restaurants dedicated to the proper preparation of the creature.
Like shaokao, kouwei xia are best consumed outdoors and at night. But where shaokao is a panoply of choice, kouwei xia is a one-size-fits-all experience. In the Changsha equivalent to a Lousiana crawfish boil, the kouwei xia arrive at the table submerged in a bowl of fiery, oily sauce — all you choose is how many bowls. The waitress will equip you with thin plastic gloves and a roll of toilet paper, in case you are making a futile attempt to stay tidy.
The meat of the xia is almost entirely located in the tail, which looks like a much, much smaller version of a lobster tail. Your first task is to break the xia in half at the point where the body meets the tail. Then you open up the tail, which is conveniently pre-split in the kitchen, and yank out the meat. All the while, you must be cautious not to 1) burn your fingers on the very, very hot crustacean; 2) break your gloves, allowing the spicy sauce to touch your skin; or 3) touch your face, neck or eyes with your pepper-coated hands. If you survive this gauntlet (or even if you don’t — some pain is part of the fun), you are rewarded with a bite or two of delicious crawfish meat. Take a breath, a sip of beer, and repeat.
On Saturday night, the rest of the menu was a relatively minimalist riff on the theme of “spicy.” In addition to the kouwei xia, we had two cold dishes: cold cucumber with peppers, and cold crinkly tofu peppers. After the kouwei xia were gone, noodles were added to the leftover sauce, so that we wouldn’t miss one drop of the delicious spice. Finally, we caved and ordered egg fried rice to try to quench the burning in our mouths. Of course, that turned out to have a bit of pepper, too.
By the end of the night, our bowls of xia were reduced to this:
No meat left in those suckers!
To sample kouwei xia in Changsha, head for the intersection of Ziyuan Lu (梓园路) and Shenglin Yeting Lu (省林业厅路), near the Guangji Qiao (广济桥). There are a bunch of small restaurants specializing in kouwei xia in this area. Just look for the characters 口味虾 on their signs.
We ate outside a branch of “Rosa Cake” at 335 Ziyuan Lu — the restaurant was actually a few doors down from Rosa Cake, but their tables were spread all over the sidewalk. Since kouwei xia is a “night food,” most places won’t open until after 8 p.m. They won’t get crowded till even later.
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