Blue Crab in Dalyan: How to Eat It Around a Boat Day

The boats pass over them all day and nobody notices. Blue crab sits in the channel mud under the reeds, works the shallow edges of the delta, and comes out of the water a few hundred metres from the tables where it is eaten. It is the one thing on a menu here that belongs specifically to the water you have just spent the day on.

What follows is not a recipe and not a restaurant list. It is how to fit the animal into a week that already has boats in it: which day to leave it alone, what has to be arranged before you sail, and who we would gently steer towards the sea bass instead.

What the fishery looks like from the deck

You will not see a crab from a moving boat. You will see the apparatus, if you know what you are looking at, and most people go past the lot of it thinking about the tombs.

• Small floats in the quieter channels, often no more than a plastic bottle, marking pots dropped at dusk and lifted at first light.
• Flat skiffs with an outboard on the back, tucked into gaps in the reeds where a tour boat could not turn round.
• The weir below the town. Dalyan is named after it, it has been catching fish across this channel for a very long time, and the crab arrived and started helping itself to what was in it.
• Crates at the fish counters in the morning with the claws still moving, which is the only stage most visitors witness.
• Nothing whatsoever, on plenty of days. None of this runs to a schedule laid on for passing boats.

Which channels are being worked shifts through the season. The skipper on your boat will know, and will generally be pleased to be asked something other than what time lunch is.

Why this particular water suits them

The system runs from a lake down to the open sea in a handful of kilometres. Fresh water at the top, salt at the bottom, and a long brackish middle threaded through the reed channels. Very few animals are comfortable across that whole range. This one is, and that is why the delta holds so many of them.

It is not a native species and nobody here pretends otherwise. It crossed from the Atlantic side and has been in this sea for generations, and for a long stretch of that it was simply a nuisance: it cuts nets, and it eats fish that are already caught and cannot swim away from it.

A market turned up eventually and the boats began landing it on purpose rather than swearing at it. The practical upshot for a visitor is that what reaches the table is plentiful, caught close by, and did not spend two days in the back of a lorry.

Where it fits in a week with boats in it

Whether a given boat can cook anything at all is a question about that boat rather than about the trip. What each trip includes is set out with the trips on our sister site.

The words that matter when you order

Menus on the riverfront are printed in several languages and the translations are approximate, so the Turkish underneath them is worth a glance.

• yengec is crab in general. On its own it tells you nothing about which one, so ask.
• mavi yengec is the blue crab, the one this page is about.
• izgara is grilled, haslama is boiled, guvec is a casserole and corba is soup.
• sarimsakli is with garlic and tereyagli is with butter, which between them account for most of what gets done to a crab here.
• It is sold by weight, which is normal and not a trick. Ask whether you are being quoted by the kilo or by the portion, and ask for it to be weighed in front of you.

Our view on when to eat it

We think it is an evening animal and a poor lunch. Eating one properly takes both hands and the better part of half an hour, and that half hour belongs at a table you have no intention of leaving, not at a stop with a boat idling beside it.

It is also the wrong dinner for the night before an early departure. A long shellfish evening and a half past eight quay do not sit well together, and we have watched enough people work that out on the morning.

And since the point of these pages is an opinion rather than a brochure: to us the crab is slightly oversold as the taste of Dalyan. It is very good. So is the mullet out of the same channel, and the pressed roe is more interesting than either. Order the crab, but do not order it instead of everything else.

Buying one and cooking it yourself

If you are in a villa with a kitchen, this is much the best way to find out what the animal is actually like. Buy in the morning, cook it the same day, and give it more pot and more salted water than looks necessary.

The practical points nobody mentions: a crowded pan boils badly, so the pot has to be genuinely large; the smell settles into the kitchen for a while; and what is left on the table at the end is a startling volume of shell for the amount of meat that came out of it. Worth knowing before you invite eight people.

Two things not to do. Do not plan to cook on the sand at Iztuzu, where fires and barbecues are not allowed and the wardens mean it. And do not tip leftovers over the side of a boat. Turtles and everything else in the river learn very quickly to follow boats that feed them, and boats have propellers.

Who we would talk out of it

Large tables. A crab arrives when the kitchen is ready rather than when the group is, and ten people waiting to eat with their hands at the same moment is not what this dish does well. Two or three in the middle of the table for everyone to pick at works far better.

Small children, usually. There is shell, there is a pick, and there is a good deal of patience required for a modest reward. The meze tray keeps them considerably happier and costs the evening nothing.

Anyone with a shellfish allergy, without qualification. It is not the same thing as a fish allergy, it can be severe, and a small kitchen works with one grill and one set of pans. Say so before anything at all is ordered. On a boat it matters more than it does in town, because the river mouth is not a place help reaches quickly.

And anyone who wants a full plate of dinner. The yield off a whole crab is modest and the evening is long, which is the pleasure of it for some people and the frustration of it for everybody else.

What changes the cost, and where the figures live

There are no numbers on this site, and that is deliberate. What is useful is knowing what moves them.

For the crab itself: the weight, the month, and whether the kitchen is on the waterfront with the tombs in view or a street back where the rent is lower. For crab arranged around a boat: whether the boat is yours or shared, whether it has a galley or a cool box, and whether the crew are cooking or a restaurant down the channel is doing it for them.

Current prices for the trips, and the booking itself, sit with each trip on our sister site rather than here. Two sets of numbers eventually disagree with each other, and the visitor is always the one who finds out.