Korean Spicy Raw Crabs Are the Best Late-Night Snack

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene.

It looked like the scene of an unspeakable crime. I pulled off my red-stained plastic gloves and surveyed the damage: the pile of crimson-soaked carcasses, limbs torn off, bits of raw flesh oozing out from open crevices. My hands were sticky (and a little bit sweet??) underneath the gloves, my pants also spattered bright blood red and possibly ruined.

All in all, it was just an average night at Ondam, a newish late-night Korean restaurant in Santa Clara. We’d come in search of a rare delicacy, yangnyeom gejang, or spicy raw marinated crabs — delicious victims of the aforementioned carnage. The dish has been a viral hit on Korean American TikTok and Instagram for a few years now, but has only recently started to appear on a handful of Bay Area menus, often at restaurants, like Ondam, that specialize in booze-friendly fare.

Late on a recent Friday night, the restaurant was jam-packed with Asian American twenty- and thirtysomethings, many of them chatting amiably in Korean. Even though about a dozen diners were ahead of us in line, we were seated quickly. The place is a model of efficiency, with a brisk, no-nonsense approach to service and iPad menus on every table.

While the raw marinated crabs are one of Ondam’s most popular, attention-grabbing dishes, we only saw them on a couple other tables. That’s probably because they’re a whole commitment, and you need to come properly prepared, ready to give them your full attention. At $35 a pop, they actually feel like a bargain because the portion size is tremendous — a giant Jenga tower of saucy, chili-stained blue crabs stacked high on the plate. There were so many that we lost count, but I must have eaten eight or 10 of the little crustaceans all by myself.

The marinade consisted of gochugaru (Korean chili powder), garlic, fresh chilies and soy sauce, which combined with the crab’s juices to form a spicy-sweet paste. The shells were soft enough that you could bite right through to get at the meat inside. What I like to do, though, is put on those plastic gloves and use both hands to smoosh the crab until its soft, gelatinous flesh oozes out over a bowl of hot rice. What a treat it was to luxuriate in the natural sweetness of the raw crab, whose taste and jelly-like texture were reminiscent of really fresh shrimp sashimi. Mixed with the (mildly) fiery kick of that bright red sauce, it was almost impossible to stop eating. And even wearing gloves, you’re bound to make a mess.

Would my doctor advise me to eat this at 11 o’clock at night on the regular? If this was wrong, I didn’t want to be right.

Even if you’re squeamish about the idea of eating raw crab, Ondam serves some of the tastiest Korean food we’ve had in the Bay Area in quite some time. In fact, most of the tables around us were ordering more typical Korean pub standards — fried chicken, army stew and tteokbokki. Based on our initial exploration of the menu, this is a restaurant that does the classics well. The complimentary banchan spread, for instance, was nothing but bangers: a tangle of soft, uncommonly savory potato matchsticks; perfectly seasoned sauteed spinach; a mound of creamy (and surprisingly addicting!) macaroni salad flecked with sweet corn kernels.

But the restaurant also boasts a wealth of dishes that are harder to find in the Bay Area. For instance, it has an extensive selection of kalguksu, or Korean noodle soups featuring handmade knife-cut noodles. The clam kalguksu we ordered came overloaded with clams and mussels, and the broth had a wonderfully deep and soothing flavor, having extracted all of the shellfish’s briny sweetness. On a cold night, it warmed us up from the inside.

There was a sweet, garlicky version of yukhoe, or Korean beef tartare, crowned with a golden egg yolk and served with crunchy slivers of Asian pear. And there was a whole menu of sotbap, a rice dish that’s a lesser known cousin of bibimbap, where all of the ingredients get cooked together in one pot. The steak sotbap turned out to be one of the most luxurious dishes of the night. The steak itself was cut into large, substantial chunks that were seared to a perfect, extraordinarily juicy medium-rare.

Saved for a future visit: the six different jeongol (hot pot) dishes, and the elaborate spread of raw meats or seafood that get cooked gently in a cypress wood steamer and served with an array of dipping sauces — a preparation I haven’t seen at any other Korean restaurant in the Bay.

You might find one or two of these lesser-known items from Ondam’s menu at Korean restaurants in Oakland or San Francisco, but only in Santa Clara is it typical to find such a wide array. And based on how crowded the dining room was during our visit, right now Ondam is the place to be in Santa Clara, at least if you’re looking for a late-night feast.

Do learn from our mistakes, though, especially if the raw crabs are at the top of your agenda. Don’t wear any clothing you wouldn’t want getting dirty. And consider ordering just one or two dishes to start out, so you can focus on working your way through those crabs before the table gets cluttered and overcrowded. At that point, every bowl and utensil on the table might already be stained red, and one false move will send your sauce-splattered chopsticks flying through the air … and onto your favorite trousers.

Not that we wouldn’t do it all again in a second.

Ondam is open Sunday through Thursday, 11 a.m.–midnight, and Friday through Saturday 11 a.m.–1 a.m. at 2450 El Camino Real in Santa Clara.