KUALA LUMPUR, March 1 — If you’ve interacted with anybody below the age of 30 at all recently, you’ll likely have heard that you’re meeting them at “a very Chinese time” in their lives.

If they’re even younger, they’re likely “Chinamaxxing” with the Adidas tangzhuang or “becoming a Chinese baddie” by drinking hot water — even if they’re not necessarily Chinese.

It’s the latest Internet fad, and it has very much reached its peak with the Chinese New Year.

It’s also gone global, and for once, some aspects of the fad — consuming traditional Chinese medicine, ordering drinks siu tim — aren’t just familiar; for some of us, this is how we’ve always lived.

And as a city, as a food culture, there can be no question that Kuala Lumpur is indeed in a very Chinese time in her life.

More Chinese restaurant groups are bringing cuisines from regions beyond our traditionally Southern Chinese diaspora than we can count, and now we’ve begun to co-opt some of the more modern, dare I say, “viral” dishes into our local canon.

One such dish is crab roe noodles, made popular primarily in Shanghai and spreading to Guangzhou thanks to some Xiaohongshu-fuelled fervour.

Entire chains dedicated to the dish and other crab roe-centric variations have popped up, serving bowl after bowl of rich crustacean caviar.

I tried it for the first time on a trip to Guangzhou back in 2024, and since then I have begun to notice it on menus at seemingly unrelated restaurants here — one a chicken rice shop, another a porridge restaurant.

But in October last year, Crab Bro Noodle House opened in MyTOWN Shopping Centre, becoming one of the first restaurants in the city fully dedicated to this dish.

As far as faithful recreations go, Crab Bro just about has it to a tee.

Every single detail, from the complimentary hot tea to the cumbersome trays that carry the bowl of sauce, noodles and each pickled accoutrement, was exactly as I experienced in Guangzhou at the famous Xie San Bao chain.

Even the price, with one portion of Signature Crab Roe Noodles at RM98, is fairly comparable, sitting just slightly above what I paid for it in China, though that flight ticket certainly doesn’t pay for itself.

But how does it taste?

Sharp and crunchy, the duo of kimchi and pickled green beans were excellent. The wheat noodles, made fresh daily by hand, were springy and dressed lightly with scallion oil.

And the crab roe and meat sauce was appropriately thick and gloopy, rich and savoury, the closest thing I’ve tasted to that luscious bowl two years ago.

And yet it still comes up slightly short. It’s just not as sweet or as unctuous as I remember.

That could well be rose-tinted glasses, but the fact that I could finish the entire bowl without much of the vinegar and still eat more says something.

I could barely finish one portion in Guangzhou, and I needed more vinegar then. Still, it is easily one of the best I’ve had here.

Crab Bro claims that the hairy crabs are sourced from Yangcheng Lake, essentially the mecca of Chinese hairy crabs, and that each bowl of sauce contains 10 crabs’ worth of roe and meat.

Based on the amount of roe and meat I consumed, I don’t doubt it. But I was left wanting something just a little richer.

And that something came in the form of the Supreme Tuhuangyou Rice (RM68), which is essentially the same order but with rice, and one key difference.

Instead of a thick slurry made with crab roe and meat, it comes with a bowl of pure crab roe: bright orange chunks of crustacean fat sitting in a red pool of straight-up cholesterol-raising beauty.

This thing is rich, and it is very, very satisfying.

There is a certain irony in how we’ve begun not just to welcome Chinese franchises here, but to co-opt and serve distinctly Chinese dishes, viral or otherwise, purely catered to a local audience.

Remember when the phrase “made in China” used to be thrown around as a joke about copying with no originality?

As our appetite for new types of Chinese cuisine beyond our Malaysian Chinese offerings increases, and it seems, all things Chinese too, it begs the question: who’s copying who?

Crab Bro Noodle House蟹哥哥

G-012H & G-012J,

MyTOWN Shopping Centre,

6, Jalan Cochrane,

Kuala Lumpur.

Open daily, 11am-2am. Closes at 10pm on Sundays.

Tel: 018-465 8999

Facebook: Crab Bro Noodle House

Instagram: @crabbronoodlehouse

*This is an independent review where the writer paid for the meal.

*Follow us on Instagram @eatdrinkmm for more food gems.

*Follow Ethan Lau on Instagram @eatenlau for more musings on food and occasionally self-deprecating humour.