Coconut Crab in Coconut Cream and Garlic Sauce

One of the most memorable dishes I have ever experienced was in the restaurant of the Hotel Rossi in Port Vila overlooking the cerulean waters of Vila Harbor and Erakor Island (set like a verdant, upturned pudding basin in the middle of the bay). The dish was coconut crab.

Ten years before, while living on Guam, I became acquainted with the clanking monster crab the Chamorros call ayuyu (pronounced “a-juju”). I had speculated about the symmetry of coconut-eating crab simmered