Deep End Dining
There’s adventurous eating, and there’s not so adventurous eating. Having supped with delight on things such as sea urchin roe, sea cucumber soup and sweetbreads, I thought I was on the cutting edge. That is, until I came across deep end dining - a blog about food that’s so daring and different it has to be delicious.
It all started so innocently; I was perusing the list of 2005 Food Blog Award nominees, when I saw a link for Eddie Lin’s post about live octopus tentacles.
I opened it and started reading a harmless and mildly entertaining story about a chicken. The real story (the story of the octopus) crept up on me like a cat stalking its prey (slowly...slowly...wait...pounce!). By the time I was in my own life or death struggle to keep the contents of my stomach down, it was too late. I had to finish the story to see how it ended.
I’ll give you just a sensation in case you want a gut check before you dive headfirst into the full dish.
A couple of soju shooters later, the waiter returned and unceremoniously set a plate in the center of the table catching me and Diane off guard. Some time was needed to register what we were viewing. The sight was uncanny. It was ridiculous and sublime. Both comic and tragic like Greektheatre masks. “What fresh hell is this?” Extremely fresh hell, evidently.
The raging plate of squirming, writhing and willful baby octopus tentacles awed us. If I was the Greek hero Perseus, then this plate before me was the severed head of Medusa the Gorgon with her locks of seething, slithering serpents. Hyperbole? How about understatement. Much like Medusa’s disembodied head, these tentacles still believed they were alive — the limbs attached to a phantom body. Diane’s head spun in a figurative way but bordered on literal. Her brain signals and emotions were cross firing so dramatically that she was laughing, gagging, hyperventilating and sobbing all in the same breath. I offered her the first taste but she replied, “When hell freezes over.” This I interpreted as a “no”.
(Warning: The full story is not for the faint of heart. Nick admitted that he almost threw up reading the whole thing.)
Comments:
That story reminds me of being in Korea around ‘79. I went to a small resturant with some Koreans and they brought out what I was told was squid, it may have been baby octopus. It crawled up my chopstick, but to impress the Korean girl I was with I tried to eat it. As soon as the suction cups hit the inside of my mouth and stuck- I spit it out and downed a glass of whatever I was drinking. After the laughter stopped they told me to wait awhile until they stopped squirming. Dipped in hot sauce they were good.
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