Posted on 03/28/2009 4:13:04 PM PDT by nickcarraway
You know those guys on the Food Network? The ones who get all puffed up about eating live baby octopus or sautéed crickets?
Well, they've got nothing on the crowd, 35 strong, who recently dared to dine at Bardo Edibles + Elixirs in Norfolk.
The reservation book was filled for Bardo's Bizarre Foods Dinner, a mid-March event that had a waiting list. Edward Storey, the restaurant's new executive chef, had searched the planet (via the Internet) for edible oddities and spent the day skewering, simmering and slicing the bugs, scorpions and sexual organs of cows.
"This is going to be awesome," Storey said with an impish grin from behind the open kitchen.
Awesome? Perhaps.
Most guests steeled themselves with a libation from the bar beforehand.
"The salad will be easy," predicted Robert Holt, the chef de cuisine at Cobalt Grille in Virginia Beach. Holt took a hit of his Captain Morgan and ginger ale and added, "But I'm really worried about the pig eyeballs and the thousand-year-old egg and the juice in the balut."
A stiff drink was not an option for me. Instead, I planned to assume a posture of "open narrow-mindedness."
Once guests were seated in the dining room, candles lit, black cloth napkins in our laps, spring salads arrived sprinkled with fat, black leaf cutter ants and a dollop of toasted weaver ant eggs, all finished with blood orange vinaigrette.
Open narrow-mindedness required that I not think at all about ants while eating them. I touched my fork to a lettuce leaf. Instantly, my mind skittered off, like an errant child running toward a rushing stream. A vision of the writhing mass of ants living under a stump in my garden flashed across my brain. The white ant eggs touched off a vivid recollection of the maggots that materialized in my outside trash can last summer after a crab feast.
No. No. No.
Across the table, Stacy Andrews of Virginia Beach had her own plan. She carefully encased the ants and eggs in lettuce leaves before bringing them to her lips.
OK. No big deal. I ate. The ant eggs had little taste and a troubling, slightly grainy texture. The black ants were a little crunchy, a little salty.
"They taste... basement-y," said Stephen Vargo of Norfolk, who was sitting to my left.
Bardo co-owner Karl Dornemann, who was acting as a sort of emcee, strolled the dining room and gently chided his guests for balking. He noted that Eric Stevens, his partner in the restaurant, recently visited China and saw "everyone eating stuff like this on a regular basis, without squirming."
I noticed that he was not eating, but whatever.
Onward to a cocktail of synthetic bull urine, triple sec and passion fruit juice. That was followed by braised sweet and spicy duck and chicken feet over steamed rice.
I have to admit, I've been curious about chicken feet. They are sold in the meat cases of many local ethnic markets. Some diners got chicken, some got duck, and to tell the difference, you had to check for webbed toes.
"Whatcha got there, Foghorn?" Scott Taylor of Chesapeake chided his girlfriend. "Eat it all, or no dessert for you."
(Never mind that dessert would be the custardy, sweet durian, a fruit that looks like a gigantic blow toad and is so stinky that it's banned from some public spaces in southeast Asia. Television chef Anthony Bourdain once likened it to "a compost heap in your stomach that keeps, kind of, gassing into your mouth.")
Anyway, my feet were chicken and they tasted like... chicken. Maybe a succulent chicken wing, but with finer bones and lots of fat between the toes. Not bad.
"A lot of work for not much meat," said Janelle Wilson of Virginia Beach, sitting two seats down from me.
Once we started, it seemed the food came faster than I could digest it.
One minute I was slurping pizzle soup - um, that's cow penis in a savory broth - the next, the chef was promising that balut was "not really disgusting."
Balut is a hard-boiled egg with an embryo inside. It's commonly sold as a snack in southeast Asia and considered to be an aphrodisiac.
We tap, tap, tapped the eggs on the sides of our dishes, and clear liquid began to run out of the shells. Open narrow-mindedness would not get me through this dish, but next to me, Vargo was chewing.
"The flavor is not bad, not much different than a hard-boiled egg," he said, "but there is some extra substance to it."
I offered him mine, which seemed to have a more developed embryo inside.
"Like a furball," he said, extracting feathers from his mouth.
Still to come were crispy baked Cambodian tarantulas with sweet hoisin sauce and spicy bananas, served family style. Also on the way were scorpions and Rocky Mountain oysters - look it up, people, it has nothing to do with the sea. The teriyaki pigs' eye kabobs were not available, Storey said. Darn.
The whole meal cost $64.88 per person, and the demand has persuaded Bardo's owners to do it again. Meanwhile, they are sprucing up their menu for spring and plan to include some of the oddities on their tapas-style menu.
To think that I once feared snails from a can from a discount store.
They have to eat this stuff in elimination contests on the tv show Survivor...
Why, oh why, did I click on this thread? I knew what it would be, but I clicked on it anyway.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Call me crazy, but don't cows have vaginas?
I am open to trying almost anything (and I have), but balut is just a bit much for me, not sure I can handle that.
LoL. Yes, bulls have penises but I neve saw a cow with one.
Balut, along with lutefisk and my aunt Edna’s meatloaf, is one of the few things in this world that I wouldn’t try even if you paid me.
Those scorpion embryos must be small.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.