Bardo Bizarre Foods Dinner #2

Bardo announced their second Bizarre Foods Dinner, and I booked. Anne was out of town, so I went on my own. It was not as challenging as the first one. Most of the food tonight was not that bizarre. Just a little bit.

We started with reindeer pate with toast points, house-made pickles, marbled egg and sweet red onion. I couldn’t work out if it was a really a terrine made from reindeer meat, or if it was pate made from reindeer liver. It had that funky liver taste, so more than likely it was liver. It was beautifully presented and looks great. Tasted great too.

Second course was octopus and scorpion soup. The broth was sharp, even fiery. The octopus came in large tender chunks. There were even some shrimp. And sitting on top was a moderately sized scorpion. I ate scorpion at the last Bizarre Foods dinner but this one was larger and much better prepared. Scorpion is crunchy and has a nice insect flavour. I ate the scorpion by itself, enjoyed it, and then ate the rest of the soup and that was delicious.

Third on the menu was Jellyfish over mixed greens topped with toasted leaf cutter ants and a sesame sherry vinaigrette. The jellyfish came in long thin strips, looking and tasting like a long wet strand of pasta. The mixed green salad was great, and the ants on top were as good as ever. I had them at the last one and they are a good sized ant, crunchy with a sweet nutty flavour. Very good.

Then we got to a more interesting item that was a little taxing for some of the other diners. Flatbread pizza with meal worms, crickets, roasted red pepper, feta cheese and red onion. One of the diners said “You could put feta on anything and roast it and it would taste good.” The big globule in the photo is roasted garlic. I tried the mealworms and they were tasteless. I tried the crickets and they were crunchy (obviously) and tasted good, just like grasshoppers and locusts. Once you put them on the pizza and added garlic and feta, you couldn’t taste them. I had a few more from the diner on the right who was reluctant to finish all hers, so I got a good tasting.

With each course, we got a cocktail and each cocktail was as special as the course. This one was a very tabasco Bloody Mary, with a slab of cucumber on top covered with marinated octopus chunks. You could eat it separately or drop it in the drink and get to it eventually. The octopus was so good I ate it all. I didn’t want to dilute the flavour by dropping it in the drink.

Then the palate cleanser – absinthe sorbet. Just like ouzo. Real absinthe, but made with weaker wormwood to avoid the hallucinations. There’s a restaurant in Portsmouth that serves absinthe, so I may have to go and try some. And one day, visit Spain or Portugal and try some made the old way with the hallucinogenic properties.

Then we had the main course – braised lambs head with roasted root vegetables and grasshopper cornbread. First, the cornbread was like most cornbread and dry and tasteless. I don’t like cornbread, with or without grasshoppers. The lamb came with the meat shredded from the skull. The skull was paraded later. Plain roasted lamb meat, with occasional funky flavours.

While we ate the lamb, our host was explaining the dish and the drink, and as a throwaway, he mentioned that the brains and eyeballs were back there if anyone wanted some. Hands went up at every table. I think he was a little surprised. But he graciously arranged for brains and eyeballs and everyone got a plate containing a slice of eyeball and a small chunk of lambs brains. Now when I was growing up, a regular breakfast was crumbed lambs brains with a sharp white sauce. Lambs brains are a childhood comfort food for me. I love them. I ate my plate with gusto. The diner on my right wasn’t willing to attempt it, so I got hers. Then her friend’s plate. And her companion’s plate. And then the kitchen brought me the last of the lambs brains. All in all, it wasn’t a lot of brains, but it was a goodly amount and I was very happy. It tasted great, but sadly, not as good as the crumbed lambs brains Mum used to make. So my memory tells me. The eyes were interesting, the flavour was more in the gravy than the flesh.

And then we come to our final course – dessert – the most challenging dish of the night. Chocolate covered Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches with raspberry creme brulee. It was very attractively presented. It also reminded me of the Monty Python sketch about the problem chocolates – frog crunch, spring surprise, etc.

Looks nice, doesn’t it? Raspberries in front, a lovely tasty creme brulee, and a large chocolate thing sticking up. You could cover anything in chocolate and some fool would eat it. Oh wait… that’s me. I turned my chocolate around and found that it hadn’t sealed. You can see the little fellow’s thorax and some leg in there.

I laughed, I bit down and it was like one of those chocolates with a liqueur centre. All you could taste was chocolate. Like I said, you could coat anything in chocolate and someone would eat it.

I had to laugh at one thing about the meal. For a very long time, I have been photographing memorable meals. This is the first meal where my food photography did not raise eyebrows. No-one noticed. Everyone else was too busy photographing their own meals. I blame the rise of small digital cameras and the recent popularity of food shows like Top Chef.

And that was the Bardo Bizarre Food Dinner #2. They will probably have one a year. Last year’s was quite challenging, including balut, hundred year egg, chicken and duck feet, testicles, bull’s pizzle, scorpions and ants. This one was tame by comparison. But one thing both of them had was food that was different but tasted great. We often go out to a meal and choose from a very limited set of options and because it’s familiar, we eat it without paying much attention to it. Eating bizarre foods forces you to focus on the taste and the texture and the nature of the food. You don’t take it for granted. And they challenge your prejudices. I prefer ants and crickets and scorpions to cockroaches, but if I was stuck, I know I could and would eat anything at all to survive. And how to prepare it nicely.