If you’ve already read our feature, you’ll understand why I’ve got something of an unsettled tummy this week. Animal genitals, dangerous sea creatures, snacks that stank and fruit that resembled human organs all went down the hatch as part of my research on the weirdest foods in the capital. Usually lunch is the highlight of my day, but for a week it was nothing but misery.
I must confess, as TOAD’s food editor, my meal times are usually spent musing over whether the caviar I’m shovelling down my neck is beluga or sevruga, or bellowing at the waiter to shave more white truffles over my lobster risotto. Well not quite, but, you know, I do get to have a lot of pleasurable dining experiences. So perhaps it was just karma catching up with me when I was briefed to seek out and eat the freakiest food I could find. It wasn’t just the vomit-inducing flavours that made the hours between noon and 2pm difficult (my plucky colleagues tucked in too, which helped ease the pain somewhat). You see, I also had to call hundreds of restaurants across the city to track down the places that served these strange dishes.
Lamb eggs undoubtedly caused the most commotion. I don’t speak Arabic but had made a weak attempt at learning the translation of this delicately named dish for research purposes, which turned out to be a terrible idea (I just couldn’t nail the Lebanese accent). So to the hundreds of hard-working restaurateurs who were disturbed by someone shouting unmentionables in broken Arabic down the phone during their lunchtime rush – I can only apologise. I was referring to the menu, not trying to insult you.
This week wasn’t the first time I’d had to eat food I considered less than appetising, though. A few years back when I lived in China, my flatmate cheerfully told me about the ancient Cantonese saying: ‘If it’s got its back to the sky, you can eat it’, as she got to work preparing sliced goat trotters for our dinner. I took her word for it, and dutifully chewed my way through three miserable pieces. Our page editor walloped an entire plateful of horse sashimi while dining in Japan (it tastes ‘lovely’ she insists), someone’s Welsh gran allegedly ate a hedgehog and my dad once ate a sheep’s eyeball in Egypt.
But of all the reactions to these stories (gagging, fainting, retching), no one ever asks, ‘Why?’ Why doesn’t come into it, no matter how gross the dish – everyone knows one of the most exciting things about being abroad is getting to try new food. You either end up with the joy of discovering a delicious new delicacy or the giddy adrenaline rush that comes with forcing yourself to do something terrifying. So, while we’re lucky enough to live in Abu Dhabi, we should propbably make an effort to get stuck in – after all, there can’t be many cities in the world where you can buy lamb brains, frog legs and jellyfish all in the same square mile. And if any readers hear of repulsive dishes we missed out – balut, a fertilised egg slurped straight out of the shell and shots of snake blood both proved frustratingly hard to come by – write in and let us know. We’ll review them, I swear. But in the meantime, I’m off to sup on some soothing warm bread and milk, because it’s all I can stomach for now. Although perhaps I’ll stir in a little leftover lamb brain – it would be a shame for it to go to waste.
