FREQUENT TRAVELLER

In which our correspondent finds that you’re not always what you eat, at least not at client dinners

Our correspondent chews over the pitfalls of eating in faraway places

I AM AN ADVENTUROUS EATER. I really am. And it helps when you have to keep travelling to places where English doesn’t work. I am never content to just eat at the hotel – if work takes me to all these exotic places, I might as well get to know them. Food is a great way to do so. But I do have my limits and the journey for local flavour can sometimes be treacherous.

Once I was scouting the streets for a bite in Dongdaemun in Seoul, and at first I was picky, determined to not just settle for any place but to find one that would give me that gastronomic epiphany. The fact that I couldn’t understand most of the menus posted in the shop windows also didn’t help the decision-making process. After much strolling around, I was ravenous. Walking past a food market where dishes were being cooked out in the open, I decided that I had found my solution: I would just point to whatever looked promising to me.

One of the stalls had something cooking on a giant frying pan. I could tell that there was cabbage and some noodles in it, but otherwise, it was just some sort of meat. The brown sauce used in this dish – plus my increasingly foggy brain caused by hunger – made it even more difficult for me to discern. So I just went for it, gesturing that I wanted a portion for myself.

I sat down and, soon, the owner brought my food to me, still sizzling on the metal serving plate. It smelled good, looked good and did not taste bad, but I quickly realised that the meat was pig’s colon. I have had it before as an experimental street snack, but as a main course it was just too challenging. So I finished all the vegetable and noodles but left much of the colon untouched. Guilt-ridden, I paid for it and made a swift exit.

My daredevil palate also helps me through client dinners. In China, not eating what’s served to you at a banquet is considered rude, while in Japan, business associates laugh at you for being grossed out by eating a fish alive. So, I often just hold my nose and eat whatever is offered – you’ve got to play the tough guy to win deals. I have eaten cod sperm (with a touch of dashi), duck fetus egg (that stared at me as I bit into it) and dog’s meat (which just tasted like tough hare meat), but none of these experiences prepared me for one very unpleasant surprise.

At a retro Shanghai-style private club in Hong Kong, where I thought the worst would merely be politely slurping up the shark’s fin soup, I was served a dish that looked like a scene from The Twilight Zone (and then I remembered from Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor that it was apparently what Empress Dowager ate right before she died). A big soup pot was put on the Lazy Susan and as the lid was lifted open, a whole turtle was revealed, cooked in a steaming hot broth. Yes, with the shell and everything still attached. The reptile was wobbling in the soup as if it was still alive. The face of my neighbour, a French woman, turned green in an instant. She was not touching it. But I just looked away from the turtle and slowly sipped away (it was too hot to gulp down). It did not taste bad at all – I just wished they had spared us the visual shock.

Of course it’s not only in Asian restaurants that you at times question what you’re putting in your mouth. All these “molecular gastronomy” creations often cause me to mutter: “Why?”

Why make something crunchy when it’s supposed to be soft? Why can’t we just season something with salt and pepper instead of a foam? Why would I want to eat something that is made to look like an eyeball?

Luckily, we now live in a globalised world. I haven’t yet been to a city where there wasn’t at least a pizza parlour or burger joint somewhere on the main road, and these places are where I often have my actual dinner after a “difficult” client do. The trick is to pick one far enough away not to get caught.