Occasionally I pop on over to Deep End Dining to see what’s cooking–or in this particular case, what’s alive and kicking and sitting on your plate about to be eaten.
Consuming live food is an Asian delicacy that is starting to make inroads here in the United States. Eddie, one of the writers for DED, has penned a rather sick and alarming account of consuming the live and twitching at a restaurant in Rowland Heights, California.
Although I love seafood and sushi, I had problems stomaching his review. For those of you with stronger stomachs than I, Cat-Gut Eddie dove into live lobster sashimi and drunken shrimp. Although the lobster didn’t twitch enough to his liking, the shrimp, on the other hand, were a bit too feisty, flopping off the table and on to the carpet in a mad dash to escape Eddie’s ravenous pie-hole.
The scene of the crime occurred at Seafood Village–a popular restaurant in the suburbs of Los Angeles that specializes in Chiu Chow cuisine. According to a thumbs-up review in the LA Times, Chiu Chow cuisine originated in Hong Kong and is “filled with exquisitely light yet assertively flavored dishes and is punctuated with the occasional peppery punch.”
Despite certain live elements, the majority of dishes are actually deceased and properly cooked. Chiu Chow cuisine is very trendy and popular in Hong Kong these days and as a result, Seafood Village draws quite a large crowd from Los Angeles’ Chinese population.