I like to think of myself as an adventurous person, especially when it comes to food. My step-grandparents introduced me to an all-you-can-eat buffet when I was 5 or 6 years old to help me stop being a picky eater. I credit that buffet experience with sparking a curiosity to try new or different foods.

This is part one of a two-part series chronicling my first encounters with new and unfamiliar foods.

Chinese Food

I was about 6 when my family took me to my first Chinese restaurant. The waitress guided us to a table and passed around large menus. There were a lot of things on the menu I didn’t recognize, but my focus centered on a rat located at the bottom corner.

The rat grossed me out because to a 6-year-old (in the 90s), pictures on menus were supposed to represent what you ate. Nowadays, I know the rat is part of the Chinese zodiac and I’m pretty sure there were other animals on the menu too… but that rat was etched into my memory.

My parents ordered eggrolls for the table as an appetizer and a noodle plate for my meal.

Eggroll

The eggrolls were the best part of the meal because they came with a sweet, bright red sauce. I dipped my eggroll into some of the pink sweet and sour sauce our table was sharing. Seeing what I did, my stepmother told me I couldn’t dip my roll in the sauce again, because it wouldn’t be proper. I noticed my sister was able to dip her eggroll multiple times, so I went ahead and tried to get more of that sweet sauce. 

WHAM! 

A blur of fatty-flesh smacked my hand, and I was scolded for not following good table manners. I pouted as I ate the rest of my eggroll, without the sweet sauce which made the roll worth eating.

Lo Mein

When our meals arrived, I didn’t like what was brought to the table. My noodles sort-of looked like spaghetti, but didn’t have the normal sauce I recognized. Instead, it was coated in something brown that looked gross and dirty.

It looked like poopoo water.

My first step-mother is probably the meanest and most despicable person I’ve encountered. I knew that if I refused to eat these noodles, I would be forced to go hungry for the rest of the day, and probably the next.

With this in mind, I twisted a few noodles around a fork, just like spaghetti.

I forced myself to put the toilet-noodles in my mouth.

It wasn’t bad.

Actually, the more I ate, the better those strange noodles tasted.

Green Tea

I had my first sip of green tea from Daddy’s cup during that meal too. The teacup didn’t look like the cups I’ve seen at tea parties hosted at the playsets in school. This cup was thick and heavy, and it didn’t have a handle.

When I looked inside, I saw an abnormally “green” liquid with some powder that settled to the bottom of the cup. There were no tea leaf particles to indicate the green tea was brewed[1]. 

Fortune Cookie

At the end of our meal, the waitress set the check on the table with an accented, “Thank youuuu!”

The check had four prepackaged and oddly shaped candies on it. Daddy said they were fortune cookies and passed one to me. He showed me how to open the cookie to see the fortune inside.

I don’t remember what the fortune was, but the “cookie” was dry and slightly sweet.

Sushi

I don’t consider sushi to be an exotic food nowadays, but it can be for someone who hasn’t tried it. I was in my early teens when my father brought me to my first sushi restaurant. When I entered the restaurant, I was like most people who never tried sushi. I thought it was gross that we were paying a restaurant to serve us raw fish. Daddy told me to have an open mind, because he knew I’d like it.

I didn’t believe him, but the gradual way he made me eat the food proved him right.

He didn’t force me to dive into the deep end. He started the experience with things I was familiar with. We had a shrimp tempura as an appetizer… paired with seaweed salad.

Seaweed?! YUCK!

I’ve seen the seaweed that washes up on the beach at Galveston, and my father just ordered it for dinner. I kept thinking of how the Japanese workers must have snuck onto a Galveston beach to harvest the seaweed. I was expecting a plate of gross, spongy, brown, mass of dead seaweed.

What arrived at the table was appetizing.

I was comfortable eating the fried shrimp tempura, because it looked like something my grandma would have deep-fried. The seaweed was very different to what I imagined.

It was green!

It had several different shades of green and looked like it could glow under a black light. I wasn’t skilled enough to use chopsticks yet, so I stuck a fork in and scooped some out of the bowl. It smelled like sesame sauce as I brought it to my mouth.

It was chewy, but tasted great. The only bad part of the experience was how the seaweed got stuck in my teeth and I had a hell of a time trying to pick it out.

Sushi

Daddy ordered the dreaded sushi while I finished my appetizer. He ordered shrimp, a “taco,” eel, something called “tamango,” tuna, and salmon “roe.” As he poured soy sauce into both of our tiny sauce bowls, he explained that everything he ordered came in twos. One for him and one for me.

I thought of what he ordered as I finished eating my appetizer.

• Shrimp – I saw the raw shrimp grandma Donnie used in her shrimp gumbo and the thought of eating it raw was gross. But what if it was worse than that? What if the shrimp still had legs on it? What really sent a shiver down my spine was the thought it may still be alive and crawling with all those tiny little legs!
• Taco – I like tacos, so that doesn’t sound too bad.
• Eel – I wonder what an electric eel looks like?
• Tuna – I make tuna fish sandwiches all the time, so it can’t be that bad.
• Salmon – I like salmon. It tastes like catfish, but not fried.

I didn’t understand some of the food names Daddy ordered, so I didn’t think about them. I didn’t have long to dread about eating the raw fish because the waitress showed up with two long wooden boards.

She set the boards at the center of the table and, again, what arrived wasn’t what I imagined. Instead of grey and slimy fish, everything looked colorful and appetizing. But, where was the taco?

• Shrimp – The shrimp was cold, but fully cooked. It still had a tail, but I easily chopped it off before eating it.
• Tako – This was not a taco! It’s an octopus and I could see its suckers! I whimpered audibly as I forced myself to eat it. It was fully cooked, but cold and way too chewy.
• Eel – The eel was fully cooked and had a sweet sauce. It was the only warm sushi we ordered.
• Tuna – The tuna didn’t look anything like the meat I scraped out of cans. It can’t possibly be tuna because it was red and wasn’t in tiny chunks. It was raw and kind of looked like a smooth tongue. It seemed like I was eating a French-kiss as I chewed the tender meat.
• Salmon Roe – This was not a fish! It was a bunch of slimy orange FISH EGGS, on a nest of sushi rice! I used a fork to pick up one of the eggs for a closer look and could see something dark within. It was gross looking, but I had to eat it. I popped the fish egg into my mouth and, to my horror, the salty egg-juices burst into my mouth. I gagged and forced myself to swallow it. It didn’t taste bad, but the texture didn’t agree with me (and still doesn’t).
• Tamango – Daddy said this bright-yellow rectangle was a sweet egg and I should like it. I wasn’t inclined to believe him after my horrific experience with the exploding fish eggs. I was pleasantly surprised when I took that first bite. It was very sweet and I quickly gobbled up the rest of it.

I’m sure Daddy ordered more food for himself that night. I don’t recall what else he ordered because I was so busy trying to cope with the contents on my plate. But I do remember him making me drink sake when he got his last refill.

Sake

I love hot sake now that I’m an adult, but that first encounter was rough. It was steaming hot and I remember saying it smelled like rubbing alcohol. He told me to drink it in one gulp. It burned: in my mouth, going down my throat, and in my stomach. It even burned as I breathed. I started choking on my own breath and drank a whole glass of water before recovering.

I’m pretty sure my dad had fun at my expense when he made me eat sushi that first time. Our family ate sushi often over the years and I learned to love it. I can’t imagine how my life would have turned out if I never tried it.

Myspace was the only social media available back then, so nobody knew about the “wriggling octopus” dish. If I was served that and it started to move… I probably would have run away from the table and swore off seafood for good 🤣

Seaweed (Chinese Market Version)

I really enjoyed the seaweed salad we had at the sushi restaurant and wanted more. Unfortunately, the only place to get it was at a restaurant and sushi dinners were so expensive my family only ate it occasionally. Most grocery stores in Texas didn’t sell sushi back then, so finding the seaweed salad I craved was impossible[2].

That is, until I found some at a Chinese food market in “Chinatown”[3].

This stuff looked nothing like the seaweed salad I ate at the restaurant. It reminded me of a plant-version of ramen because it came in a pouch of seaweed with an oily flavor packet.

It was made by straining the preservative liquid out of the seaweed and mixing flavor packet.

It was disgusting.

Jellyfish

I discovered prepackaged jellyfish in Chinatown while looking for seaweed salad. It was so strange that I simply had to try it. Prepackaged jellyfish and seaweed are very similar:

• They’re packaged the same way.
• They have the same liquid preservative.
• They’re prepared the same way.
• They almost taste the same.

The only significant difference is the color. Prepackaged jellyfish is white and semi-translucent, to seaweed’s dark green.

Did I mention they almost taste the same?

As in… both are disgusting, but jellyfish is even more so.

Chicken Feet & Kidney

My high school friends and I frequently travelled to the Hong Kong City Mall in Houston’s “China Town.” We’d go on the weekends to eat dim sum and shop for nick-nacks or special foods we couldn’t get in the suburbs.

We talked about it at school and a couple friends expressed interest in joining us the next time we went. It seemed like a great way to broaden their cultural experience, but it quickly became uncomfortable for all of us. The newcomers were freaked out by the differences in food and the pungent smells in the grocery store.

Both newcomers were especially disgusted when we walked past a certain restaurant in the mall. They stopped in their tracks and stared at a window which prominently showed cooked birds hanging by their twisted necks.

My friend and I shared a quiet laughed at their expense and offered to stop for a snack.

The newcomers blurted out, “No!”

After an hour of dealing with the newbies and hearing how gross things were, we walked to the food court and split up to get our favorite types of Asian food. My friend and I weren’t hungry and were still giggling at our other friends’ culture shock.

We thought of a devious way to gross them out even further, and set out to do just that. We found a vendor who sold chicken feet and KNEW it would creep them out. On our way back to the dining table, we saw another vendor selling a dish with various cooked organs and bought that too (just in case the feet weren’t gross enough).

We found our friends eating stereotypically “normal” Chinese food at an outdoor dining area. We could hear them complaining about how terrible it smelled inside the cafeteria as we approached with a pair of innocent-looking carry out containers.

We sat at the table and popped open our containers to reveal our lunch. They looked at our plates in disgust as I cut a kidney in half. It looked like clay and tasted pretty bad. It was dry and bitter, and hard to chew.

I couldn’t handle any more of the kidneys, so I grabbed a claw and nibbled on the skin and tendons. The looks of disgust on their faces was hilarious, so I took the show to the next level by licking between the toes I hadn’t nibbled on yet.

One friend covered her eyes and said, “Eww! I can’t believe your licking and chewing its toes.”

The other one started laughing, so my coconspirator grabbed one of my chicken legs. He pointed it at him while he asked, “Wanna try it?”

My accomplice didn’t wait for a response and quickly reached over the table, with chicken foot in hand, and asked again, “Won’t ’cha try it?”

The guy recoiled in terror and yelped out, “No!”

He leaned back to get away from the cursed chicken foot, but my accomplice was already standing and swinging his body around the edge of the table. I instinctively knew he was going to touch him with it.

My accomplice laughed as he brought the foot even closer and said, “Here, have a try.”

He almost got the guy too, but his victim managed to leap from the table just before the voodoo chicken foot touched him. His chair toppled over as he scrambled to get away. My friend chased him around the table, armed with the chicken foot.

They were at a standoff on opposite ends of the table. I was still sitting, but saw an opportunity to assist my coconspirator. I grabbed my last chicken foot, and as the guy got close to my chair, I reached out with it and yelled, “Wanna shake my HAND?”

That guy had some really good reflexes and managed to dodge my surprise attack.

Everyone was laughing at this point and we all agreed to a truce. Just before sitting, my friend and I made our chicken feet do a high-five.

***

These are some of the exotic foods I tried as a child and teenager. I realize most of these “exotic” foods are from Asian cultures, which is purely coincidental. I promise there will be foods from other parts of the world in the next article describing my adult encounters with new and seemingly strange foods.

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[1] Green Tea: As an adult, who’s had several dark matcha lattes, I think this restaurant was making the green tea using matcha powder as a shortcut. This was a great idea for the time period, but nowadays, every tea-connoisseur will know the difference.

[2] Grocery Store Sushi: Around 2005, was when I started noticing grocery stores were handing out free samples to entice Americans to try the “exotic” Japanese food called, sushi. Most of the stores that sold sushi didn’t sell seaweed salad until the mid-2010s.

[3] Chinatown: When I was a young adult, in the early 2000s, that region of Houston was long-sense known as “Chinatown”. It’s called “Asia Town” now that people are trying to be politically correct about everything. The name changed when the first and second waves of Covid-19 swept through the USA, and local TV stations and newspapers changed rhetoric to alleviate hatred toward Chinese people.