Food Stuff

Gunfire on the Range

In a ramshackle part of Southwest St. Louis that borders Affton, MO lies the best BBQ restaurant I have ever been to. I've sampled everything Memphis, Kansas City, and some of TX have to offer but none compare. And, the place is also a gun range. It is called Sharpshooter Pit and Grill. They have a rib special that is a phenomenal deal, $16 for a half slab with a mountain of fries and green beans or whatever sides you want (they actually have more than beans and slaw which is a must for me). All of the food is fresh, the meats are very smokey/barked outside and tender as hell inside. As far as ambiance, it is a reflection of its environs, a John Wayne pic, paintings of pigs, rusty farm accoutrements, metal poles outside painted to resemble bullets, and video screens to watch the patrons shooting their guns. Often, especially from the outside, you can smell the food and hear gunfire ringing out. Very old-timey.

Horsepatality in Iceland

My favorite meal experience while we were in Iceland was one of the only relatively reasonably-priced, locals only gas station, N1, holes in the wall near Hofn on the coast. We went there the night before and the kitchen was closed but happened to show up the next day and it was the "plump day" soup buffet (we think fat tues lost something in translation). The place was filled with taxidermy and Icelandic nostalgic items, it was full but everyone else appeared to be laborers, highway workers etc. The food was all you can eat salted lamb and horse meat, carrots, potatoes, bean soup and coffee or tea for $17 US which was ungodly cheap for there. The lady was very hospitable and perky. She had a cabinet full of dishes that she used to stock the buffet which I thought was homey and fun. I learned something that my cats likely already know, horse=not terrible...

Dinner with a Side of Darkness

Meg and I were recently in Las Vegas where we hung out on Freemont Street for a bit during the full experience including the video, people ziplining, street performers et all. I was considering revisiting the Heart Attack Grill now that I saw the HBO documentary episode on it, forget what it is called. If you are not familiar, the restaurant serves food that is as unhealthy as humanly possible. You can get a burger with like 6 huge patties, the milkshakes are made from butter fat, the fries are cooked in lard etc. And they sell cigarettes and other things to kill you faster. The restaurant features an outdoor scale where you can weight yourself and those who are 350 lbs+ eat for free. When I went there with an old friend a few years ago, I knew nothing more than the unhealthy food gimmick. They make you wear a hospital gown, which I tried to avoid, but the sexy nurse hostess yelled at me and made me comply in order to enter. I had heard that large people died there while eating, and that number has since gone up. When I watched the doc learned that the owner is a former health and fitness guru and this is his Machiavellian experiment, let people take American dietary excess to it's extreme and prove a point about health and fitness. Interesting but twisted stuff. He has had several morbidly obese spokesmen. He keeps going through them because they keep dying. The ashes of one are showcased in the dining area. The food is above average as I recall. Though I routinely eat like shit, the idea of some smarmy puppet master clogging my arteries to teach me a lesson keeps me on the fence a bit. That being said, I'll probably go back at least once now that the unforgettable/unique brand is emblazoned in my brain.

Spiders in the Kingdom of Pol Pot

Ever since that other bald guy with the show I can't remember the name of started filming himself going around the world eating things like stirfried fruit bat and bull penis, I have felt a desire to try foods that are bizarre and a bit frightening without going overboard (no raw four-legged creatures, no penis, no consuming blood in it's original form). This has not always served me well in that, other than having Rocky Mountain Oysters for the first time at the iconic Big Texan steakhouse in Amarillo, I almost never truly enjoy what I eat or want a repeat performance. This was most certainly the case when I ate tarantula in the capitol of Cambodia. We had gone to a bunch of somewhat Westernized eateries all throughout our guided tour and that place was no exception, but the tour guide had promised that, despite the bland menu, spiders were an off-menu local delicacy. The walk to the restaurant involved a trek thru the most unappetizing, pungent open market full of throbbing fish guts, rotting vegetation, and other things hovering somewhere between life and death or far on the death end of the spectrum. As such, that got me thinking a lot about what the local experience was like in the culinary and other realms. As such, I decided to try the tarantulas even though I was apprehensive and dreading the moment they would appear. As pictured above, they were long and thin and placed in a wheel around a fruit-based dipping sauce. Each table got 2 plates. I absolutely refused to eat the bodies. Someone tried one and said something about squishing. I had two legs. The sauce was great, and the legs were edible overall. The frying process burned off the fuzz and they were like dry husks with no meat inside. The skin stayed in your mouth the way those seeds they give you after a meal at an Indian restaurant are with you all day. I got a good pic out of the deal, but was in no way satisfied and never want a repeat experience, but in the land of genocide, the killing fields, and myriads of homeless street children, it seemed the appropriate thing to do.

The only thing better than one food truck is more trucks than you can count

While in Oahu in May of 2017, one of the most enjoyable things we discovered was the plethora of food trucks and divey Hawaiian plate lunch places centering around the less trafficked North Shore Beaches. Some of the most common are the shrimp trucks, the places offering plate lunches (most notably bbq chicken and shredded pork always beside a scoop of white rice and a scoop of macaroni salad), fish taco places, huli huli chicken, and smoothie/fruit juice trucks. Many of them have a google listing even if they don't have a website per se. Pictured here is me with the spicy garlic shrimp entrée with rice and a salad which was $15 I believe. I am not sure if these places are byob, but they have that feel. As pictured, many places had fruit juice and cold coconuts for sale for beverage choices. The trucks are more affordable than restaurants, prepare quality food fast, and are a great way to satisfy the desires of a crowd, like a way less lame version of a mall food court in some areas like Shark Cove where 6-8 trucks are parked in tandem. Huli Huli chicken is grilled over wood logs and is marinated in a sweet Teriyaki-style marinade with some extra spices. We also found cheap local farmers' markets, people selling delicious buttered garlic Hawaiian rolls, shaved ice, and other cheap treats. I did no googling beforehand, and still found numerous quality meals and snacks to be had. All in all, outside of the tourist places, I didn't feel prices on food were much more than the Midwest. I heard tell from a guy in our hotel hot tub that one of the shrimp trucks sits adjacent to shrimp-laden waters and allows the patron to fish for their main course, but no amount of internet searching confirmed this for me. Those are the types of things I need to believe exist...

Bangkok Scorpion on a Stick

When we went to SE Asia, and in this case, Thailand, several years ago, I knew that they ate some varieties of insects but did not know which ones. After our several days in downtown Bankok in one of the red light districts viewing the sex trade industry from afar, we met our tour group on Ko San Road which is a far more cost effective, touristy area that is largely filled with what appear to be ex-pats and, what's the politically correct word for Eurotrash? Anyway, I ate like one or two extra meals since everything was ridiculously cheap here (whereas downtown, prices were similar to mid-size American cities), we met our tour group for the rest of the trip, and then we ventured out to see the nightlife. There was a lot of tourist bug eating going on. I saw one tourist just destroying one of the scorpions like I have here and wanted to throw up. I bought one more because of the photo op, but unwillingness to eat it haunted me a little. While we walked around, I tried to will myself to take a bite and I just couldn't get there. Putting a pincer in my mouth for a photo was the closest I came. When I got back to the hotel, one of the desk attendants laughed when I walked in with the scorpion still on the stick. I found out later that Thai people don't eat those, that is just something that is sold to tourists, which may be why he thought I was funny. By the time we got to Cambodia, I ate some Tarantula legs, but I had to work my way up to that...

Something Special in Vegas

Vegas has changed a lot over the years and where to get a decent meal changes frequently too. We love the buffets, but honestly of late we have had better luck with the restaurants than the buffets. Our favorite restaurants include Marakech, a Moroccan restaurant with several courses of delicious food and live bellydancing entertainment while you dine under a giant tent of sheets lit with lanterns that create the most wonderful ambiance. We are also fans of Hash-House-A-Go-Go where you get served meals that are so big it is cartoonish. Eating there is like communal experience with the other diners as you all watch with amusement at the next giant meal coming out of the kitchen and cannot help but stare and and laugh as you make eye contact with one another in shared understanding of childlike wonderment. Seriously, my pancake was the size of a trashcan lid.