Anything That Moves

by Dana Goodyear

  • • •

  The next stinkbug I came across I ate. It was lightly fried, and presented on a slice of apple, whose flavor it is said to resemble. (I found it a touch medicinal.) This was in a one-story white clapboard house in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles, with a skateboard half-pipe in the backyard. The house had been rented by Daniella Martin and Dave Gracer, two advocates of entomophagy, under false pretenses. “We told them we were scientists,” Martin said, giggling. In fact, Martin, who used to be an Internet game-show host, writes a blog called Girl Meets Bug; she and Gracer, an English instructor who travels the country lecturing on entomophagy and has been writing an epic poem about insects for the past fourteen years, were in town to compete in a cooking competition at the Natural History Museum’s annual bug fair.

  Martin, who is in her mid-thirties, with a heart-shaped face and a telegenic smile, stood at the counter in the small kitchen pulling embryonic drones—bee brood—from honeycomb. They were for bee patties, part of a “Bee L T” sandwich she was going to enter in the competition. But, finding them irresistible, she fried up a few to snack on. “It tastes like bacon,” she said rapturously. “I’m going to eat the whole plate unless someone gets in there.” I did: the drones, dripping in butter and lightly coated with honey from their cells, were fatty and a little bit sweet, and, like everything chitinous, left me with a disturbing aftertaste of dried shrimp.

  Gracer opened the freezer and inspected his bugs: housefly pupae, cicadas, and, his favorite, ninety-dollar-a-pound katydids from Uganda. “They’re very rich, almost buttery,” he said. “They almost taste as if they’ve gone around the bend.”

  “Dave, where’s the tailless whip scorpion?” Martin said, and Gracer produced an elegantly armored black creature with a foreleg like a calligraphy flourish. “I’m thinking about doing a tempura type of fry and a spicy mayonnaise,” Martin, who also worked for a number of years in a Japanese restaurant, said. First, she flash-fried it to soften the exoskeleton, and then she dipped it in tempura batter. To her knowledge, no one had ever before eaten a tailless whip scorpion. “All right, people, let’s make history,” she said, using a pair of chopsticks to lower it back into the pan, where it sizzled violently. I decided right there on a new policy, one I thought would pass muster with Gold: I will eat disgusting things, but only those with long established culinary traditions.

  When the scorpion was finished, she put it on a plate, and she and Gracer sat down on a couch to feast on what looked like far too much bug for me, and yet not nearly enough to satisfy hunger. Gracer pulled off a pincer. “There’s something—that white stuff—that’s meat!” he cried, pointing to a speck of flesh. “That’s meat!” Martin repeated excitedly, and exhorted him to try it. He tasted; she tasted. “Fish,” Gracer said. “It has the consistency of fish.” Martin split a leg apart and nibbled. In a few bites, they had eaten all there was. “That was really good,” she said.

  The following morning, in a tent on the front lawn of the Natural History Museum, Gracer faced Zack (the Cajun Bug Chef) Lemann, an established bug-cooker from New Orleans, who dazzled the judges—most of them children—with his “odonate hors d’oeuvres,” fried wild-caught dragonflies served on sautéed mushrooms with Dijon-soy butter. Children are often seen as the great hope of entomophagy, because of their openness to new foods, but even they are not without prejudices. Gracer, who presented stinkbug-and-kale salad, had neglected to account for the fact that kids don’t like kale.

  A five-year-old approached Lemann afterward. “Excuse me, can I eat a dragonfly?” he said. Lemann cooked one for him. The boy picked the batter off, revealing a wing as elaborately paned as a cathedral window, and then bit into it: his first bug. His little brother, who was three, came over and asked for a bite. “Good,” he pronounced.

  “Who’s going to eat the head?” their mother asked.

  “I will,” the five-year-old said. “Once somebody licks the mustard off.”

  The last round of the day matched Martin against Gracer. He was making Ugandan-katydid-and-grilled-cheese sandwiches. Drawing on her Japanese-restaurant experience, Martin decided to make a spider roll, using a rose-haired tarantula bought from a pet store. She held up the spider and burned off its hair with a lighter, and then removed its abdomen. “The problem with eating an actual spider roll, made with crab, is that they’re bottom feeders,” she said. “This spider probably ate only crickets, which ate only grass.” She whipped up a sauce and added a few slices of cucumber, and then presented her dish to the judges, warning them brightly to “be very careful of the fangs!”

  A young girl with curly hair lunged eagerly at the plate. “If it’s in sushi, I’ll eat it,” she said. When she had tried a piece, she declared, “It’s sushi. With spiders. It’s awesome.”

  • • •

  Four-fifths of the animal species on earth are insects, and yet food insects are not particularly easy to find. Home cooks can call Fred Rhyme, of Rainbow Mealworms, who provided the Madagascar hissing cockroaches for Fear Factor. He sells more than a billion worms a year; the sign at the edge of his farm, a conglomeration of twenty-three trailers, shotgun houses, and former machine shops in South Los Angeles, says, “Welcome to Worm City, Compton, Cal., 90220½. Population: 990,000,000.” The farm supplies six hundred thousand worms a week to the San Diego Zoo. “It’s mostly animals we feed,” Rhyme’s wife, Betty, who is the company’s president, told me. “The people are something of an oddity.”

  I wasn’t in the market for more mealworms. I had gone to visit Florence Dunkel, the entomologist, in Montana, and eaten plenty of them, fried up in butter, in her kitchen. They smelled of mushrooms and tasted of sunflower seeds. The flavor was unobjectionable, but not reason enough to eat something that reminded me of the time I was halfway through a sleeve of extra-crumbly Ritz crackers before I realized that the crumbs were moving. I wanted to see if bugs could be transcendent, and I knew who would know. “One of the biggest successes of the local New Cocktailian movement is the mezcal-based Donaji at Rivera downtown, which Julian Cox serves in a rocks glass rimmed with toasted-grasshopper salt,” Jonathan Gold wrote to me. I duly went to the restaurant and ordered the Donaji, a $14 cocktail named after a Zapotec princess. The salt tasted like Jane’s Krazy Mixed-Up Salt, crushed Bac-Os, and fish-food flakes; the bartender recommended it as a rub for grilled meat.

  Gold also mentioned that I might try Laurent Quenioux, at Bistro LQ, an old acquaintance of his. Gold’s 2006 review of Quenioux’s wild hare stew—“a soft, gloriously stinky Scottish hare stewed in something approximating the traditional foie gras–inflected blood”—was one of the pieces for which he won the Pulitzer. To me, Gold wrote, “He occasionally has escamoles, giant ant eggs, on the menu. They’re very seasonal, early spring I think, so you’d have to call.” It was winter. I would have to wait.

  Escamoles are not actually eggs but immature Liometopum apiculatum. A delicacy since Aztec times—they were used as tribute to Moctezuma—they are still a prized ingredient in high-end Mexico City restaurants, where they are known colloquially as Mexican caviar. Exquisitely subtle, palest beigy-pink, knobbly as a seed pearl, they command a market price of around $70 a pound.

  Like humans, Liometopum apiculatum ants are opportunists; they will eat anything they can overpower, and, because they do not sting, they tear their prey to shreds. (They are also ranchers, tending flocks of aphids and defending them from lady beetles, in exchange for the aphids’ surplus honeydew.) They burrow under boulders or at the base of trees, and live in colonies of up to fifty thousand members. Traditionally, they were hunted only by experienced escamoleros—the irrepressible image is of an ant with a Tejano hat with a lasso—but, according to Julieta Ramos-Elorduy, a biologist who studies food insects at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, their desirability has invited poachers, who overharvest and destroy the nests. The ants, which are most readily available in the state of Hidalg
o, are also found in the southwestern United States. High prices have inspired North American foragers to get in on the business. “Recently at San Juan market in Mexico City, monopolizers informed us that small airplanes loaded with tons of the product arrived from the United States and sold it to the highest bidders,” Ramos-Elorduy wrote in a 2006 paper.

  You can’t really buy escamoles in America. The head chef at José Andrés’s Oyamel, in D.C., has scoured local markets for them without success, though once, on a tip from a lady who overheard him complaining to his barber about their unavailability, he discovered some frozen Thai ant larvae (labeled as “puffed rice”) in an Asian grocery store in Virginia. José Andrés himself told me that he considers escamoles a delicacy, and if he could get them he’d put them on the menu at Minibar, his acclaimed six-seat restaurant.

  At the first sign of spring, I called Quenioux. He had just closed Bistro LQ because of a problem with the lease, and said he was trying to get some escamoles to serve at Starry Kitchen, a downtown lunch counter owned by Nguyen and Thi Tran, who had previously run it as an underground supper club out of their apartment. Quenioux was about to start a pop-up there called LQ@SK. “Basically, you need to smuggle them,” he said of the ants. His connection, a Mexican man living near Hidalgo who brought them in foam cups in his carry-on luggage, didn’t work anymore; the last two times Quenioux had placed an order, he’d prepaid, only to have his shipment confiscated by Customs at LAX.

  A week before the soft launch of Quenioux’s residency at Starry Kitchen, he told me that he had a line on some escamoles. He knew a guy who knew a guy who would bring them across the border from Tijuana; we simply had to drive down to a meeting place on the U.S. side and escort them back. We set a time, and I went to a street corner in Pasadena, near where Quenioux lives; when I arrived, a red Toyota Corolla was waiting. The window came down partway, and I heard someone call my name.

  Originally from Sologne, France, Quenioux—pronounced “kinyou”—grew up hunting, learned pastry in Paris at Maxim’s, and worked in Nice alongside the German-born chef Joachim Splichal, who brought him to Los Angeles in the early eighties. He is a gentle person, with huge, pale green eyes, a bald-shaved head, a set of prayer beads around his wrist, and the endearingly antisocial habit of seeing everything he encounters as potential food: the deer near Mt. Wilson, which he hunts with a bow and arrow; the purple blossoms of the jacaranda trees; a neighbor’s chicken, which he killed and cooked when it came into his yard. Usually, he eats chicken only when he’s home in France; he thinks American chickens are disgusting.

  Certain laws just don’t make sense to Quenioux, like the one that prohibits him from serving a dessert made from chocolate hot-boxed with pot smoke. “What’s one gram of marijuana, just to have the smoke infuse the chocolate?” he said. When he read in the news that there was to be a mass culling of fifty thousand wild boars that had crossed from Texas into Chihuahua and were destroying everything in their path—not fit for consumption, warned a government official—his first thought was, Shit, can we get a few of those? “Tamales!” Daniel, his sous-chef, said. “With salsa verde!”

  As for the escamoles, “We do it for the culinary adventure,” Quenioux said. He has made blinis with ant eggs and caviar, and a three-egg dish of escamoles, quail eggs, and salmon roe. He has fantasized about making an escamole quiche, and, using just the albumen that drains out when the eggs are frozen, meringue. His signature dish is a corn tortilla resting on a nasturtium leaf and topped with escamoles sautéed in butter with epazote, shallots, and serrano chilies, served with a shot of Mexican beer and a lime gel. Insects are, to him, like any other ingredient: a challenge and an invitation. “Let’s do gastronomy with bugs,” he said. “Let’s make something delicious.”

  Quenioux talked about escamoles all the way down south—their delicate eggy qualities, their wildness, their unexpected appearance (“condensed milk with little pebbles in it”), the responsibility he feels to train the American palate to accept them. “The insects will be the solution to feed all those masses, but how do you get insects on the daily table in America?” he said. “In the last twenty years, we grew here in America from iceberg lettuce to baby frisée, so the time is now.”

  After a few hours, we arrived at a strip mall and parked in front of a drugstore, then walked toward the meeting place, a restaurant, where the escamoles were waiting. “OK, let’s go,” Quenioux said, getting out of the car. “I’ve got the cash.”

  The front door to the restaurant was open, and an old man with a drooping moustache was mopping the floor. “Hola, señor,” Quenioux said. The old man pointed to a Dutch door, which led to the kitchen. Quenioux stuck his head in, and eventually a young woman wearing a dirty chef’s coat and a white apron appeared. “You come for the escamoles?” she said. “OK, I get for you.” She returned a minute later with a plastic shopping bag containing a large ziplock filled with half a kilo of frozen product. Quenioux handed her a hundred-dollar bill.

  Getting back in the car, Quenioux opened the bag to examine the goods, a pale orange slush, scattered with clumps of oblong ant babies. “We got the loot!” he squealed.

  • • •

  The Starry Kitchen narrative, with its elements of amateurism, scofflaw pluck, and media savvy, is the kind of restaurant story you hear all the time these days. In 2009, when Thi Tran lost her job in advertising, she asked her Facebook friends what she should do. “Cook, cook, cook,” came the reply. Thi is first-generation Chinese, with a natural scowl. She is practical and modest, where her husband, Nguyen, who is Vietnamese-American, is boisterous. He often dresses up in Comic-Con-style costumes for food events, and displays a sign, referring to a spicy tofu dish that is a Starry Kitchen specialty, which reads “Eat My Balls.”

  Inspired by Kogi—the Korean-barbecue food truck that started in L.A. and set off a national craze—Thi thought Vietnamese tacos might be good, and developed some recipes at home. Three weeks later, Nguyen told her, “We’re serving out of our apartment this Sunday,” and flyered their three-hundred-unit building in North Hollywood. To him it was normal: like a lot of Asians he knows, he grew up eating in unofficial home restaurants. “In every ethnic neighborhood in L.A. there is someone doing something like this,” he said.

  Within a few months, their apartment was the No. 1 rated Asian fusion restaurant on Yelp. (Providence, a fantastically expensive restaurant with two Michelin stars, was No. 2.) When the health department confronted Nguyen with the Twitter feed where he shamelessly touted specials and warned him to stop, Thi was unnerved, but Nguyen insisted that the intervention was a blessing. They moved the restaurant, which they had named after a popular Hong Kong cooking show, into a legitimate space in a large corporate plaza, and burnished their creation myth. “It increased our audience,” he told me. “We were seedy, and being caught validated that we really were underground.”

  A week after the ant run, I was at Starry Kitchen, watching Quenioux get ready to serve the escamoles as an amuse-bouche. Nguyen bounded around, talking about his role in securing them. “I called everyone, from Laos, Cambodia, Thailand—all the sources I know got caught,” he said. He was thrilled about the air of the forbidden that the dish would confer. “It’s going to be a great note to start on—not even the taste, just them knowing it was smuggled and it’s ant eggs,” he said.

  To complement a menu full of Asian flavors—teriyaki rabbit meatballs in miso broth, veal sweetbreads with shishito peppers and yuzu—Quenioux had decided to prepare the escamoles with Thai basil and serve them with Sapporo. “These are very spicy,” he said, placing an ample green nasturtium leaf on a plate. “I foraged them from my garden this morning.” There was a light sheen of sweat on his forehead.

  Just before the service, the waiters started to panic. “What am I telling them?” one asked. “I can’t just go up to them and say it’s ant eggs.”

  “Tell them it’s very exotic, and traditional in Me
xico City,” Daniel, the sous-chef, said. I went into the dining room and sat down. “This is an amuse from the chef,” a waiter said, presenting me with the dish, a composition as spare and earthy as a Japanese garden. “It’s smuggled-in ant eggs.” I rolled the leaf around the tortilla and bit: peppery nasturtium, warm tortilla, and then the light pop of escamoles bursting like tiny corn kernels. A whiff of dirt, a sluice of beer, and that was it. They were gone by night’s end, but their fresh, succulent sweetness stuck with me. Unexpectedly, I had something new to crave.

  Three

  BACKDOOR MEN

  Igot in 2K live crickets,” Brett Ottolenghi, the ostentatiously earnest, honest, perpetually worried young proprietor of Artisanal Foods, a fancy-food purveyor in Las Vegas, wrote me by text message. “Thinking I’d try to cook with them before offering to chefs. But the pen I made isn’t working and they are escaping by the hundreds in my house.” Five minutes later, he wrote me again. “I think I’ll have to live among them. There is no way I can pick up this many. A Chinese chef might help me cook some tomorrow.”

  Las Vegas is among the top food cities in America, if you go by the number of superexpensive restaurants with famous chefs. Ten of the fifty highest-grossing restaurants in the country are on the Strip, and there are more master sommeliers in Las Vegas than in any other city in the country. Adam Carmer, the casino developer Steve Wynn’s first hotel sommelier, described himself to me as “the No. 1 maître d’ in town.” He says, “Other places, you might have four or five extraordinary restaurants in a state or in a country; here you have four or five in a hotel. For shoes, you go to the mall—that’s what the food’s like out here.” Almost forty million people visited Las Vegas last year. It is one of the places in the world where the outlandish ideas and hyperprecious ingredients of the food avant-garde meet the masses, and Ottolenghi is one of the people making introductions.