Friday, January 25, 2008

Oysters, not so Southern Style

Stacey found a restaurant on line, it’s in NYC and we were going in a couple days. When ever we go to NYC Stacey goes online and looks for all kind of things to do. She always comes up with good places to eat. This time she searched “cheap eats”, one of the places that popped up was Kuma. It was described as tapas style plates with Asian flavors.

So we went there and really enjoyed. Then a few months later we were in NYC and decided to go again. This time we would try some new dishes. And so it went and things were good, but we thought we needed one more dish, so we ordered a Oyster omelet. The menu had some weird name of something that was on the omelet. Our waitron told us it was Bonito Flakes. Oh we said, fish flakes, OK we’ll give it a try.

Well we had no idea and I bet they love serving this dish to people that talk like us. That would be slow and with a drawl.

crab-bed-bowl-art-007.jpg

The plated landed on the table as if it was a spaceship that was alive. We were just sitting there staring at the dish and I thought for sure it was alive. The waitron came by and we ask, what the hell? She informed us that is what fish flakes do when sprinkled on top of a very hot plate of food. The flakes danced as if they were a small nation raising their arms and crying out for help.
It was in a small casserole dish straight from the oven. It looked alien. It was scary. It even smelled bad. I’ll try it I said and I did and it was strong. I don’t know of anyone born in America who enjoys dried fish flakes. It was like eating the strongest, most rotten fish flavor ever. So I tried another bite. Same results, duh. So Stacey tried some and spit it out, across the table, landing on a photo hanging on the wall. It wasn’t a really good piece of art, so the chewed up oyster with fish flakes kinda helped it. So then Stacey scraped the Bonito flakes away and tried another bite, because other then the stench of death this dish looked pretty good. She did the same thing and it landed in the same place, totally changing a still life painting of fruit on a table into something that looked like a boat on a river.

I wonder if anyone ever cleaned that painting.