“I think the worms are a little overcooked,” one of my tablemates announces with the authority of a true entomophagist. We’re seated at a long, communal table along with 40 other diners at the mysterious Charlie’s Burgers’ latest anti-restaurant experiment: a 10-course dinner featuring insects.
Eating worms brings new meaning to underground dining.
Charlie’s Burgers is the guerrilla dinner party that features top chefs cooking in unusual venues. As with all its events, a certain cloak-and-dagger mystery surrounds the evening. I am told to arrive at a location just prior to dinner where I will find one of Mr. Burgers’ associates. He is waiting with a box of stinkbug-garnished chocolate cupcakes that he offers along with an envelope in which to “donate” $155 for the dinner, complete with wine pairings, and directions to the event locale a block away. (Despite its unappetizing name, the stinkbug adds only a bit of crunchiness and not a distinct flavour.)
Arriving at the venue, I find a diverse crowd gathered. Wine is offered along with a canapé, a potato chip with crème fraîche, roasted crickets and grasshoppers seasoned with sumac, chili powder and lime. It’s crunchy and creamy with a taste not unlike onion dip.
I ask Jeff Stewart – one of the chefs, along with Matt Binkley, responsible for tonight’s menu – what inspired the dinner. “I see cooking with insects as the ultimate culinary challenge,” he says. “The concept stems from the same idea as you might find at the Black Hoof or Charlie Trotter’s where they are trying to utilize off cuts like jowls and tripe, but there’s also a sustainability component to what I’m doing. When you look at how much energy is needed to raise cattle or poultry or sheep, it’s enormous, while the amount used to raise insects is minuscule. That’s appealing to me and, of course, that they’re obviously pesticide free.”
Pesticide free, perhaps, but I’m more concerned with flavour. I want to be blown away by bugs.
Roasted forest nymphs
Our amuse-bouche arrives in a little teardrop-shaped serving vessel. It contains a tempura abalone mushroom on top of a fresh shiso leaf with homemade ricotta, pickled wild leeks, local soy sauce and a few roasted forest nymphs (a.k.a. juvenile grasshoppers). As delicious as the dish is – warm with a bright herbaceousness and creamy with a lively acidity – the nymphs add little to the flavour, acting mostly as a complement to the crunchiness of the fried mushroom. Hoping for a little more bugginess in the next course.
Ancient Chinese scorpion soup
Mr. Stewart wanders by with a live emperor scorpion on his hand. The soup’s delicious broth is sweet with carrots and Chinese plums, but I’m having a hard time discerning the scorpion in this 1,000-year-old recipe. A close inspection reveals a few shards of carapace and there are bits of something that remind me of soft portobello mushroom gills, which I’m told are in fact scorpion. They taste slightly earthy with a subtle meatiness like pancetta.
Queen ant Thai salad
Most of the critters cooked tonight were farmed in Thailand where, as in China (the other country leading the world in bug farming), such creatures are in some demand. What would be recognizable to most people as a som tam salad (green mango, papaya, shrimp, Thai basil, mint and cilantro in a lime, chili and lemongrass vinaigrette) has been bugged out with the addition of a whole queen ant sitting on a little kaffir lime leaf-scented cracker. Queen ants, as any Grade 5 biology student can tell you, are a rare delicacy as there’s only one for each colony. The good queen’s sacrifice was not in vain, but her particular flavour is lost in the general sweet, spicy goodness of the salad. She was a bit crunchy, though.
The Charlie “Bugger” micro chickpea and bean burger
