The weirdest thing Adam Platt has ever eaten.

Question: Is there anything you won’t eat?

Adam Platt: No. I’ll eat anything. Well, I’ll eat-- I-- Yeah, within bounds I’ll eat anything. In New York you don’t really-- I have traveled a lot and you eat- there are some pretty grim things that you have to eat but they’re all edible if you eat them quickly but in New York in the kind of restaurants that I go to it’s my duty to consume everything on my plate and it’s not that hard to do. And I don’t have certain things like chicken liver that I don’t like or tripe or chickens’ feet. In fact, I like all those things so I’m perfectly happy with a big bowl of stewed kidneys.

Question: What's the weirdest thing you've ever eaten?

Adam Platt: The weirdest, craziest thing-- Probably-- I just-- I’ve just written an article about it. Recently, in the last year or few months, I was in Japan and Japan is-- It’s probably the best eating-- Well, Tokyo itself like New York-- It’s probably the best eating town in the world now. Michelin just did a guide there and I think the total stars they gave out in New York and London were something like- between 70 and 80 stars to all the fancy restaurants. In Tokyo they gave out 160, 170 stars to all the various restaurants there. Anyway, so the Japanese cook at this very high level all different kinds of food, Japanese, Italian, Brazilian, French, but they also cook a lot of really bizarre, strange things. You go to these beautiful department stores. In the basements they have these beautiful food halls which make for- the fancy boutique food places in New York look like McDonald’s, not quite like McDonald’s but on that level. And they are selling- next to these beautiful, shiny French pastries they are selling platters of grilled eel gizzards which taste like fish liver that’s been soaked in butane. And during the course of that trip I had those eel gizzards and I also had grilled chicken ovaries which is yakitori, which is it’s grilled on a stick, all different kinds of meat. The ovaries are-- They grill it and it’s basically these sort of gizzards which are sort of squeezed on a stick and at the end of it is the ovary which looks like a bobbing egg yolk and it actually tastes quite good but it looks so freaky when it’s bobbling around,and then you eat it and the yolk bursts in your mouth and it’s the innards of a chicken, so that was sort of grizzly. And I also had- on that trip I ate fugu which is the blowfish- which is the poisonous blowfish, which is a great delicacy in Japan, and I’ve just written a story about this. And the top piece de resistance delicacy of fugu is the engorged sperm sac of the male fish and they’ll serve that grilled in little pieces like summer marshmallows, and there’s really no taste to it but you bite-- Again it’s on a stick and they are these little burnt white things, not burnt but lightly grilled, and then you bite it and the sort of hot fish milk will sort of flood around in your mouth and it’s really- it’s sort of disgusting but I did it.

Recorded: 4/22/08