There’s a version of food travel that looks great on Instagram and a version that actually happens. The version that actually happens involves more uncertainty, more stomach-related anxiety, and more moments of sitting across from a local person who has just handed you something that smells wrong, waiting to see if politeness wins out over instinct.
I’ve been keeping a list of the tastes that genuinely surprised me. Not just interesting surprised. The kind where you stop chewing and sit with it for a second. Five of them are worth writing down.
How I Stopped Ordering the Safe Option
I’m not a fearless eater by nature. I spent most of my twenties ordering the safest thing on the menu and considering that a reasonable life strategy. What changed it was less intentional than a plan. More like a series of small capitulations.
A friend talked me into a bouldering gym I’d been walking past for years. The same pattern started showing up elsewhere, too. I’d try a new game if there was a free way to explore it first, often using sites like https://bonus-jaeger.de/ to compare no-deposit bonuses before deciding whether it was worth my time. I’d book trips to places I knew little about simply because a good deal appeared at the right moment. None of it felt particularly adventurous. It was just a series of small decisions that gradually made the unfamiliar feel less intimidating. Looking back, it’s not surprising that food eventually followed the same path.
Hákarl, Iceland
Greenlandic shark has to be buried for months before it becomes edible. Fresh, the meat is toxic. Time underground is what fixes that, which is either ingenuity or desperation. Surviving in Iceland has historically required both.
The smell hits before you’ve fully committed to the decision. Ammonia, mostly. Not the smell of something bad. More like a janitor’s closet that somehow ended up on a plate. The taste is milder than the smell suggests. Firm, slightly chewy, and the taste stays longer than the piece did. Not good, exactly. But I ate three pieces, which probably says something.
Durian, Malaysia
The vendor in Penang watched me the way you watch someone about to walk into a glass door. Not warning me, just watching. Everything I thought I knew about durian was based on the wrong variety, which I found out about thirty seconds later.
There are dozens of cultivars. This doesn’t come up enough. The one you tried at an airport in 2015 and hated was probably not the one worth trying. What I had that afternoon was custardy, complex, with a sweetness that had something almost alcoholic underneath it. The smell was still confrontational, but the taste was genuinely good. I went back for more. I would have felt stupid about all the years I’d avoided it if I hadn’t been busy eating.
Century Egg, China
Nobody introduced it gradually. It arrived on a small plate and looked like an egg that had been through something. The white had gone almost black. The yolk was grey-green. For about two seconds I just looked at it.
The taste is earthy, sulfurous, strong. Not violent the way the appearance threatens. The white sets into something firm and jellylike, the yolk soft and creamy toward the center. Eaten alone it would have been a challenge. With rice and ginger it was just food. I tried a second piece deliberately, because the first happened so fast I wasn’t sure what I’d actually tasted.
Casu Marzu, Sardinia
I was at a table where it appeared without much announcement, and by the time I understood what I was looking at, a sheep’s milk cheese intentionally exposed to the cheese fly Piophila casei, whose larvae partially digest the fats into something soft and nearly liquid, I had already taken a bite.
The taste is sharp and intense, more so than any aged cheese I’d had. The texture runs toward liquid at the edges. The sharpness hit before I’d fully registered that I was chewing. I tried a second piece on purpose. I can confirm it was as strange as the first. I can also confirm I finished it.
Kiviak, Greenland
I had kiviak through a contact, not a restaurant. There was no menu involved. Little auks, fermented inside a hollowed-out seal carcass for months. That’s what it is. It wasn’t a tourist situation. Someone knew someone.
Gamey isn’t quite the right word. Concentrated is closer. Like everything had been compressing for the six months it sat inside the seal and you were getting all of it at once, in one small bite, with nowhere to put it. It is not for most people. But the history is part of what you’re tasting. Food that exists because someone figured out how to survive in one of the harshest places on the planet. You eat it and you’re eating a solution to a problem.
None of these five changed my daily eating habits. I still mostly eat things that are unremarkable. But I think about them more than I think about most meals that were technically better, which probably tells you something.