Courtesy of Travel
Channel
Season 7 of Bizarre Foods kicks off with a 100th
episode celebration in Las Vegas, including an inside peak at Muhammad Ali’s
70th birthday bash. But as lavish as that sounds, Andrew says that the remainder
of the episodes will not disappoint. He revealed, “The rest of the season has
got some of my favorite episodes… We go to Austin, Texas. We do Florida and
Miami — two separate Florida [shows] — more strange stuff going on in Miami. We
just couldn’t cover it in one and decided to head into the center lands of the
state and go through central Florida and make another episode.”
But the highlight of
the upcoming season just might be the Los Angeles episode. Andrew described it
as “one of the most unusual episodes we’ve ever filmed, which is certainly in
my all time top five… In that episode, we managed to create a pop-up restaurant
— a one night only bizarre foods menu — and I used that mechanism to explore
Los Angeles. [If] I’m going to compete as a lonely restaurateur in that city,
I’d better know what the diners like and what the chefs are cooking.”
In order to pull of
the fete, Andrew called on some high-powered friends in the foodie domain. He
gave a sneak peak, saying, “So we had a chance to hang out with the guys from
Animal, Jonny Shook and Vinny Dotolo Shook, and Michael Voltaggio from Ink and
Lee Hefter from Spago and Ludo Lefebvre
from Ludo Bites — and
then create our pop-up restaurant, which was absolutely a blast. It’s great to
get out and cook for people again. I missed it, and still do.”
But of course Bizarre Foods is more about eating than
cooking for Andrew. The chef-turned-TV-personality acknowledged that he’s part
of an elite culinary club, “Some of the craziest food in the world is so arcane
or so seldom seen that it’s almost like a cult of people who have eaten them.
Real casu marzu is now illegal in Sardinia. Ortolan are illegal in France. Foie
gras is now illegal in California in a couple more days.”
Still there are some foods
that the man who’s tasted everything from a still beating frog’s heart to
almost every type of testicle one could imagine, doesn’t like. He confessed, “I
take a tremendous amount of enjoyment from a huge variety of foods, but [the
popular Southeast Asian fruit] durian tastes like rotten onions and smells like
feet and probably, most importantly, is that you have to walk past ripe mango
scenes to get at the durian, in any tropical Asian market because durians come
into the same season as mango scenes.”
He also doesn’t enjoy
a snack that might shock some people. “The only one that I can think of is
walnuts. They’re soapy… That’s really the only one that I don’t like… I’ll even
eat a Brazil nut.”
As Andrew was quick to
point out, an aversion to certain forms of nuts isn’t all that unusual in other
parts of the world. He explained, “In Argentina they don’t eat peanut butter.
It’s repulsive to them. Kids won’t even try it.”
Still he said that
anyone looking to step out of their comfort zone on an international trip
should absolutely sample one of the world’s biggest culinary secrets. Andrew
suggested, “I recommend anybody going into any department store in any
Scandinavian country, buy themselves a tin of something called Surstromming,
which is fermented canned fish. That’s one of the all-time most heinous foods
in the world. Easy to get, not fun to eat it. It’s pretty foul.”
And that sums up
Andrew Zimmern’s day job. Watch him find unusual delicacies in our own backyard
when Bizarre Foods America debuts on Monday, July 9 at 9
p.m. EST/8 p.m. Central on the Travel Channel.
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