Amlee Gourmet Restaurant – Las Vegas, Nevada (CLOSED)
There’s a Cantonese saying that translates to “anything that walks, swims, crawls, or flies with its back to heaven is edible.” The Chinese diet counts as delicacies some things which would repulse the more sensitive American palate. It’s not just the Chinese who will imbibe, ingest and intake what we might consider sundry strangeness. Each culture, including American, has foodstuffs other cultures find shocking. One culture’s strange and inedible is another’s traditional favorite. Take cheese, for example. Until rather recently, few Chinese would eat cheese, considering it the fetid spoils of milk. As it grows smaller, the world has become increasingly fascinated by watching the consumption of the bizarre–bizarre in this case being a voyeuristic term that doesn’t apply to the culture in which the food is enjoyed. The Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods With Andrew Zimmerm chronicles the adventures of an intrepid eater who will try any and everything put in front of him, regardless of how much it writhes, palpitates or squirms as he puts it in his mouth. It’s televised shockfest at its most appealing to those of us who think we’d try just about anything. Compared to Zimmerm, most of us are rank amateurs. Thousand year old…
