I Poisoned Myself

Who on earth will try to swallow some poisonous food? The Japanese do! Fugu, or puffer fish, is one of the delicacies in Japan.

The fish is poisonous, so it has to be prepared by a licensed chef. However, the chef will intentionally leave a bit of the poisonous stuff on the knife for slicing the fish, just to thrill the guests.

Since I am in Japan, I went out hunting for a restaurant serving fugu with two Thai friends today and we found this restaurant at Omiya.

There were actually living fugu in the aquarium at the entrance! We knew that we were at the right place.

After we had settled ourselves down, we started to decide what to order. Since the menu was in Japanese, it took a bit of time for me to understand the items.

The first thing that came before we put down our order was this fugu salad. It was a mixture of fugu skin and belly with spring onion and red wasabi. It tasted quite nice.

Then came the highlight of our self-poisoning adventure, the fugu sashimi! The fish itself has actually not much taste, but the fish meat was a quite a fair bit tougher than normal fish, more like jellyfish. After eating this, all our tongues turned a bit numb due to the poison.

We also tried the deep-fried fugu and it tasted quite nice. The fish meat was silky smooth. This came with the fish bone, so it must be the central part of the fish.