Travel channel: Hong Kong Jackie Chan edition...they are eating mantis..

Madmonkey

New member
I was channel surfing earlier this morning and saw the program on Travel channel called 'Hong Kong Jackie Chan style'. In that show, there was a small segment of a street restaurant where they serve mantis in batter dip and fried, boiled and served with noodles, and the last dish looked like it was some kind of stir fried dish.....

The most horrible part was when they showed how they pull the head off and eat the tail/body part of the poor mantis....

My peacock mantis is so lucky he is in my home and not in Hong Kong:D
 
I don't see how that's any different then someone eating a fish or a lobster.. I think it's kind of neat that people eat them.. Would it trouble you to know that they also eat tridacnid sp. clams in japan? (though they are not pretty ones like the types we keep in our tanks).
 
I didn't see the show but if they looked like them, they probably were. I saw tankfuls of large 8-10" spearers at a couple of street restaurants in HK. I'm personally really into seafood but was a little leary of the restaurant.

Gonodactylus wrote up a thread a while back about his experiences 'round the world about mantises as food in different cultures.

-Rogue :P
 
I saw that show a while back and I believe they are mantis shrimp. However, you can only eat the middle portion and there isn't too much meat. Personally, I didn't think that they were that great to eat when I tried them last year in HK.
 
So.... What kind of an idiot volunteers to stick their hands in the holding tank, pick one up and rip the head off from the tail?

Call me a major wuss, but I'm not picking one of those things up with my bare hands.
 
Most of the tanks are chilled, so they're quite sedentary. Then, they use a fish net to capture them into a bucket. From there, they throw them right into the wok with head and tail intact. It's up to the customer to rip of the heads from the tail (after it has been cooked).
 
Some of them were WAY bigger than shrimp! Maybe prawn size to lobster size. It was really hard to tell because the spiny lobsters they had were massive. I think we need a menu to envision all of this seafood:

hongkong.jpg
 
Heheh... that's one of those ads for Japanese tourists visiting Hawaii. Why go all the way to Hawaii for Kobe beef when they could be sampling Kahlua Pig, plate lunch and zip packs. ;)

-Rogue
 
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