After months of waiting and growing excitement, we finally arrived in Siem Reap, home of Bugs Café that our friends, the Johnsons, told us about. Bugs Café, as the name suggests, is a café that serves bugs. We went there for dinner a few days ago, ready for a night of adventure. We ended up ordering:
Wild Spring Rolls…stuffed with ants
Savory Muffins with crickets and silkworms
Scorpions and Green Papaya salad
Feta and Tarantula Samosas
Cajun Coconut Snake (curry)
Crocodile à la Française (curry)
Insect Skewer with Grasshopper and Giant Waterbug
Tarantula Donut
And… Mom got chicken
It’s funny, because the chicken was the one thing we actually couldn’t eat! Mom wasn’t sure it was cooked through well enough. All of those foods were very interesting. The tarantula donut was sweet and very bitter and the consistency was super soft. The consistency of snake meat is sort of stringy, but soft and easy to chew. Crocodile is like a mix between tough fish and beef, and tastes a little bit like chicken. Surprisingly, most of the food was delicious! We didn’t like the giant water bug as much because there wasn’t as much meat. It’s weird to think of bugs as having meat inside. Our favorite was probably a salad with green curry paste, crickets, and silkworms. Delicious!
Earlier in the week, we went to a restaurant on Pub Street, a lively street in the heart of Siem Reap, where we tried a crocodile burger and crocodile steak. The quality of the food wasn’t as good, and the crocodile was more tough and chewy that it was at the Bug Café. Still, it was fun to try crocodile. Mom stuck to chicken 🙂 (but did try a bite of crocodile!)
Just don’t eat bat soup😊
Ha! Yeah, we’ll be careful 🙂
Oh my! I get the jitters a bit looking at these pics. But I think I’d at least try most of them…
😉 It was quite an experience eating such odd looking things! It was definitely worth it. And tasty too.