Pénis d'animaux pour visiteurs aux Olympiques

[Animal 0]

Animal penis tests the tastebuds of Olympic visitors


IT'S a hard act to swallow.

Let's be honest. We came to China not for the Olympics, or the promise of new democratic freedoms, or even the chance to buy some cheap electronic equipment and flog it off to friends for a profit back home.
No, we came here for the food, in all its bizarre, exotic glory. Take your pick. Scorpion kebab? Roast dog leg? Deep fried worm? And for the absolutely fearless, what about the ham sandwich on offer at the Olympic media centre?

But nothing, surely, beats the diced, gristly thing dangling from my chopsticks.

Welcome to Guolizhuang, a Beijing restaurant specialising in animal penises and testicles.

The locals refer to it as a petrol station for men and a beauty parlour for women, so devoutly do they believe in the health-giving properties of animal genitals.

Penis on the menu So there seemed no point in wasting time. Entrée was demolished quickly - a combination dish of fried, honeyed worms that spent their life eating only bamboo, the wagyu beef equivalent of the slug kingdom.

But now main course has arrived and it's far more confronting. The raw penises of four animals - ox, sheep, deer and donkey - lie limply on a plate as our waitress stirs a hot pot bubbling away on a portable stove in our private room.

The soup, enriched with chicken and fish bones, has a turtle floating helplessly in the middle, its head and legs swirling around the shell.


Into this boiling stock go the penises. A few minutes later the first is hanging from my quivering chopsticks. Ox penis, says the waitress, is full of protein, good for the skin and aids longevity. And the deeper its colour, the more effective its properties.

Down the hatch it goes. The first thing you notice is the blandness. It's fatty, slightly chewy and awkward to swallow. The next piece is dipped in chilli sauce and there is an immediate improvement, but it still fails to blanket the growing queasiness in the pit of your stomach.

Sheep's penis. A flabby little thing taken from a breed of Inner Mongolian sheep known for strength and speed. Clearly this one was not quick enough. There's no difference to the ox. Bland, soft rubber.

Things improve, flavour-wise, when the deer arrives. But the best is clearly the donkey penis. Slivered from the top half, it looks like a streak of bacon and carries the faint taste of pork.

By Chinese standards, it's an expensive meal, well over $A100 and easily beaten in flavour and texture by the scrambled egg with lily flowers and the mandatory accompaniment for an Australian in Beijing, fried rice.

Of course, we could have opted for the Canadian seal penis but at more than $500 a dish we begged off. And the “Head Crowned with a Jade Bracelet" sounded fascinating, but our appetite for horse penis from western China was by now diminished.

...

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/beijing_olympics/story/0,27313,24104498-5016752,00.html

[Animal 0]

BE CAREFUL AT THIS 'CHINESE RESTAURANT’

Posted: 12:00 am
August 3, 2008

Just when you think you've seen everything, TV has a way of showing you that you haven't.

For example, I never knew how some food preparers in China kill a duck.

And now I do, thanks to this four-part documentary miniseries premiering this week on Sundance Channel. The title says it all. It is called "The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World," though, with 800 employees and seating for 5,000, it might well be the biggest restaurant of any kind in the world, period.

This giant eatery, the West Lake Restaurant located in the Hunanese capital of Changsha, serves hundreds of roast ducks a day, but they apparently kill them one at a time.

As you'll see if you watch this week's premiere episode, the method of death is astonishing, especially for the duck.

Basically, this fluffy, white-feathered duck is just standing there minding its own business when someone comes along and plunges some kind of a sharpened stick about the size of a thick pencil into its breast. As the duck stands there with a "why me?" look on its face, the stick-bearer (who is unseen) uses the stick to actually widen the hole until it's spacious enough for him (or her) to insert a couple of fingers.

Probing briefly inside the duck, the fingers find the duck's heart and yank it out of the cavity, ending the duck's befuddlement and its life.

Later in the episode, chefs are seen chopping snakes into four-inch pieces that are still twitching when they're served on a plate. Speaking of twitching, another dish is demonstrated in which the tail half of a still-living fish is submerged in bubbling oil and deep-fried while the other half remains uncooked. It is then served, half-fried and half-breathing.


Difficult as it might be for some to witness the literally heartless killing of a duck, plus the other culinary styles that are so much different than our own, I love this kind of stuff for the way it opens a window on a world most of us will never have the opportunity or take the trouble to see for ourselves.

In fact, the theme running through this restaurant series is the same one that underlies all the other China specials you're seeing this summer as the world prepares for the Summer Olympics getting underway this Friday in China (on 8/8/08, symbolizing the Chinese belief that the numbers 888 bring good luck). See related story, page 3.

Other China shows seen recently include Ted Koppel's excellent China series earlier this month on Discovery, last week's "China Week" specials on Travel Channel, and this week's Bob Woodruff special on ABC, "China Inside Out" (Wednesday at 10 p.m.).

On show after show, it's been the same story: Though the Chinese government is still Communist, and many people (including the millionaire entrepreneur, a woman, behind the West Lake Restaurant) still belong to the Party, no one seems to be living communally in China anymore.

On the contrary, this is a country in the throes of capitalism gone wild.

One young woman whose wedding is shown in Episode 2 of "Biggest Restaurant" even states flat out that for her, love and money are so intertwined that she wouldn't think of having one without the other.

She's not exactly a bridezilla in the mold of those seen on WE, but at the rate they're going, the Chinese are fast becoming just like us.

THE BIGGEST CHINESE RESTAURANT IN THE WORLD

Monday, 9 p.m., Sundance Channel

http://www.nypost.com/seven/08032008/tv/be_careful_at_this_chinese_restaurant__122434.htm