Joe and I went to a Korean restaurant for dinner tonight. The menu was of the point-at-the-picture-to-order type with no English. We ordered two plates of food: One that we'd had before and liked, and one that looked like a new item on the menu.
We were having a nice time together. The food got to our table. I was curious about the new dish. On the menu, it had looked like some kind of beef and green pepper kinda thing. I chopsticked a piece of the meat into my mouth. It had a nice teriyaki flavor, although it was a little spicy. And gristly. And there was something hard in it. I got the little hard pieces out of my mouth and put them on my plate. Joe looked closer at the meat, wondering what part of an animal it was, since it was so gristly, and shaped weird, with, like, jiggly meat tubes coming off a central piece.
It was chicken feet. A whole plate full of teriyaki chicken feet. That was a chicken toenail in my mouth.
It took me a few seconds to decide whether I was going to vomit. I didn't.
We just told our waitress that the dish was too spicy. She took it away. We were eating off the good food plate just waiting in absolute dread that she was going to come back to our table with a plate of fixed, less-spicy chicken feet. She did come back with the chicken feet, ours, but they were wrapped in a to-go box.
And that's the grossest thing I've (knowingly) consumed in Korea.
