Night of the Hissing Cockroaches

Just behind her is Sung-Cha Park, a respected Korean culinary artist. She can turn ordinary carrots into chrysanthemums and sculpt Buddha from a turnip. But the trayfuls of canapés she’s preparing would elicit screams at most gatherings. Her pièce de résistance is a half-dozen towers of vertically stacked pineapples, each crowned with a splay of leafy fronds to simulate a grove of miniature palm trees. To these she affixes with dagger-like ornamental toothpicks the five-centimetre-long hissing cockroaches, now dead—dispatched, in fact, by a spiced-brandy marinade. They are ugliness incarnate, with serrated legs and armoured exoskeletons. I know I’ll have to try one. But I’m in no hurry.

Rurka bounds from place to place, seeking advice from the crew. But there’s no doubt: he’s the one to whom everyone will turn on issues of taste. He sends the earthworms back for further tenderizing. He asks that the beer batter on the flowers be thinned so the tempura doesn’t conceal the colours and texture inside. He makes sure the tarantulas are cooked thoroughly. And when the first of the beavers makes its appearance, it is, after a day-and-a-half spent immersed in Cabernet, a cartoony purple colour, as if it has just escaped from Sesame Street. Rurka and banquet sous-chef Joshua Bierman discuss the beaver’s next culinary transformation, then Rurka turns his attention to the two feral hogs, which have just arrived on a pair of wheeled gurneys. Someone announces “It’s csi time!” as half a dozen people transfer each pig to a prep table. Basted with a thyme, paprika, and chili sauce, upright ears protected from searing with comic, tinfoil dunce caps, mouths wedged open with skewers or empty cans, the hogs get departing kisses on the snouts from Bierman before the doors of the industrial ovens open and they begin their five-hour 350°F journey toward barbecued pork. “There weren’t nearly so many things before,” Bierman says of Rurka’s influence on the exotic buffet. “His message is: Don’t be afraid to try stuff. Don’t be afraid, period. That’s what exploration’s about.”

Late that afternoon, as darkness falls over Manhattan and the guests start arriving, Rurka’s collection—the rosemary-herbed rattlesnake cakes with sour cream, the lightly glazed edible orchids, the maggots in mushroom caps, the roasted South American ants on a seasoned crème fraîche cucumber boat, the beer-battered testicles served with chipotle aioli—ascends on freight elevators to the floor above. Not far away, the explorers themselves, decked out in dinner jackets and gowns worthy of an Academy Awards evening, ascend the ornate staircase toward the Grand Ballroom. I recognize Steve Fossett, who recently completed the first solo, nonstop, non-refuelling aerial circumnavigation of the globe, and Dr. James Watson, the Nobel Prize”“winning co-discoverer of the structure of dna. Also in attendance, according to my program, are Col. Matthew Bogdanos, who led the US investigation into the 2003 looting of antiquities in Baghdad, and astronaut Dr. Kathryn Sullivan. The crush of elegant people grows, and I have a sense of what it might have been like during final decadent days of Caligula and his Roman friends, what with the trays of beaver (buckteeth and all) and braised legs of kangaroo moving through the crowd. Guests push toward the buffet tables—goading, tentative, wisecracking—reading the descriptions beside each dish then gradually sampling the palatable and the improbable. There is a lot of laughter.

The first plate I encounter is covered with five-centimetre-long roasted scorpions on durian- and foie gras-topped raisin bread. Scorpions are normally best dispatched with the sole of a boot and durian is, smell-wise, right up there with week-old road kill, but duty compels me to eat (very quickly) the offering. I see the skeptical look of the woman beside me. “Crispy,” I reassure her with a thin smile. The barbecued hogs have baked apples in their mouths. And Rurka has posed the toothy alligators as if they’re about to launch themselves at eaters’ throats. I ask the server for a slice. It has the chewiness of a chicken that has crossed the road once too often. With the throng pressing in, cnn cameras prowling, and celebrities milling about, I decide: What the hell! Carpe diem. I’ll try everything.

Moments later, however, I want to recant my pledge. A woman holds a skewered tarantula, honey-glazed and nearly the size of my hand. We speculate on its poison potential, then decide to stare arachnophobia in the face and share the spider. Within kissing distance of one another, we each gnaw off a hairy leg, giggling at the absurdity of the situation. Tarantulas have an astringent taste, like old Brazil nuts. But most buggy creatures are merely crunchy and head stomachward easily. My subsequent foray into worm cuisine, however, reaffirms that things wiggly and limp are best left to robins.

I seek comfort at the buffet table, filling my plate with seemingly safe, non-insect, non-wormy items. The elk bourguignon is five-star; the rosebuds in champagne batter and orange-honey sauce pure manna; the rattlesnake bony, but no problemo. There is, however, one item on my plate I keep avoiding. But duty calls, so I sink my teeth into the calf-eyeball fritter. Unless you’re a fan of the chewy-gelatinous—say, very old octopus Jell-O—certain textures can be a serious mouthful. The eyeball has the consistency of rubbery goo. My throat constricts. Digestively speaking, south suddenly begins heading north: a Noah’s Ark of invertebrates, reptiles, mammals, and worms is about to go airborne. Infamy looms. My rented tuxedo is about to be fouled. I fight the spasm. Willpower defeats reflexes. Then I look down. My bite has removed only the batter and there on my plate, staring up accusingly at me, is a half-eaten brown eye. South heads north again. Cheeks balloon. Please, God. Please! I will go to church if you make this stop. God listens.

Rurka moves anonymously through the gathering with an expression suggesting he can’t shake the lingering worries that come from masterminding such an event. “No poisonings” I ask him. “No. No screaming yet.” Ahead I see Park’s cockroach-covered pineapple palm trees and know that a moment of truth is at hand, here among the cognoscenti and the explorers. Do I have the Right Stuff The cockroach is, on close inspection, hideous, fat, and shiny, with long, pointy feelers. And way too many legs. It’s something only Kafka could love. It would be ostracized in hell. I close my eyes and reassure myself with this fabled truth, the essential explorer’s dictum: no guts; no glory.