World News for Students of English

23-09-2014 15:00

Now, it’s not a dish for everyone, certainly not for those afraid of bugs, but one small Mexico restaurant is offering up a new food challenge – tacos with insect toppings!

Yeah, La Cocinita de San Juan even has a full list of Mexican-style tacos with wild menu items such as scorpions and spiders. And they really are wild, says restaurant owner Pedro Hernandez.

“It’s really hard to catch them. They’re wild, so there are people who are in charge of going into the hills to go and lift up the rocks and uncover them in the weeds. You have to be really careful when you grab them because the scorpions, if they sting you, those little scorpions will send you to hospital.”

So, how do you get your customers to eat something they would normally send back to the kitchen? Well, apparently some of the dishes are easy to disguise.

“Scorpion doesn’t have a very characteristic flavour, really. It’s the preparation that really gives it a characteristic flavour. Then, they’ll eat it. Because otherwise, they’ll say, ‘No wait, I’m not going to eat a scorpion,’ then seeing it all prepared, they eat it and say, ‘Well, it’s good.’”

Well, we don’t know about you, but we’d rather stick to a burger!

Difficult words: topping (something you put on top of food), wild (something that lives in nature AND something that is very exciting and strange), weed (wild plant), grab (take), disguise (make look or taste like something different), send back to the kitchen (tell the restaurant you don’t want to eat something because it has something disgusting in it), stick (pick something familiar or normal).

Source: www.ondemandnews.com