Is that a goat’s head on my plate? EWW GROSSNESS

Credit the worldwide increase in foreign travel - and the popularity of foodie blogs and niche cookbooks like A.D. Livingston’s “Skillet Cooking for Camp and Kitchen” (with recipes for cod tongues and turtle liver). Don’t forget the publicity machinery behind TV personality/chef Anthony Bourdain and “The Year of Eating Dangerously” by Tom Parker Bowles.

What better time than Halloween to ask some of Boston’s leading gastronomes to share their extreme dining stories?


“There’s a cheese I ate in Sardinia called casu marzu, which is dialect for ‘rotten cheese,’ ” said Boston Harbor Hotel Executive Chef Daniel Bruce. “It’s filled with live maggots. It was pretty pungent; one spoonful was enough for me.”

Craigie Street Bistrot’s Tony Maws ate “roasted goat head in the main market in Marrakech: You eat the cheeks, you eat the eyes, you eat the tongue and then you crack open the skull and eat the brain. With a little Moroccan salad on the side.” Yum!

South End Formaggio Kitchen owner Valerie Gurdal learned a little something when she sampled fried duck feet in Bangkok: “(They were) a little bony and not a whole lot of meat - I wouldn’t reorder them again,” she said. “I had fried whole duck neck in New York, which was really good. It was confited first and you ate it with your fingers.”

Ken Oringer, chef-owner of Clio, was grossed out - Halloween-style - when he was served bat in the Seychelles Islands. “It was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever eaten,” he said. “It was the local specialty. We had it at an Italian restaurant, prepared by a Creole chef with white wine and lemon - it was nasty.”

On the other hand, extreme eating was delightful - and close to home - for “Limster,” one of the most prolific posters on the Boston board of www.chowhound.com, who sampled goat cassoulet at Troquet in Boston. He said it was “made from all the spare parts: fried goat brains, tongue, liver and heart. Plus patties of neck meat and apples, roasted loin and braised shank. It was delicious paired with a ’75 (Chateau) Petrus.”

Don’t tell Ellen DeGeneres, but Chris Schlesinger of the East Coast Grill & Raw Bar ate dog in Vietnam. “In a dog restaurant - we were in and out pretty quick,” he said. “It was in black bean sauce; it tasted like baby lamb.”