Exotic Meat Round Up: Yeeha… Oh God, It Saw Me

The most exotic thing we’ve eaten in the last few weeks was a tiny crab at a sushi restaurant, plucked from a leaded glass bowl we thought was for decoration, hit with some sort of torch or flash steamer (we missed that part), and placed before us whole, eyes, legs, claws, and all. It was about an inch wide, maybe—just big enough that we had to open wide, like a yawning seaside cave, to place it intact on our tongue.

Bits of carapace do not become more tender as you chew them, although they do become smaller and thus more able to be swallowed.

But that’s hardly meat at all! By definition, meat must come from something that can hurt you. (A chicken or a lobster might qualify, should one’s guard be down, but our tiny crab… not so much, unless we feared a shorn taste bud.)

In fact, the more dangerous the animal, the more delicious the meat. That’s why alligator is some of the most delectable flesh in existence, flakey yet substantial. It’s why we suspect that the still-beating heart of a cobra as eaten raw by Anthony Bourdain in this video thumps with tear-inducing flavor. If ambrosia were meat—and it most certainly was—the gods could have only harvested it from the shanks of Cerebrus.

In New York, there are probably plenty of places to buy exotic meats—heck, the Polish butchers alone stock bits of pig and cow for consumption that most Americans don’t know exist—but that’s no reason not to plumb the entrails of the internet for choice, overnightable options.

Here’s a few places to start. Although we can’t vouch for any of them, we’ve been giving a few elk steaks a lascivious lingering over.

• ExoticMeats.com – The winner by dint of domain, Exotic Meats has a decent shopping cart interface, a wide selection of more conservative meats—rattlesnake but no cobra, we’re saying—and a variety of sampler packs to get you dabbling at around $100. They’re West Coast, so those of us on the Atlantic side might want to look elsewhere—ten pounds of meat to Brooklyn is at least $60.

• Amazon! – Despite a newly-opened Grocery, The online stalwart doesn’t really sell the meat themselves, instead linking to several vendors of exotic fare. (So no free Amazon shipping, either.) While you might find better deals elsewhere, Amazon is useful for comparing the offerings (offalings?) of several different, say, elk tamale providers.

• Game Sales, Intl. – If you’re looking for exotic meat that isn’t from our North American continent, this Colorado-based company imports red deer from New Zealand, wild boar from Russia, and kangaroo from the kelp beds of the Indian Ocean. The rest of their offering is pretty pedestrian—still no god damn cobra—but not every meat seller is going to have some of these offerings.