Palm Beach restaurants: Chefs reveal the creepiest foods they've had the nerve to put in their mouths

Squid-ovary soup, anyone? Extra-plump roasted ants?

Such would seem the fodder for a witch’s brew in this Halloween season, but Palm Beach chefs, restaurateurs, sommeliers and others have consumed these things — often with trepidation or momentary pause.

They’ve also tasted other items that might send chills down the backs of conventional-minded eaters.

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Just ask them: What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever eaten?

“That’s easy,” said Clay Conley, chef/co-owner of Palm Beach hotspots Buccan and Imoto.

The multiple-time James Beard Award-nominee has consumed a wide spectrum of eats throughout his career, but a dish in Tokyo caught him by surprise. While living in Japan in 2004 to help open a restaurant for celebrity chef Todd English, Conley dined at a restaurant famed for its mosquito-eyeball soup.

He tried something else instead: the aforementioned squid-ovary soup. “The restaurant had two tables in it and I remember the soup having a very intense broth with feathery things floating in it — almost like eggs in an egg drop soup. … I didn’t love it.”

What's on the menu? Fried lamb brain!

Longtime Breakers Vice President of Food and Beverage Nick Velardo has boldly explored the world of food and wine for decades, but time was when eating lamb brain was a novel chew for him.

“Early in my career, I used to work in the kitchen of a Greek restaurant in Connecticut and they loved to roast lamb — especially the head,” said Velardo, also board president of the Florida Restaurant & Lodging Association’s Palm Beach County chapter. “As a delicacy, they fried the brain, which is actually quite delicious.”

For another Palm Beach dining-scene epicure, ant larvae proved to be a disquieting eye-opener during a trip to Mexico six years ago.

While scouting potential new restaurant locations, Dobi Trendafilova, operations director for Le Bilboquet Group — which includes Le Bilboquet in Palm Beach — dined at a fine Mexico City restaurant where the specialty was escamoles.

“It’s essentially ant larvae, although it’s often referred to as Mexican caviar,” Trendafilova recalled of the meal she ate with Le Bilboquet owner Phillipe Delgrange. “It’s an acquired taste for sure.”

For Renato’s executive pastry chef Vesna Capric, summoning a frightening food experience isn’t easy. After all, she noted, she grew up on her family’s Montenegro farm, eating “pig’s ears, cow’s tongue, chicken feet — you name it.”

Then she remembered being freaked out by a bunny on a platter.

While working as a young pastry chef in Switzerland in the late 1980s, she and friends were served whole rabbit at a St Moritz eatery.

“It was skinned, cleaned and roasted with vegetables all around the platter, but it was whole with its legs and everything attached and you could clearly see it was a rabbit. All I could think was that eating it would be like eating someone’s pet.”

A certain reptile was “by far the scariest thing I ever had to eat,” said David Sabin, the founder/chief organizer of the annual Palm Beach Food & Wine Festival, which takes place Dec. 8-11 this year.

The quantity and variety of alligator Sabin faced in one sitting was particularly unsettling, he said.

While judging a 2015 head-to-head chefs’ cooking competition highlighting alligator — the tail, belly, legs, ribs and more — “I was required to try a dozen dishes,” said Sabin, who’s married to acclaimed area chef Lindsay Autry. “It was the first and last time I ate alligator.”

A traditional Scottish dish known to inspire fear in the squeamish once panicked Master Sommelier Virginia Philip, who owns an eponymous Palm Beach wine-and-spirits shop.

During a visit years ago to see a relative in London, a family meal included haggis. That’s the Scottish pudding-like sausage made with oatmeal and sheep’s heart, liver and lungs — all encased and served in the animal’s stomach.

“I was absolutely horrified — and it was not good,” Philip said.

A taco with leaf-cutter ants as big as 3/4 inch long

For Tom Whitaker, England native and  executive chef at The Colony, a dish this past spring challenged his wits: an ant taco.

Roasted “zompopos de mayo” — leaf-cutter ants that can grow as big as ¾ inch long —filled a soft-shell corn taco with avocado crema and pico de gallo.

“It was made by our executive sous chef Yamileth Sandoval,” who’s from Guatemala, said Whitaker. “I think Yami wanted to see if I would accept the challenge (of eating the ants), which I did,” he said. “It was crunchy.”

“Gooey” is one of the ways Sebastien Tribout, director of operations at Meat Market Palm Beach, described the eating quality of downing his first fish eyeball after a friend visiting him from Vietnam dared him to do so.

It happened one day two years ago as Meat Market’s culinary team finished making fish stock with a fish head. “My friend said of the fish head, 'You know, you can eat the eyes,’” recalled Tribout. “Then she made me try one. It was gooey and chewy. In some cultures, this may be a delicacy and I respect that; but for me, I found no pleasure in it.”

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Halloween in Palm Beach: Scary foods chefs have eaten