I am a fairly fearless eater. I've dined on boiled goose blood and fish bladders in Hong Kong, llama pate in Chile, and fermented whale meat on the Faroe Islands — although I draw the line at Greenland's seal-and-blubber soup. Upon hearing that the Mandarin Oriental Tokyo had recently started offering insect snacks at the Mandarin Bar, I immediately wanted to taste them.
Cooking with bugs is a fairly recent fad among top fine-dining restaurants around the world. In 2012, U.S. chef Jose Andres made headlines for introducing grasshopper tacos at his Washington, D.C. restaurant Oyamel, while Brazilian chef Alex Atala popularized the trend by topping dishes with Amazonian ants that taste of lemongrass at D.O.M. in Sao Paolo. In Copenhagen, Noma's Rene Redzepi regularly dispatches foragers to collect the citrusy wood ants he uses to garnish steak tartare. More recently, Tokyo chef Zaiyu Hasegawa of Jimbocho Den has adopted the idea by crowning his signature garden salad with a single ant from Chiba Prefecture.
Noma, says food and beverage director Thomas Combescot-Lepere, was the original inspiration behind the Mandarin Oriental's unusual new bar snacks (this January, the Danish restaurant will relocate to Tokyo temporarily for a six-week residency at the hotel's French restaurant Signature, and ants will likely appear on the menu). However, Japan has a long history of consuming arthropods — particularly in the mountainous regions of central and northeastern Japan. One of the most famous edible-insect-producing prefectures is Nagano, where grasshoppers and zazamushi (stonefly larvae) are prized as delicacies.
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