The 5 Dishes that Made My Career: Andrew Zimmern

The host of Bizarre Foods breaks down his early forays into the world of extreme eating.

He approaches worms, armadillo, cow-skin soup, and calf’s brains with the same glee as a four-year-old does an ice-cream cone.

He is Andrew Zimmern, host of Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern and Andrew Zimmern’s Bizarre World, and author of the new book Andrew Zimmern’s Field Guide to Exceptionally Weird, Wild, and Wonderful Foods.

But how, exactly, does one develop a taste for fruit bats, or end up traveling the world to eat fried scorpions?

To better understand Zimmern’s fascination with the unfamiliar, we sat down to chat about the five transformative dishes that were critical to the development of his adventurous palate as a lad. Spoiler alert: one of them is crispy stringbeans from a Chinese restaurant. So, you never know—even if you don’t think you’re that daring, you might be just a few years away from tucking into a big bowl of wriggling mollusks.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

1. Mussels, Long Island

The obsession started early for me, I must have been three, four, five years old. As a little kid, I ate mussels every other day in the summertime. We’d summer out on Long Island and my father would lower me by my leg into between rocks so I could harvest mussels, and we’d cook them up on the beach—in pots with shallots, parsley, and white wine, with crusty bread on the side—and I remember the taste of those wild mussels and their broth. It opened my eyes early on, the idea that you could forage in nature, that food was a broad and expansive group and not just found in the supermarket. It informed not only my culinary career as a cook, but also my television career, in terms of storytelling and describing to people why things are culturally important. I always get asked, “Have you ever gotten sick making your show?” I haven’t. But I have gotten sick at least once a year from eating mussels. I don’t care. I’d eat them for breakfast.

2. Whole-roasted baby goat/lamb/pig, Spain

I mention all three of these together for a reason. It was 1973, I was 12 years old, and I went to Spain for the first time with my family. My father took us to Valle de Los Callados, outside Madrid, where there was a fantastic old restaurant underneath the Roman aqueduct. The waiter came up to you and said, “Goat, lamb, or pig?” Then they’d bring your choice out on a big oval plate, this relatively newborn young animal, probably 18-24 inches long, and you ate the whole thing yourself. The younger the animal, the more tender and delicate the meat. It was one of those moments of reckoning. I was so swept up in the drama of it, in the protocol of it, in the tradition of it. It was partaking in history, and I fell in love with the story of food.

3. Meal at Restaurant Paul Bocuse, Lyon

The following year, we were at Val D’Isère skiing. There was a blizzard and we were trapped in the hotel, and eventually when it cleared, my father borrowed a van and we all piled in, and he drove us through the Alps all day and into the afternoon until we got to Lyon. We ate at Paul Bocuse, then slept in the airport hotel in Lyon, and drove back to the hotel the next day. Bocuse was the Lion of Lyon—you could trace his [lineage] back through the chefs he worked for to Escoffier and Carême, who codified classic French cuisine. I ordered the tasting menu. I will never forget the black truffle soup under a dome of puff pastry, or the tiny little thimble-sized pyramid of mousses that arrived. I was overwhelmed with the possibilities of food. That dinner, I knew for sure I was going to be in the food business for my life. I always suspected, but at that moment, I knew there was no turning back.

4. Crispy fried string beans, Uncle Tai’s Hunan Yuan (New York City)

The Chinese food revolution happened in NYC in the second half of the 1970s. For a gazillion years in New York, Chinese food was in Chinatown, or in chow mein takeout spots, or the high-end Cantonese restaurants with maître'ds wearing black tuxedos. Richard Nixon, God bless him, did a lot of fucked up shit, but when he and Kissinger reached out to China for a cultural exchange in the early '70s, the result was some amazing chefs that came from China. Uncle Tai’s was the first Hunan Szechuan-style restaurant—it was like food from Mars. I had no idea food like that existed. That restaurant cemented my fascination with Chinese food that exists to this day. I think the seminal influence I have on the food world is this notion of what we can learn about food from other cultures—how we use food as a divining rod to explore those cultures. When I look back at my life, I see the Chinese food revolution as the start of me getting really jazzed about the global possibilities of food.

5. Eel and cucumber pinwheel, Hatsuhana (New York City)

When Hatsuhana opened in the '70s, it was a groundbreaker. There wasn’t a restaurant in New York serving such a fancified version of sushi and sashimi, and a handful of cooked dishes. My father would go there almost every day for lunch when it opened, and I remember going with him. We’d eaten eel in East Hampton because they were all around the inland waterways, and we’d buy them, gut them, skin them, and grill them. But I’d never seen eel in a Japanese restaurant. Instead of putting it in a traditional roll, they’d roll it up in a long piece of thinly sliced cucumber. You can imagine the cool cucumber and hot fatty eel inside. To see this kind of thing for the first time was, like, “Holy shit, there’s so much to this food world I don’t understand.” I made it my business when I graduated from high school to learn as much as I could about it.