Supper of the beast: Where to dine on creepy cuts of meat
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From most folks' culinary point of view, Halloween calls to mind individually wrapped fun-sized candy bars and bowls full of injection-molded sugar in the form of misshapen pumpkins and outsized corn kernels. To foodies, Halloween means harvest time: slaughtering hogs, roasting ribs, and picking apples, corn, and pumpkins. But what about consumption for burgeoning vampires, zombies, and werewolves? For anyone who gazes at the harvest moon and gets a sudden craving for guts, tongues, blood, or hearts, The A.V. Club rounds up some of the stranger meats lurking on local menus.
Heart
Nothing says victory like devouring the heart of your enemy. Inka Heritage serves strips of beef heart in a traditional fire-roasted Peruvian style, evoking human sacrifice. Beef heart is lean, dense meat—you know, from all that life that used to course through it—and Inka Heritage cooks it until it's tender and pleasant to gnaw into pieces.
Blood
While most creatures of the night don't bother cooking and congealing their blood suppers, Fugu does the work for you. It might not be as tasty as human blood, but Fugu's Szechuan pig's blood offering is still worth putting on your finest black cape for. The fried pig ear in chili sauce (a good start if you're going out as Mike Tyson this year) and pig intestines round out a pretty diverse "pan-Asian" menu. But the scariest part may be the obligatory 15 percent gratuity added to every bill.
Entrails surprise
If you'd rather not know just which parts you're swallowing, El Pescador serves up a stimulating mystery-meat dish. Hot stone bowls filled with sea-creature parts—including many different tentacles—provide a downright underworldly experience. Despite persistent curiosity about why the hell it's so chewy, even non-freaks will find that its flavors are admirably balanced and simple.
Nothing goes better with intestines and tendon than rice stick noodles. Ha Long Bay makes arguably the best pho in town, and the "Deluxe" option comes with a surplus of body bits: sausage, tripe (intestines), tendon, and steak. No need to rend flesh from bone here, either: The tendon is stringy and slides down easy and most often gets mixed up with all the rice noodles (though it doesn't have much flavor here), while the tripe is like a savory animal-fat gummy bear. Biting down gives way to a velvety and also flavorless inside, and pretty much reinforces any thoughts you may have had about why this isn't something a lot of people go out looking for in a meal. Thin strips of rare steak and chunks of sausage round out the animal-part flight, but the real stars of the meal are the broth and rice noodles, garnished with a generous helping of basil, lemon, bean sprouts, and peppers.
Tongue
This cut of meat is pretty creepy if you stop to think about it: You have two tongues in your mouth and you're trying to choose which one to chew and swallow. It's the sort of existential crisis that could drive any reasonable taqueria patron to accidental self-mutilation and cannibalism. That said, Taquerias Guanajuato and Guadalajara offer excellently prepared lengua (tongue) tacos as a matter of course. Tongue comes in little chunks, and is sort of like really squishy, fatty roast beef. While you're ordering tacos, Guadalajara also offers a gordita that might make your skin crawl—chicharrones in salsa verde. Somehow, the cooks take pig skin and replace anything that isn't fat (which isn't much) with poblano salsa, creating a mutant hybrid of Fruit Roll-Up and neon-green Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ooze. Abandon hope, all ye who sup upon this: It's the only thing in this article that The A.V. Club could not finish.
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