Adventurous diners feast on $100 per head to enjoy a five course tasting menu whose main dish was the rat meat.
New York artist Laura Ginn hosted the rat meat dinner at the Allegra LaViola Gallery in Manhattan as part of her presentation.
Ginn, who says she's been "working on the development of an intensive program to be able to survive on what we see" in recent years has been learning how to build shelters, hunting, trapping, and tan skin to make her own leather. Her project culminated in the exhibition and dinner, including photographs and videos of her radical experiment in self-sufficiency.
But the real attention-grabber was the five-course tasting menu, which was heavy on the rat, a truly sustainable resource in New York City. According to the news media, the rats that were ordered in bulk and came over, whole and frozen, were not from the sewerage network doctor, but from a clean and safe facility in California.
Tempting recipes to make delicious rodent meals, billed as a "post-apocalyptic hunter-gatherers party," was prepared by the chef Yuri Hart. The course consisted of a goat cheese crostini with rat meat, served with a shot of non-rat gazpacho. "The goat cheese overwhelmed the rat, but we found the flavor and texture reminiscent of lamb," wrote Laura L. Griffin.
Then came a "fat", "salty" and "delicious" rat and pork terrine, followed by the main course, "rat in
two ways" that is, boiled and roasted. Ginn "performatively sucked the flesh from the bones" during this course.
The end of the course, after a palate cleanser was a desert of French bread topped with crispy corned rat. This layer is "a whole head of crispy rat with the mouth open, teeth protruding forward, and black leg on the top of French toast, toes and claws clearly visible," according to Griffin.
Ginn, who was a vegetarian until last year, financed her one-of-a kind spectacle through the crowd kickstarter website for fundraising. She raised a little over her target amount of N300,000.
