A dish served at Hong Kong’s Ocean Park marine theme park during Halloween. Photo: SCMP
Source:
https://scmp.com/lifestyle/food-drink/article/3153888/halloween-foods-are-real-horror-show-pity-chef-who-has-make Food & Drink
Halloween foods are a real horror show: pity the chef who has to make pizza with a monster face and the bartender asked to concoct ghastly looking drinks for Instagram posts
- It’s the time of year when restaurant owners and marketing teams put pressure on their kitchen staff to come up with “something spooky”
- But if you really want food that shocks, try eating grilled fish heads, deep-fried grasshoppers, chocolate-covered ants or blood sausages
Dishes for members of the media during Ocean Park Halloween press conference to present the 15th Halloween Fest, at the Tuxedos Restaurant in Ocean Park, Aberdeen. 27AUG15
I imagine most chefs in the city just hate Halloween. That’s the time of the year when restaurant owners and marketing teams pressure the kitchen to come up with “something spooky” for their “fright night” parties and promotions.
Often that means conjuring visually novel cocktails and gimmicky foods. At the most basic level, it’s making hot dogs with wieners that look like human fingers or pizzas with monster face features made from olive eyes, razor-sharp mozzarella canine teeth and splattered tomato sauce blood for extra gruesome appeal.
Meanwhile, bartenders are expected to use a lot of dry ice for witchy cauldrons of drinks that include bloodshot eyes made from lychees, and chocolate-carved insects. Red- or black-coloured beverages are particularly encouraged because they will make a fun Instagram post for patrons.
The thing is, I’m not so sure anyone over the age of 12 is actually interested in drinking or eating something that belongs on the set of H.R. Pufnstuf (Google it, millennials!)
To be fair, I will admit if I’m with a group of friends and we notice such goofy dishes on the menu, social conviviality dictates somebody at the table will end up ordering at least a couple of the items, for fun if not for gastronomic pleasure.
However, I also don’t remember the last time I had dinner with friends on Halloween night. Like any festive holidays in Hong Kong – including St Valentine’s Day, Christmas, New Year’s Eve – hospitality outlets pull out all the stops to rake in customers. Sadly, it often means overpriced celebrations that accompany disappointing set menus.
In the case of Halloween, the thrill of joining a throng of revellers in the city’s Lan Kwai Fong nightlife district in bad make-up or cheap rubber masks, bought 10 minutes earlier from a costume stall on nearby Pottinger Street, left me years ago already. Call me a geezer, but I have no interest in partaking in a parade of loud boozy yahoos, whose raison d’être is to garner pointless attention. I’m just too old for that s**t now.
The only chance in this lifetime I’m going to appear in public in a ridiculous costume again is if Anna Wintour invites me to attend her Met Gala and Jeremy Scott agrees to design me a tux. In other words, it ain’t gonna happen.
It’s also slightly dismaying that ridiculous Halloween-themed baking and cooking programmes seem to be actively promoted by various TV channels. Just the shows I’ve heard about on Netflix and the Food Network include Halloween Wars, Halloween Baking Championship, Halloween Cake-Off, Freakshow Cakes, and the cheeky, morbid confections of The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell.
A bar in Lan Kwai Fong at Halloween in 2019. Photo: Dickson Lee
All of them tout the fun and spectacle of large-scale, “horror” looking foods that have little real purpose than to be frivolous.
I suppose there’s no harm in once a year being served nightmare appetisers like a skull wrapped in parma ham, or graveyard desserts dripping with strawberry coulis guts. However, in addition to being mostly tasteless, most of these concoctions have little to do with actual taste. It’s more about how goofy and goth-y you can make kitchen ingredients.
Personally, I don’t need to look at food pretending to be scary. I’ve eaten snail soup, marinated duck tongue, grilled fish heads, and enjoyed all of them. Chocolate-covered ants do not scare me, neither do deep-fried grasshoppers. And I actually like pig’s lung soup, cooked tripe and blood sausages, especially the Spanish morcilla.
In other words, the whole silly game of making faux gruesome Halloween snacks feels like a patronising exercise. Dare I say it: it’s the gastronomic equivalent of doing blackface and not actually having any close acquaintance or friends who are black.
Deep-fried grasshoppers are a real food, so why make fake insects to eat for Halloween?. Photo: Getty Images
If you’re squeamish enough to feel grossed out when an Arabic tribesman on TV eats a goat’s eyeball, don’t act like you’re brave munching a sugared eye socket of a zombie cake bust. That might be a trick, but it’s not actually a treat.