Looking for foods to try and share a bit of my own culture. My family is cantonese viet and I grew up eating in a lot of traditional banquet hall restaurants. Usually these are dim sum menu for lunch and traditional shared foods for dinner. Most people have tried the common ones like siu mai (pork wrapper dumpling) and haw gow (shrimp rice dumpling) but my favorites are the uncommon ones like ngau zaap (beef offal) and baak wan fung zaau (pickled chicken feet).
Ngau zaap is basically braised brown sauce using off cuts, usually stomach and whatnot, with chinese radish. Its very savory, kinda like if you made an asian gravy.
Baak wan fung zaau is just chicken feet pickled in white vinegar. If you had pickled radish it’s essentially the same pickling and the chicken feet is gelatinous and a bit crunchy. You can also get them sometimes boneless since eating around the bones is kinda a pain. I really like pickled foods so this is one of my faves
“Exotic” is a strong word for nopales. (Nopal is the singular, not nopale) You can get it at every grocery store in the Seattle area. And yeah it doesn’t have a strong flavor on its own. Kinda like green beans?
I can vouch for ant eggs (escamoles) and roast grasshopper (chapulines), they’re tasty but a lot harder to find around here.
Maybe niche then? Didn’t realize exotic had a negative connotation
I don’t remember the last time i saw cacti for sale in a supermarket. Though in all fairness I go to asian ones maybe 70% of the time and standard american ones for the rest
I don’t think exotic is negative, it’s just too commonly available for me to think of it as strange or foreign. Even the Asian groceries around me carry it.