Chicken Heads

Every month I organize a little music party in Shanghai called The Antidote. We usually do it at C's Bar on Dingxi Lu. Next door to C's Bar is Uncle's BBQ. They do Dongbei-style barbecue here (Dongbei means northeast China). So I've been going to Uncle's quite a lot since they opened last year. I like how you can just go and point to the raw skewers without having to read the menu. Some of the stuff is weird meat that my native Chinese friends don't even know the words for, much less able to translate to English, so we have to use charades. The waiter just points to his own body parts to explain what this and that is on the skewers. They got hearts, necks, tongues, just about every weird thing you can imagine. But I was delighted to see a new item last night -- chicken heads! They have skewers with 2 or 3 little chicken heads on them. They slice the chicken heads vertically down the center, and spread them out, so you see the profile of each chicken head from both sides at once.



I have to say, these were really difficult to consume because I just didn't find much meat to eat on them. I picked at them for several minutes with my front teeth, tried to pull off edible parts, and eventually just put the whole head in my mouth. That didn't work. It was just a solid and rubbery boney mass.

Disappointed with the chicken heads, we ordered some tongues. I'd had tongues like these before, at a dim sum restaurant in Oakland, California. Peony Pavilion, I think. They had this enormous platter with like 30 or 50 duck tongues on them. Did you know ducks have a bone in the middle of their tongues? Do people? I tried feeling around for my tongue bone but I almost gagged.



Anyway, these tongues were kind of bigger than the other duck tongues I'd had, so I said are you sure they're ducks? For a while there was some confusion because someone suggested they were actually lamb tongues, but that would be silly, lamb tongues would look totally different, probably like little cow tongues. But I'm certain these were duck tongues because I know the Mandarin Chinese word for duck is "yah-zi" and it also means male prostitute. One that makes a ton of cash entertaining rich married ladies. And to think I've been doing that for free all these years...

There's not much meat on those heads and tongues, so we ordered more. One of my favorite items here is actually the cow cartilage, er, beef tendon. It has a nice firm chewiness and a subtle flavor perfect for sprinkling the spice powders on. It was first translated to me as "cow viens" but I didn't think that was possible. When checking out weird meat, you really have to be inquisitive.