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…but once you’ve tried it, feel free to hate it. ((Photo courtesy of Piez.))

My favorite pizza is Hawaiian – ideally with red pepper flakes.  Don’t turn up your nose quite yet.  If you like pizza, ham, pineapple, and spicy food – why not try all these things at once?

Obviously, not everything that tastes great separately also tastes good all mashed together.  Actually, a friend of mine has vowed never to eat at a Chinese-Japanese-Italian-American-BBQ buffet ever again for this very reason.  ((Ray: No one made you eat all of that stuff at once…))

A few weeks ago I decided to try a new pizza… which lead me to compile this short list of the oddest foods I’ve tried:

• Baby octopus. I’ve had the chance to eat baby octopus at several different restaurants – sushi and Chinese places.  Interestingly, each time the baby octopus had the very ends of their tentacles chopped off.  What’s up with that?  They were a little too chewy for my tastes.
  • Verdict: They were okay, nothing to write home about.
• Peanut butter and baked potato. Admittedly, I ate this in order to make the point that anything tastes good with peanut butter.  Fortunately, I was right.  Actually, my theory is that anything tastes good with enough peanut butter, ranch dressing, or barbecue sauce (but not all at once).
  • Verdict: Great!
• Frog legs and snails. They were both on the menu and I’ve never tried either one before, so why the hell not?  The frogs’ legs tasted like chicken and the escargot tasted like garlicky scallops.
  • Verdict: Tasty!
• Anchovies and pineapple pizza. I like Hawaiian pizza, so why not try a pizza with anchovies instead of the ham?  Well, that’s what I thought.  Not terrible, but clearly not me at my culinary-decision-making-best.
  • Verdict: Extremely salty, but edible.
• Blood sausage and dandelion greens pizza. We were eating at a very “upscale” restaurant in Chicago and this was the only thing on the menu which looked somewhat familiar.  We settled on this restaurant based upon the recommendations of a friend of a friend.  Everyone shared their dishes, so I got to sample a little bit of everything.  Unfortunately, my selection out the large list of unacceptable options, was the blood sausage and dandelion greens pizza.  It tasted much worse than it sounds.
  • Here’s what I learned from that last item on the above list.
    1. I strongly suspect that the friends of our friends did not like our friends very much at all.
    2. I do NOT recommend trying pizza with blood sausage.
    3. I would strongly suggest NEVER eating at a restaurant named “Avec” in Chicago.

  • Verdict: Skip this restaurant and thank me later.

I’m not saying that this restaurant is totally without merit.  My experience was probably simply just the result of poorly trained waitstaff, the most uncomfortable seating arrangements I’ve ever encountered, bad ingredient choices, the inability to cook things properly, and extremely severe lapses in judgment.  You know, that’s all.

Too harsh?

Look – that was the only time in my life that I left a restaurant still hungry.  We went back to our hotel room and got room service.  I ordered a platter of nachos so big I was unable to see it with both of my eyes at the same time.