(CN): Animal penis tests the tastebuds of Olympic visitors

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Animal penis tests the tastebuds of Olympic visitorsGarry Linnell in Beijing

| July 31, 2008 12:00am

 

IT'S a hard act to swallow. Let's be honest. We came to China not for the

Olympics, or the promise of new democratic freedoms, or even the chance to

buy some cheap electronic equipment and flog it off to friends for a profit

back home.

 

No, we came here for the food, in all its bizarre, exotic glory. Take your

pick. Scorpion kebab? Roast dog leg? Deep fried worm? And for the absolutely

fearless, what about the ham sandwich on offer at the Olympic media centre?

 

But nothing, surely, beats the diced, gristly thing dangling from my

chopsticks.

 

Welcome to Guolizhuang, a Beijing restaurant specialising in animal penises

and testicles.

 

The locals refer to it as a petrol station for men and a beauty parlour for

women, so devoutly do they believe in the health-giving properties of animal

genitals.

 

So there seemed no point in wasting time. Entrée was demolished quickly - a

combination dish of fried, honeyed worms that spent their life eating only

bamboo, the wagyu beef equivalent of the slug kingdom.

 

But now main course has arrived and it's far more confronting. The raw

penises of four animals - ox, sheep, deer and donkey - lie limply on a plate

as our waitress stirs a hot pot bubbling away on a portable stove in our

private room.

 

The soup, enriched with chicken and fish bones, has a turtle floating

helplessly in the middle, its head and legs swirling around the shell.

 

It smells and tastes similar to chicken and sweet corn soup.

 

Into this boiling stock go the penises. A few minutes later the first is

hanging from my quivering chopsticks. Ox penis, says the waitress, is full

of protein, good for the skin and aids longevity. And the deeper its colour,

the more effective its properties.

 

Down the hatch it goes. The first thing you notice is the blandness. It's

fatty, slightly chewy and awkward to swallow. The next piece is dipped in

chilli sauce and there is an immediate improvement, but it still fails to

blanket the growing queasiness in the pit of your stomach.

 

Next: Sheep's penis. A flabby little thing taken from a breed of Inner

Mongolian sheep known for strength and speed. Clearly this one was not quick

enough. There's no difference to the ox. Bland, soft rubber.

 

Things improve, flavour-wise, when the deer arrives. But the best is clearly

the donkey penis. Slivered from the top half, it looks like a streak of

bacon and carries the faint taste of pork.

 

By Chinese standards, it's an expensive meal, well over $A100 and easily

beaten in flavour and texture by the scrambled egg with lily flowers and the

mandatory accompaniment for an Australian in Beijing, fried rice.

 

Of course, we could have opted for the Canadian seal penis but at more than

$500 a dish we begged off. And the " Head Crowned with a Jade Bracelet "

sounded fascinating, but our appetite for horse penis from western China was

by now diminished.

 

The waitress cast a withering look of contempt at us when she saw the amount

of leftover food on our table. She was in an even worse frame of mind when

we knocked back the chance for takeaway.

 

Those who keep coming back to this restaurant swear that the food on offer

enhances their yang, or virility, and provides clear skin and an improvement

in kidney function.

 

Unfortunately, the only thing we noticed was something far more startling.

For the first time we could remember after eating Chinese food, we weren't

hungry a few hours later.

 

 

 

 

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