Things that piss me off
Cooked dishes that include shrimp with their tails still attached. Why does anyone do this? The crunchy tail bits are not tasty, and I don't know anyone who likes eating them. When you encounter them in a dish, you have to stop, pull off the tail parts, put them aside, and resume eating. This is a waste of time and energy, and it's messy.
I encountered this tonight in my entree, Pad Thai with jumbo shrimp, at Kin, a relatively new Raleigh restaurant. The appetizers for our group were uniformly quite good, with the crab rangoons and the raw fish sampler being, to my taste, particularly yummy. My Pad Thai was quite spicy, but I like it that way, so I was pleased. My first bite of shrimp was perfect, and I was content--until I had to start removing tails. The desserts were tasty but came with amateurish presentation that featured whipped cream from a can on top of otherwise good basics. I recommend the restaurant, but it could use better desserts.
I know the shrimp tail issue is, in the global scheme of things, insignificant, but if the goal is to create a great dining experience, details count. Chefs, please take off the shrimp tails for us!
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2 comments:
ooh, i agree with you completely! it's such a little thing, but the irritation is extremely disproportionate.
you probably already have your own way of dealing with the tails, but i learned a useful method of de-tailing that minimizes time/energy waste and mess:
with fork in one hand and knife in the other, orient the shrimp horizontally on the plate so the body is toward the fork hand and the tail is toward the knife hand.
place the knife against the tail shell at the point where the meaty part narrows down to the fins; the ideal spot varies by shrimp, but you want to have enough meat between the two sides of the tail that you can feel when the knife transitions from meat to shell.
push down hard enough to cut through the top layer of shell and the meat, but not through the bottom layer. this is surprisingly easier than it sounds!
holding the knife in place, use the fork to pull the shrimp body out of the tail shell. the shrimp is now conveniently positioned on the fork to be transferred to your mouth. :)
with practice, i've been able to reduce this to two motion clusters: position-shrimp-place-knife-cut-shell and stab-shrimp-with-fork-remove-from-shell-and-eat.
it's still annoying, but i'm less likely to end up with crunchy shrimp...
(speaking of tail-on shrimp - the ones where they don't even manage to get all the legs off are the ones that really irk me. both because it adds overhead to my finely tuned tail-removal process, and because it implies new heights of diner-experience indifference.)
- lisa
I should have known you would have solved the science riddles of the clinging shrimp tail. I'll have to try it.
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