Shrimp served both living and drunk, stunned in a strong liquor called baijiu. Diners usually bite the head off first before consuming the body. A horrible pursuit, not just for the cruelty aspect, but also for the severe risk of paragonimiasis.
While traveling in Suzhou, Ch!na, the Foodbeast squad had the opportunity to try the nation’s live ‘drunken shrimp’ dish for the very first time.
For those unfamiliar, this delicacy can be found across various parts of Ch!na, and involves live freshwater shrimp that are immersed in a liquor-based sauce of some kind prior to eating. They often come to the table swimming or jumping in the alcohol, and it’s recommended to eat them once movement has ceased. Variations of this dish also include boiling the shrimp briefly either before or after they are marinated in the alcohol.
The version the Foodbeast crew came across at Laodongwu Restaurant in Suzhou was lively, as you can see in the above Instagram video. This is what Foodbeast’s Reach Guinto had to say upon trying them for the first time:
“To this day, that nervousness from having to kill a living thing with my teeth is still pretty fresh; I’d say just as fresh as that shrimp tasted. Rich, slightly briny, subtly sweet live shrimp paired with the punch of the alcohol sauce made the experience well worth it.”
If you’re curious to try these for yourself but aren’t in Ch!na, there may be a restaurant in your area that carries some variation of the live drunken shrimp. We came across a 2006 report of one restaurant in Rowland Heights, California, that served it with prawns, but it was an off-menu item and it’s unclear if they still serve it.
The drunken shrimp, eaten alive while inebriated, with no hope for survival; not only for the shrimp, but for those who eat it as eating uncooked freshwater shrimp increases one’s risk of a foodborne illness, specifically a parasitic lung infection. But hey, that probably is not all too scary for the “adventurous eaters” who would just forge ahead in today’s world of dangerous challenges and eat them anyway!
We wanted to get this one in just before lunch if you’re undecided about what’s worth eating today.
If you’ve been following our weird food series, it should come as no surprise that this culinary creepshow is a Chinese dish. Drunken Shrimp. Essentially your drunken shrimp dish is comprised of a healthy helping of prawns which are seasoned and unceremoniously left swimming in a strong liquor called Baijiu, Baijiu typically runs between 80 and 100-proof, which is approximately 40 to 60 percent alcohol by volume. But the “weird part” (we guess, maybe weirder is a better word) the shrimp are uncooked. That’s right, the dish before you is a pile of live shrimp bathing in a sea of strong alcohol which stuns them and presumably makes them slower and easier to grab. Perhaps makes them a little less accurate as they’re snapping at your face with their little claws because they’re still alive!
Their flavor is reportedly quite similar to cooked shrimp. There are also other versions of the dish where the shrimp are killed or cooked first, but where’s the challenge in that? When you sit down for your weird seafood dish, it’s a greater challenge to do battle with an angry, drunken shrimp taking one last crack and tearing your lips open as you move to chomp down on it, live.
Now, don’t be fooled by the knock-off recipes you see online for Drunken Shrimp or Spicy Drunken Shrimp at all of the usual recipe sites, because we know you’re going to search for this once you’re finished here. There is only one “real deal” in the Drunken Shrimp realm, and that is the one-on-one battle you will have, should you dare, with angry drunken live shrimp.
