Shrimp Heads as Homewrecker – NYC Restaurant Reviews | donuts4dinner.com

Dr. Boyfriend and I both have birthdays this month, and we want to eat delicious foodz on our special days. For mine, I made us a reservation at The Wright, which is the restaurant inside the Guggenheim Museum. (Click on the link and look at how beautiful it is! I don’t care how good the food is, ’cause I’m going solely for the decor.)

For his birthday, he was thinking about going for an elaborate sushi dinner at the best place in town, but it just so happens that I saw a Momofuku Ko reservation open for that day and decided to snatch it up and try to convince him it was time to go.

In case you’re unaware of the ridiculousness of getting into Ko, it involves logging into a reservation website precisely at 10 a.m. every day, selecting lunch or dinner and the number of people in your party, clicking on every available timeslot, and finding out that they’ve all been taken in the time it took you to move your mouse to them. And you can do this over and over again for weeks without ever getting a reservation. Each night’s spots fill up literally before the clock hits 10:01.

But I got us one! And it’s for lunch, which lasts an extra hour . . . and costs an extra $50! For a total of $175!(!!)

The other ridiculous thing about Ko is that Chef David Chang famously doesn’t allow photos. My blogfriend Chubby memorably drew her meal on a notepad with a Sharpie, but other than that, you rarely, rarely see any of the food they serve. So to be honest, I had no idea what I was getting into.

The website says, “We try our best to serve delicious American food,” which I imagined meant, you know, lots of red meat. But then Dr. Boyfriend IMed me with this:

And then he sent me this photo from VIP in the City:

Which is just mean, right?

We spent the next two days dancing around the issue of me not wanting to eat shrimp heads while I secretly showed the photo to everyone I knew and asked if they thought I could handle it. Their answers ranged from “shrimp heads are delicious” to “those freaky tentacle things scrape the top of your mouth and make you BLEED”, but I kept going back to what Kamran and I always say about challenging foods, which is that anything you’re being served in a fine dining establishment is edible at the very least and more than likely is actually life-changingly delicious.

This morning, Kamran announced out of nowhere in the midst of my watching “The Biggest Loser” before work, “If you’re not going to eat that shrimp head, you can go ahead and cancel our Ko reservation.”

I said, “I’m going to try to eat it! I really want to eat it! But I can’t control the weird things my brain tells me about eating shrimp eyes! An irrational fear is still a fear!”

And he said, “The way you’re reacting to this is making me seriously consider whether or not you can handle what they’ll serve us at Per Se.”

I said, “Don’t threaten me with Per Se! Shrimp heads are objectively gross!”

And he said, “If you feel that way, cancel the Ko reservation. And while you’re at it, cancel The Wright, too.”

So we broke up.

No, just kidding. So I went to work, and we apologized to each other over IM, and he sent me a more recent review that didn’t include any shrimp heads whatsoever. There’s a chance I might have to eat the dreaded SOFT SHELL CRAB, though. I’m so scared.