Le Menu: Xtreme Cuisine

Xtreme Cuisine: Arizona's cunning culinary wizard Chef Kaz Yamamoto prepares taboo illegal moveable feasts for the elite and über-rich

I devour half my owl in one bite, and find it crunchy and succulent, brown juice covering my fingers and running down one side of my mouth. The heart, liver and other innards pop with an explosion of warm saltiness as I chew into them.

I'm so there.

I was going to put it in "Beyond Chicagoland", and then "Shopping and Cooking".

I don't really think non-food chat is suitable, but it's also not really a restaurant.

The final few paragraphs are the best. Well, him talking about having sex with Ruth Reichl for 16 hours is pretty good, too.

Maybe he should set up in the 49th Ward.

I looked twice to see that the publication wasn't The Onion. It's hard to believe anyone, especially a chef, could be so blithe about harvesting endangered animals or plants, to say nothing of cannibalism, in the name of a gourmet experience. (I believe the part about Reichl.)

This bothers me. I'll try almost anything, if it seems appetizing, but I also believe in sustainable agriculture. Killing and eating 100-year-old saguaros, pygmy owls, penguins, chimpanzees and other endangered plants and animals strikes me as inordinately selfish.

no way......this is a hoax!

Although I was amused by Bert Parks' serenade of the "last" Komodo Dragon in The Freshman, last week's natto at Katsu reminded me that the plant world has plenty of new experiences to offer. So, there is really no need to eat endangered animals. I might make an exception for insects, though the ethical underpinnings of that choice are not yet clear to me.

I agree that this has to be a hoax -- presumably to make some point or provide some social commentary about exteme eating or somesuch. Try googling the chef (Yamamoto) and all you get are references to this article. Try googling his alleged former-model girlfriend ("Alexis Bridgemont") and you also only get the article or references to it. Besides the outrageous nature of the story, I have a hard time thinking this guy could really keep things so on the down low that there are not other references to him out there. But what an imaginative mind for the writer -- the thing about Ted Nugent shooting a flaming arrow at a penguin and eating the exploded and flaming carcass off the arrow is pure gold.

But, the photos in the slideshow look completely real.

Well, maybe not.

It does, however, do a great job of making people think about the subject, and how far is too far.

gleam wrote:But, the photos in the slideshow look completely real.

Well, maybe not.

Thanks for the links to the photos; I hadn't seen those in the slide show format (only in the right margin of the original linked article). Some telltale signs of photoshopping there, methinks.

The piece was published in the Phoenix New Times, the local equivalent of the Reader. They received an angry letter from one of the restaurants mentioned in the piece and responded with this from the Editor:


The Wrigley Mansion [would never] condone anything like this to take place within our facility.
Jill Hawkins, Wrigley Mansion

Editor's note: Of course the Wrigley Mansion doesn't cook dogs! And (for those of you who got to the end of the story, which became more and more ridiculous as it went along) Mayor Phil Gordon and Senator Jon Kyl didn't really pig out on human flesh, either. And news anchor Lin Sue Cooney's never even met Chef Kaz Yamamoto. "Xtreme Cuisine" is a satirical account of this faux Japanese chef's penchant for serving up exotic, sometimes endangered, animals to ritzy clientele. It was one in a long line of New Times parodies. The last was about taxidermied human beings ("Forever Yours," October 28, 2004). The article claimed that space in the huge mansion was rented by our fictional chef for a party there. The main course this comical chef supposedly served was Bichon Frise. Cook us up and serve us for dinner, but we thought this cute breed of canine had an edible-sounding name. We mean, we bet Great Dane would be mighty damn tough! As for our fake chef serving cat, come on! You'd have to eat a litter of 'em to get full. The article was reminiscent of fare from The Onion, Mad Magazine or National Lampoon; parody is a form of social commentary that dates back at least to Jonathan Swift. So don't go burning down the Wrigley, please! It's a great place where we recently hosted a party for Arizona Press Club Journalist of the Year Paul Rubin of our staff. What we were trying to do was poke fun at animal-rights wackos who'd send their turtles to MIT if not for the institute's acceptance policy. Also, it was to poke fun at a movement in the restaurant business around the world to serve up the most bizarre of cuisines. In Japan, they eat gold and poisonous fish, for Buddha's sake! Right here in Phoenix, you can buy leg of lion (no kidding, this time). Need we go on? Well, we plan to. In next week's installment of The Bird, we will further explore reaction to chef character Kaz Yamamoto's wacky world of penguin hunting and fricasseed pooch.