My fussy food adventures: From picky eater to gourmet

Can someone with a particularly discerning palate be a good food critic?

I am a fussy eater. So who, then, am I to tell people where and what to eat?

What is the point in a food reviewer who writes about spaghetti Bolognese and chicken nuggets - the "safe" foods of American pop culture, or, closer to home, rice and chicken curry, a safe staple for picky eaters in Bangladesh? But, here’s the twist - I am an adventurous fussy eater.

Sushi was perhaps the first exotic food I had. I was eight. The restaurant was Samdado. And it was long before sushi shops had sprouted like mushrooms across Dhaka.

I've never eaten fish curries at home because of the not-so-subtle fishy odour that only I appeared to sense. But that undercurrent wasn’t there in Samdado’s dishes.

My first taste of sushi rolls was of the tempura - prawn battered and deep fried. Crunchy and fresh, it was served slathered in flavoured mayonnaise and wrapped in rice.

But even a more acquired taste like sashimi, raw fresh fish sliced and served cold with an accompaniment of soy sauce, did not bother me.

I learnt to relish not only the flavours of the fish, but its textures. I could physically feel how fattiness could be used as flavouring in an otherwise bland dish. It was strange, yet it piqued my interest.

The next time I tried something adventurous, I found my favourite restaurant. I used to take French lessons at the Alliance Française in Dhaka. One day, out of curiosity, I looked up French restaurants in the city. To my surprise, there was one.

Around 2014, one of the most exclusive Japanese restaurants in town was Wasabi. It shared the space with two less popular siblings - Bellagio, and Le Soufflé. As far as I know, these were Dhaka's only true fine dining establishments at the time, serving European cuisine and dabbling in molecular gastronomy. My father and I first tried escargot - garden snails served in a buttery parsley sauce - at Le Soufflé.

It was lavish. We got little round tongs for the dish to avoid scorching our fingers on the hot shells. There were also tiny two-pronged forks to pull the snail from it protective coating. The snail itself was meaty, but the parsley butter made it seem softer and smoother than it would have with any other sauce, such as a sharp marinara or silky béchamel.

When I told my mother about my new favourite eatery, she was disappointed. Her story, like any other Bengali mother's, began at least a few miles away from her actual point.

"You know we used to raise ducks when was I young? I would spend all day watching and feeding them. You've seen the lake in front of our house, right? I used to pluck snails from the lake's edge, crack their shells with stones and to feed them to the ducks as a treat. Who would have guessed, all these years later, that my own daughter would spend our hard-earned money on the same things I fed our pets?"

Despite my mother's disapproval, I kept going back to Le Soufflé for more snails. Unfortunately, Le Soufflé closed permanently a few years later. It may have been due to a lack of publicity and customers, but it might also be because my mother cursed the place after I splurged the family budget on poultry feed.

You can still find escargot at Gulshan’s Oro for Tk 1,500 a plate. I can’t say it tastes as good, but, then again, it lacks that seasoning of fond memories.