An Arizona restaurant is serving up lion tacos.
At $400 per pound, those are some serious food costs, but I’d be lion if I said I didn’t want one.
That’s awesome. I’d eat one. YOu can get a whole range of exotic meats online, but they aren’t cheap.
I’ve had lion jerky before, and while it sounds neat it’s not. Predators don’t generally taste very good, this tasted mostly like rancid bacon. An animals diet gives most of the flavor to it’s meat and things that eat other things tend to taste very, very gamey and unpleasant. I don’t think there’s enough taco spices out there to cover up that flavor.
Savenor’s on Charles Street in Boston sells some pretty exotic meats, but I don’t see lion listed on their website:
http://www.savenorsmarket.com/site/
But you could get Yak or Elk or Black Bear or Wild Boar steaks, and make a taco out of those.
There’s an interesting double-standard people have.* We can eat cows and pigs and chickens, even lambs and deer and bison. But lions? OMG!!! I don’t know what’s so different about it.
Anyway, I’d probably try it just to try it, but I honestly wouldn’t expect anything spectacular. Most ground meat tastes pretty much like most other ground meat, in my experience.
*Of course there are those who are against the consumption of *any *meat, but I don’t think that’s what this is about.
This might be one time I’m actually glad the item isn’t free range.
Personally, if I were eating lion meat, the whole time I’d be thinking about the fact that I was eating cat. I can see how that would be disturbing to some people. After all most people don’t keep cows and chickens and pigs as pets. Granted most people don’t have lions as pets either. But the relation to Garfield is probably a little too close for comfort.
African Lion for less than $20/lb at a local exotic meat dealer in the Chicago area.
ETA: I didn’t watch the video, but clicking on the OP’s link, I see that the opening still from the video contains a flyer from the above-mentioned exotic meat dealer.
The burger meat that’s pictured is $9.95 a pound at Czimer’s. Don’t know where the hell the $400/pound cost comes from. And, think about it, if your materials cost is $400/pound and you’re selling your taco for $8.95 each, how are you possibly making a profit? A taco made with $0.99/pound meat goes for about $2 around here.
He said he knew that he would not make any profit- He is doing this for publicity, and it appears to be working. A quick Google search of “Lion Tacos” returns a bunch of news hits.
Maybe that is 80/20 lion in Chicago, and Kobe that he is purchasing?
I don’t buy it. They show a picture of the ground lion meat, and it’s from Czimer’s, which is what I linked to above, where it costs $9.95 a pound. The video itself says it’s from a Midwest farm. The article contradicts this, saying it’s from a California farm. At any rate, the video footage contains the package from Czimer’s and, unless they just found some file footage or got someone in Chicago to shoot that video for them, I assume they just took a shot of the lion meat that was lying around the restaurants when they were shooting the footage.
It’s ten bucks a pound. No way he’s paying $400/lb, even for that kind of publicity.
Volume!
I mean, a standard taco is going to have something like an eighth of a pound of meat. That’s $50 per taco in costs. For him to break even on his material costs, he’d need to serve his tacos with 1/44 pound of meat. Assuming that the a good portion of the people coming to his place because of the publicity are doing so to try the lion tacos, he’d be hemorrhaging cash at that rate (assuming a standard 2 oz taco or, hell, even a 1 oz taco). I doubt he’d be making up for it with increased sales of his other products.
I’m willing to bet, given the evidence in the video and the business aspect of it, he’s getting it for the aforementioned $9.95/lb or similar.
ETA:
Also, note the end:
No idea how big a lion tenderloin is, so that’s not $199.99/lb, that’s for the whole loin. The burgers work out to $20/pound, much more sensible. Where is the $400/lb figure coming from?
But maybe the meat taste like lasanga?
I just realized – that video is for lion burgers, but the article is for lion tacos. There’s a bit of a disconnect there.
By the way – I am so naming my next band “Lion Tacos.”
This was the article that referenced the $400 for an entire tenderloin, and $199 for ground beef.
The journalism seems a bit shoddy there. $100/lb for ground beef? And that directly contradicts the other sources mentioned here.
In other words, I think the inflated prices are part of the publicity stunt. He’s paying, at most, $20/lb for ground lion meat.
ETA: Also, that particular article doesn’t say $400 for a whole tenderloin or $199 for ground beef. It says $400/lb for the tenderloin, and $100/lb for the ground beef. Tenderloin is $24.95/lb at Czimer’s, for comparison.
Correct. Since we have been talking about single-pound servings, I took it for granted and did not specify with the amount.
Anyway, yeah I didn’t like the way that one was written as well as the ABC article, but the AZ Star is where $400 came from.
Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion Taco”!
Tenderlion!
The jokes write themselves…
That would be a taco with some bite!
But seriously, predators don’t taste good, although another lion might be okay with eating a lion taco.