I don’t understand the rationale behind restaurants serving shrimp with the tails attached. It makes sense for cocktail or salt-and-pepper shrimp, where they are supposed to be eaten with the hands and/or consumed whole. But what about in soups or saucy dishes? Then you either have to perform the awkward operation of sawing the tails off or picking them up and getting your fingers all messy.
It seems to me that if the kitchen staff are going to go to the trouble of removing the shell then taking the tail off isn’t that much additional effort.
What am I missing? Is everyone else eating the tails and enjoying them? Is there some other reason for leaving them on?
My wife is Asian. I’ve never seen her, or any of our Asian friends, chomp down on the tail of a shrimp. Might happen somewhere, but I’ve never seen it. She is really good at getting the tail meat out. The secret is to pinch at the base of the tail and that last little section comes right out. You can do it with your fingers or a fork and spoon.
Hear, hear! I just had a shrimp and linguine dish with cream sauce, and the shrimp still had the tails on. There’s no way they expected the diner to pick them up by the tails: they were covered with sauce. It was annoying as hell to have to remove the tails.
Ok, but why did they intend that? What are the advantages?
You can, but it is not very convenient with the dishes I’m talking about. It seems to me that it would be comparatively much easier for the preparer to pinch the tail off beforehand.
I had to deal with this yesterday with a nice big bowl of jumbalaya. The shrimp was covered in rice, peppers, and sauce. It would have been nice to have the tails off before serving the dish. It wasn’t that hard to cut them off with a fork against the side of the bowl though.
I know this isn’t IMHO, but that bugs the hell out of me when they leave the tails on. I’d rather chow down on my car keys than eat the hard shell of a shrimp.
It helps a ton with presentation. I also happen to like the taste of a little tail every once in a while. And it’s really not that hard to detach with a fork and a knife, quit yer bitchin’!
I plonk them in whole - head, tail, legs, whiskers - for a lot of dishes - especially paella and stuff like that - you just have to pick them out and eat them with fingers. No big deal.
I’ve seen people peel them with knife and fork, but I would avoid ordering them if the establishment is such that peeling them by hand might be frowned upon. At home, though, they’re definitely finger food.
I spear the little bastids with my fork in the last tiny bit of meat before the tail, where the little bit of shell is left over the meat-- has the same effect as pinching with the fingers: bite and pull and the whole thing comes out nicely.
I used to go to a Vietnamese restaurant in the Arlington/Falls Church area where they served a soup (maybe their version of pho) that was topped with a funny kind of fried tail-on shrimp. The shrimp wasn’t just dipped in batter, it was in the middle of a circle of batter and they really fried the hell out of it. They told us it was definitely intended that you eat it with the tail–it would be impractical to extricate the tail from this composition. The shell was like soft-shelled crab, maybe a little crunchy but thin and quite pleasing actually.
I had that, only it didn’t come with soup. Just the mass of battered shrimp, a plate of foliage, and a bowl of fish sauce. I wish I could remember what it was called.
There’s a sushi restaurant in town that I eat at regularly that serves several types of rolls with a shrimp tail sticking out of the end one - it’s completely a presentation thing, but it makes for very awkward times for the poor soul who has to navigate the tail with their chopsticks. It is always the last one of its kind left behind, since no one wants to tackle it. The shrimp is in the middle of a sushi roll so it’s not easy to pinch the tail off.
