Why do restaurants see fit to leave the tailes of shrimp on oin what would otherwise be a perfectly delightful meal??
Because they make good handles.
They’re also nice and crunchy when fried!
(pause for the gagging to subside)
Just don’t do it when you have to impress anyone.
…uh, so you can keep track of how many shrimp you ate? Stimulating conversation on a dinner date.
He: Hey I ate seven shrimp and you ate nine, look at the tails!
She: (thinking to herself) Loser…
…send lawyers, guns, and money…
Warren ZevonAside from making a nice handle, I guess another reason would be to affirm the fact that you are actually eating a shrimp. Without the tail, it would just look like a piece of fried… erm… something… if they substituted that with some ingeniuos synthetic food, you’d never be able to tell the difference…
In college, my roomate told me that where he came from they always ate the shrimp tales. Being gullible, I ate about ten–crunchy but not particularly tasty–before I noticed that on his plate there was a pile of very much uneaten shells.
Obviously, you swallowed his shrimp tale.
BTW, the “vein” on a shrimp that’s removed before cooking isn’t a vein at all. It’s the intestine. Have a nice day. 
“What we have here is failure to communicate.” – Strother Martin, anticipating the Internet.
So deveining is really disembowling.
I suspect it has to do with aesthetics (don’t they look nicer with the tail?) plus they’d cost a whole lot more if somebody else took 'em off for you. I eat them if they’re crispy, and for some reason have this idea that they’re good for me.
So, anyone other than Sycorax and cornflakes regularly eat the tails in a restaurant?
For those of you who do not, how do you remove the tails from your food when in a restaurant? Do you cut them off with a knife and then move them with your fork? Or do you remove the tail by hand to ensure you get all the yummy shrimp goodness and let people stare at you? I brought this question up at the NC Dopers’ meeting and no one really had an answer. They just looked at me weird.
I always try to do things in chronological order.
I grab the tail, bite most of the shrimp off, then suck the last bit of shrimp from the piece of shell left near the tail… Mmmmmm good stuff, Maynard!
“Shrimp tails, shrimp tails,
Roly-poly shrimp tails.
Shrimp tails, shrimp tails,
eat them up. Yum!”
Voted Best Sport
And narrowly averted the despised moniker Smiley Master
Forward deployed until 18AUG00
personally, when i eat shrimp, i grab them by the tail, and then i semi-bite all the way through, and then pull away, getting all the shrimpy-goodness outta it.
The reason why the tails are left on, is because it prevents them from rot. Yea, that’s right. There is a little peice of meat inside the tail, and if that peice of meat is exposed for a while, it begins to rot. Now, that peice of meat rts a lot quicker than the rest of the shrimp (not exactly sure why…) But yeah, that’s why when they are raw. I don;t really know why when they are cooked, perhaps less labour for the lazy ass cooks in this world?
Trust me on that first part. I have worked in the Seafood department at my local grocery store for 5 years now…
wonders how he can stand it anymore…
The shrimp tails are tasty when fried, with a little soy sauce and sesame seeds. Frinstance, at one of those cook-on-the-table Japanese restaurants, you can ask the guy to cook the shrimp tails for you.
Just boiled, though, I dunno. I guess they wouldn’t hurt you, but I don’t know that they’d have much taste.
I am a fan of shrimp tails myself. It’s probably partly upbringing, my whole family eats them. As a matter of fact, I knew a lot of people that ate the tails when I was growing up, and didn’t understand the strange looks I would get when I moved out to California and would eat them in resturants.
Maybe it’s a New England thing? Possibly an Italian New England thing? Anyone else from that area of the country remember this?
laziness is the first thing that comes to mind.