A friend of mine had talked up haggis forever. Then one day I got invited to attend the local Scottish festival with him, where I got the opportunity at long last to try this delicacy. My reaction was somewhere between meh and yuck. I later heard that people in Scotland seldom eat that dish anymore now that they have a world of better food choices available.
Yeah, I think necessity lies behind a lot of ‘local delicacies.’ In the days before common, cheap transportation and refrigeration, you pretty much ate what was produced in your local area – and you liked it! – the other choice being starvation.
Now you can basically get anything anywhere all the time and so the local not-actually-very-yummy fruit loses out in comparison to peaches and bananas and cherries.
My mother was big into “Colonial Cooking.” Stuff like Hermits, a molasses flavored cake-y textured cookie, sometimes with raisins. Really big back then apparently, but a total nothing to kids who grew up on oreos.
But if you want something UTTERLY horrible, go to Sturbridge Village (a mock Colonial town/tourist thingy) and buy “Spruce Gum.” It’s essentially chunks of dried spruce sap. Really. It’s hard, like rocks, totally unchewable, and it tastes like, well, inedible plant sap. They sell it in a tiny matchbox sized box, which doesn’t matter because no one voluntarily puts a second piece into their mouth.
Both New York pizza and Chicago pizza disappointed me. I like a thick, soft, bready crust and neither one provided.
Lobster
This sounds like something people used to ward off scurvy in times of deprivation, before they knew about vitamin C, and there’s enough demand for it that they still make it.
I was surprised at the results of this as she was. SFW.
Growing up, we had a fig tree in our yard. Lots and lots of figs fresh off the tree (and all over the yard). The trick is to wait until they a just a little wrinkly, pluck them off and roll them between your palms a little to mash the insides. Split them open and nibble out the good stuff. Nothing better.
For me, the food that surprised me in a negative way was… Hardboiled eggs.
I was in high school and had, surprisingly, never eaten a hard boiled egg. My mother was talking to a neighbor about a new diet she was on, the hard-boiled egg diet (I think it was one of these “eat as many as you want but nothing else” diets). Later that day, I was getting hungry and thought of the bowl of hard boiled eggs my mom had in the refrigerator. So I grabbed a salt shaker (I knew from TV and movies that people ate hard boiled eggs with salt) and a couple of eggs and sat down. I peeled the first egg, dashed a tiny bit of salt on it (my plan was to experiment to find out what the perfect amount was) and bit into it. The gag reflex was instantaneous, my throat spasmed, the bits of egg flew out of my mouth, and I dry retched for a minute or so. After rinsing my mouth out for a good bit, I cleaned up the egg all over the table, put the unpeeled one back in the fridge, and have never tried to eat a hard boiled egg since then.
I still like eggs fried, poached, soft boiled, scrambled, in omelets, and just about every way they can be served. I don’t even have a problem with bits of hard boiled egg in something like a salad, where they aren’t a dominant flavor, or cooked into a dish. But not whole. 
Poutine. Had some in Montreal, and it was just a big soggy mess of crap. I had two bites, and threw the rest away.
Seconding caviar. Tasted like overly salty, overly strong canned tuna fish.
Sturbridge Village isn’t a Colonial reproduction place – it duplicates life in early-to-mid 19th century America*
I didn’t realize that they sold spruce gum there – I’ll have to check it out.
For years Durgin Park restaurant in Boston sold gum made from pine sap (spruce is a pine, I know). The major complaint of users wasn’t that it tasted awful, but that it was so tenacious that it pulled out your fillings.
Tradition chewing gum is made from plant sap, too, when you come down to it – it’s chicle, which comes from South America. Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana tried to introduce chicle chewing gum to the US when he was in exile from Mexico, but I don’t think he was successful – chewing gum got big in the US sometime later. Spruce gum and pine sap gum just carry the same idea to other plants. In fact, you can look at maple sugar candies as another expression of the idea.**
- Sturbridge Village really started out as the antiques collection of the Wells family, which owned and, for all practical purposes, founded American Optical (no matter what their literature says about William Beecher starting it in 1833). The thing is, their “antiques” included entire buildings, which they assembled into a faux 19th century village.
** in recent decades, chewing gum has been made from edible polymers. Yep, plastics. https://www.polymersolutions.com/blog/sticky-situations-thoughts-on-polymers-in-chewing-gum/
Huh. My exposure to the place was a school field trip in…fifth?.. grade, which was sold to us as viewing ‘Colonial Life’, but that wouldn’t be the only untrue thing I was taught in school.
Which was a fair number of decades ago. So no guarantees that they still sell the spruce gum.
OTOH, I stick by saying the stuff was incredibly nasty. One of my friends bought a box of it, tried a piece, then spit it out. He shared the rest out, and NO ONE found it even tolerable.
Yeah, poutine is somewhat underwhelming as well. When I was last in Montreal, I went on a poutine spree, trying out four different places including the most iconic one, La Banquise. Like all poutine I’ve had, it was pretty good for the first two or three bites, and then, like with all other “garbage fries” type constructions for me, sense and shame kick in, and I am left wondering why I am still eating this.
Reminds me of that ancient SNL sketch with a family stuck in Cedarcrest Mall selling Scotch Tape. The son is complaining to his Da’ about having to uphold Scottish traditions. “And another thing! Black Pudding, haggis, <some third item> – It’s like Scottish cuisine is all based on a dare!”
Shake Shack…Danny Meyers place from New York.
A Shake Shack opened in St Louis (Dannys hometown) about a year ago. I tried it several times…very Meh. The Burger was no better than any standard “smash burger” and the shake was simply soft serve ice-cream.
so Shake Shack, for me, meh and quite overpriced.
Primanti Brothers sandwiches. These are legendary in Pittsburgh…some sort of meat, topped with fries and cole slaw. I had my first at PNC Park, home of the Pirates and it was awful. Tasteless meat, soggy fries, bland cole slaw, just plain unappealing. On the chance that it was something they put together in advanced and warmed up at the park I gave it another try in one of their restaurants and the result was the same. No third try on that one!
Ah, yes! That’s the most recent “new food” of the bunch to me. We made a special stop through Pittsburg just to try the original Primanti’s location in the Strip District while en route to Harrisburg/Hershey on our road trip this past summer. Now, there was nothing really wrong with the sandwich (we had two different kinds: the Pittsburger for the kids and the capicola and cheese for me), but I just came to the conclusion that fries do not improve a sandwich. Coincidentally enough, we had a Cleveland Polish Boy a week later on the way back, another french-fry stuffed sandwich, and came to the exact same conclusion there. The sandwich was vastly improved by removing the French frys and eating them separately.
Still, I mean, cool regional sandwich, the both of them, and I kinda get the working class aspect of packing a bunch of calories in a hand-held form, but, culinarily, not among my favorite things in the world.
Ding-ding! We have a contestant for our word of the day! 
We had it in Indonesia while staying with Indonesian friends. It was a delicious sweet custard treat. Had it later in Hawaii and it was disgusting. I think it’s a knowing when it is ripe thing. Which we obviously don’t know how to predict.
It’s possible that my disappointment was due to it not being at optimal ripeness. We got it at a roadside stand. Still, it would be hard for it to live up to its hype no matter what. Personally, I much prefer jackfruit or guanabana.