Extreme dining: Four edgy alternatives to burger and fries.

“I will not eat oysters,” Woody Allen once remarked. “I want my food dead -- not sick, not wounded -- dead!” We’re guessing Mr. Allen would forgo the dining adventures below, which include eating a live octopus. And crickets. And food so hot your throat does two consecutive cartwheels and a back flip. Sick of being gastronomic wusses, we challenged ourselves to eat like the other half eats (or at least those who partake of the bugs and live fish options prevalent in places such as Asia) -- because living on the edge doesn’t have to mean scaling Mt. Everest; you can push the limits by simply opening your mouth . . . and swallowing.

The unseeing scene Opaque in West Hollywood’s Hyatt hotel has been serving dinners in the dark on the weekends for two years with no advertising, only word of mouth. The dining room is truly, absurdly pitch-black, like when a cartoon character walks into a dark room and shuts the door.

Before I was led into Opaque’s noir state, I ordered my three-course meal from one of four menus in the bright lobby. Then I put my hand on my server Michael Headley’s shoulder and followed him down maybe four or five zigzagging hallways.

Dining in the dark started in Switzerland in 1999 when a blind minister opened the first restaurant staffed entirely with blind waiters. Opaque’s owner, Berliner Ben Uphues, followed suit; all of the servers are visually impaired recruits from the Braille Institute. “It’s one of the best jobs I’ve had,” Headley said.

Once we got to the table, Headley instructed me to place my hands on the laminate tablecloth (all the better for the mess I would make) and remain still -- he was pulling out my chair. I heard other diners talking softly all around me. After cautiously lowering, I was seated, but the challenges kept coming: Find my water glass. Find bread and butter. Keep track of water glass. Don’t stick fingers in butter. And so on.

“The dining in the dark experience can make some people really anxious,” hostess Joyce Wong said. “They feel out of control.” Every so often a few can’t take it and leave. Yet most diners acclimate, relax and revel in all the nonvisual sensory information you might otherwise take for granted. Eavesdropping on other diners is more fun when you can’t see them. The food is pretty average, but every bite is an adventure -- fascinatingly foreign. Inhibitions are lost. Go ahead, scoop up the rest of that chicken breast and gnaw on it like a primitive, right there in the razzmatazz of Sunset Strip. Being seen is so overrated.
-- Margaret Wappler

Opaque, Hyatt West Hollywood, 8401 W. Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (800) 710-1270, darkdining.com. Price: $99 for a three-course dinner, not including alcohol, tax or tip.

It’s alive!!! Fans of the ultra-violent Park Chan-wook film “Oldboy” know there are times when you just “want to eat something alive.” Fortuitously, Angelenos who experience such cravings can have their blood lust satisfied at Ma San, a K-Town institution since 1972 that specializes in fresh seafood . . . really fresh seafood.

Large, centrally located and utilitarian aquariums housing fairly hideous monkfish, eels and gnarly-looking sea urchins reinforce that Ma San is more about the food than the atmosphere. And the Korean-language menu, staff and patrons confirm that there will be no fusion dishes available, just the kind of legitimate Korean meals one might find in Seoul or Pusan, birthplace of avuncular chef-owner Alexander Lee.

Arriving on the scene ignorant of Korean, and finding no English-speaking servers, I might have had problems cornering my prey. But I came prepared, armed with the magic words “san nag-jik”: live octopus.

The name is a bit of a misnomer -- since the preparation involves relieving the poor ‘pus of his bulbous head, it should probably be called “dying octopus” -- but there’s no mistaking the lively tentacles the waitress politely delivers. They’re moving, pulsing, writhing.

Fortified by a few shots of soju cocktail, I attempt to pick a segment up, but even with the chopsticks provided, it’s difficult. The suction cups are still working furiously, forming a tight vacuum against the plate. With a little elbow grease, however, I wrestle it free, dip it in the obligatory sauce -- sesame oil and salt -- and pop it into my mouth.

Minus the sauce, the taste is almost neutral. This dish is all about consistency. If you can imagine a particularly tough and animated gummy bear, you’ve got the idea. With reports of Korean diners actually dying while attempting to swallow this dish -- the Heimlich maneuver rendered useless by the cephalopod’s suction-cup-on-epiglottis technology -- it’s a gummy bear I chew thoroughly. And with one determined gulp, it’s all over, except for the guilt.

The soju takes care of that.
-- Liam Gowing

Ma San, 2851 W. Olympic Blvd., L.A., (213) 388-3314. Price: $25 for a plate of octopus.

Hot enough for ya? A bit of advice to those who attempt Orochon Ramen’s debilitatingly spicy “Special #2” ramen bowl: Don’t let the “Wall of Bravery” trick you. The successful diners look nonchalant in photographs, inscribing boasts like “I have spice in my blood!” and “More noodles, please.”

Do not listen to them. They are lying. The Special #2 bowl is the ramen equivalent of Barbara Stanwyck in “Double Indemnity:” Its lusty flavors seduce you before leaving you for dead on a bathroom floor in Little Tokyo.

Orochon’s 3-year-old Special #2 contest is a simple proposition. Finish your bowl (half the size of a basketball) in under 30 minutes, and you join the survivors on their dining room wall for perpetuity. Three or so people a day ignore the warning to “eat at your own risk,” and about half succeed in finishing it. There are other delicious and less spicy bowls on the menu, but for sinus-cleaning, sweat-staining, honey-can-you-sleep-outside-tonight heat, Special #2 is the witch goddess of Orochon.

Special #2 is not soy-sauce brown or miso gold like the other ramen bowls. It’s blood red from 10 scoops of chile powder and jalapeño slices. Upon first bite, it’s unexpectedly tasty, and full of mushrooms and hearty noodles that mute its potency.

Then you’re left with the question of how to finish the broth. The only reasonable way: lift the bowl and chug. Doing so is the culinary equivalent of walking up to a riot cop and begging for a full-face macing. Your eyes go blurry and you begin to double over from the sheer volume of it. Twenty minutes in, the problem becomes less about the spiciness on your lips than the roiling evil inside you. And there’s still half a bowl to drink.

Special #2 got the best of this reporter, and caused him to miss several deadlines while sucking on ice cubes and eating crackers to dull the burn. But like an ex-lover, over time the memories of Special #2 grow less painful, possibly even enticing. Someday, I’ll ask for more noodles, please. But that day is not today.
-- August Brown

Orochon Ramen, 123 Onizuka St., No. 303, L.A., (213) 617-1766. Price: $6.45 to $6.95 a bowl, depending on your broth.

Insects, insects, eat ‘em up, yum! Chowing on insects while watching single-engine planes cruise by is the kind of casually exotic dining experience L.A. does best. Typhoon, a laid-back but sleek pan-Asian restaurant overlooking a patch of junior tarmac at the Santa Monica Airport, has five insect dishes on its diverse, otherwise debugged menu, ranging in difficulty from the mild Chambi ants served on potato shoestrings to the hard-core Thai water bugs stuffed with chicken. I tried them all.

Liquor helped undo a lifetime of avoiding things that crawl over garbage. Potato slivers topped with a few dozen ants, which come from tonic herbalist Ron Teeguarden’s Dragon Herbs store on Wilshire, look like a picnic gone wrong. But a scoop was tasty -- salty with citrusy sparks.

Next, dried sea worms with a tamarind dipping sauce. Crunchy, briny and alarmingly similar to maggots in size, the worms taste like eating the crust out of the corner of a fish’s eye.

The Chinese believe crickets bring good luck, but judging from the cooked critters in front of me, that luck doesn’t apply to their own lives. Nestled in a stir fry with garlic, chiles and basil, they have the textured snap of grassy, buggy potato chips. “It’s popular in Taiwan to sit up on a hot night in a beer garden, drink and eat roasted crickets,” Typhoon owner Brian Vidor says. In fact, we’re in the minority in not eating bugs: Much of Asia, Mexico and Africa includes them in their cuisine.

As in the two scorpions I find before me, perched perkily on shrimp toast. The cooking renders the stinger harmless, but its thumbnail-sized body still tastes like sun-boiled danger: alkaline and burnt.

Finally, the chicken-stuffed water bugs, popular with the schoolchildren who visit Typhoon on field trips. Flavor-wise, they weren’t so different from crickets, but the texture was a little tough, i.e., thready wings that wouldn’t surrender to the usual bout of mastication. (My otherwise attentive server forgot to advise taking the wings off.)

Just when I thought I’d gotten it under control, I bit into one of its beady eyeballs and some vile, far-too-organic taste shot through my mouth. Check, please!
-- Margaret Wappler

Typhoon, 3221 Donald Douglas Loop South, Santa Monica Airport, (310) 390-6565. Price: Insect dishes range from $8 to $10.