TRAVELLING IN STYLE : EXCELLENT ADVENTURES : Adventures in Dining : Foul-smelling fruit? Thai-style locust? Frogs’ backs in Vietnam? You won’t believe he ate the whole thing

THE FIRST TIME I ever set out deliberately to have an eating adventure was in 1970, when I convinced my mother, who lived in Kentucky but was traveling with me in France, that her life would be enhanced greatly by dining (and paying the check) at a restaurant with three stars--the ultimate gastronomic accolade--in the Guide Michelin.

This was to be a first for both of us, and Charles Barrier in Tours (since demoted to two stars) was our carefully selected destination. Arriving in the city, we settled first into our hotel, where the worldly-wise proprietress insisted on installing us in adjoining rooms, with a nudge and a wink that made it perfectly clear that she was not buying our mother-and-son story. As shocking as I found her inference, I was even more shocked by our experience at Barrier itself. To begin with, we were completely unprepared for the fact that the French visit their temples of gastronomy tieless and in shirt-sleeves. Neither had we anticipated the particularly French sort of visual bad taste in which the best terrine de canard we had ever imagined was spooned out of a china Donald Duck. On the other hand, the turbot poached in white Loire wine was faultless--and, in the matter of wine, it was a distinctly pleasant surprise when our waiter actually praised us for ordering a modest local wine instead of some considerably more expensive bottle from the restaurant’s long selection of “imported” Bordeaux and burgundies.

SINCE THAT TIME I HAVE HAD OTHER DINING adventures aplenty. Some of these were undertaken as the result of commissions from a major American financial newspaper to which I formerly contributed. This pillar of the Establishment once sent me to Hong Kong to eat dog on its behalf. That particular menu item turned out to be illegal (though hardly unknown) in the Crown Colony, so to avoid breaking the law, my Hong Kong culinary cicerone took me on a short ferry ride across the South China Sea to Macao. There, in a not-too-clean back-street eatery, this man bit dog.

I do not recommend eating Rover. Although it was, said the almost spectral proprietor who was clad in little more than a stained undershirt, a very young puppy, it tasted like rank old goat.

Other gastronomic adventures of mine have been self-generated. In Hong Kong, I once actually asked to be fed durian--a fruit that looks like a cross between a pineapple and an outsized grenade and smells so foul that throughout southern Asia people are forbidden to take it into hotels or onto any form of public transport. I liked it. I still do. As I write this, there is one ripening in a warm place in my kitchen. The bank manager is coming for lunch tomorrow, and if he makes any difficulties about my overdraft privilege, I shall feed it to him for dessert.

I’m not, I must admit, as adventurous as William Buckland (1784-1856), who said that it was his ambition to eat a member of every living species and that, until he ate a bluebottle fly, he had always thought “that the taste of mole was the most repulsive.” Nor would I have wished to eat a bit of the embalmed heart of Louis XIV of France, which the Archbishop of York had bought from a grave robber during the French Revolution. Buckland helped himself to a bite of it while the archbishop’s back was turned.

But out of curiosity I did buy some locusts last March in Surat Thani, Thailand, and took them back for the chef at my hotel to prepare. He removed the wings and legs, then pounded the bodies with garlic, chiles and fish sauce and served the resulting paste with long beans, cucumber and cabbage--all straight from the freezer and crunchy with hoarfrost. It tasted like frozen vegetables mixed with astringent toothpaste.

BUT MY GREATEST DINING ADVENture, I think, in almost a Peter Pan sense, was dinner in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) this March, at what is known locally as “the snake restaurant.” As we sipped snake wine (rice wine in which snake meat had been macerated), Thu’, the young woman who was my interpreter-guide, translated the menu for me, asking if I preferred to begin with boar, venison, bat or cobra. After brief consultation, we decided on minced cobra with grilled-sesame-seed-and-prawn crackers. It was really quite nice, for the cliche is perfectly true: Like so many other exotic meats, cobra tastes like gamy chicken. Our meal continued with frog’s legs and backs (I had never eaten the latter before) in a French-influenced style, sauteed with garlic and (the Vietnamese touch) fish sauce. Good. Finally came braised tail of pangolin--a sort of armored anteater--which resembled tough beef, but with hideously chewy and gelatinous scales.

Suddenly Thu’ seemed embarrassed. Four Singapore or Hong Kong businessmen, accompanied by four heavily coiffed and made-up Vietnamese professional “escorts,” were dining at the next table. Although we had declined our waiter’s offer to kill our own cobra at our table, we watched in horrified fascination as theirs was brought to them, baited and encouraged to bite the waiter’s gloved hand and then executed with a quick blow of a sharp knife and skinned in what looked like a single movement.

Unfortunately, the snake’s dispatch was the signal for boisterous male drinking games to begin. The escorts waited demurely for their dinner as their clients grew louder (and no doubt lewder). Although at first I thought they were very jolly and I was enjoying watching them have a good time, it eventually dawned on me that the snake restaurant was actually a place for men to drink and not really suitable for a well brought-up Vietnamese girl like Thu’. To take her mind off the goings-on, I steered the conversation toward serious subjects--specifically the spread of AIDS and the sorry plight of Vietnamese women--many of whom, Thu’ told me, preferred to remain single rather than to take on the problems of demoralized Vietnamese men.

Not for the first time, I had bitten off more than I could chew.