Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Guam - Dinner at Meskla

Overall: Tasty and interesting, but too expensive. Experience also dampened by fish bone (see below).
For an appetizer, I had Hinetnon Tapun - a "clam bake" of chopped surf clams, palm hearts, banana flowers, cream cheese, and spinach, with garlic Chamorro flatbread. It turned out to be basically a dip for the flatbread (which was olive, not garlic), which really tasted mainly of cheese except for a few satisfyingly large chunks of clam and some smaller pieces of what I assume was palm heart (reminded me of artichoke heart but less sour).

For the main course, I got the "Chamorro Platter" - basically a sampler of fiesta food (every village on the island holds a fiesta for the feast day of its patron saint, and they eat the most characteristic Chamorro food on those days). It included dried beef, fried reef fish, red rice (which is flavored and colored with the seeds of some plant, the name of which I didn't catch), titiyas (Chamorro tortillas), pasta salad, and clam kelaguen.

The dried beef looked like cha siu pork, but was tough and salty.  The kelaguen was good - tasted like ceviche, and went well with the titiyas.  The pasta salad was pasta salad.  The fried fish tasted good (also good with the spicy tartar sauce that came with the platter), but the outside wasn't just crispy - it was as hard as a rock.  I was biting so hard to get through the outside that I was chewing a bone (large bone for a fish) before I knew it.  A piece got jammed down between two of my teeth, and misaligned my bite until I got back to the hotel to floss it out (fortunately the teeth returned to their normal positions).  Obviously, this detracted somewhat from the overall experience, and I didn't ask for the dessert menu.

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