Menu With $110 Dirt? French-Inspired Restaurant in Japan Offers $110 Dirt Dishes
A menu with a $110 dirt dish on it has stunned restaurant-goers. The extraordinary menu has been offered by a French-inspired restaurant in Japan, and features the expensive dish in which the main ingredient is dirt.
The restaurant is called "Ne Quittez Pas," and promotes itself as being inspired by the Southern French region. It is hoping that the unique dish, featuring dirt, and costing a wallet-emptying $110, will be a hit among those wanting to try something new.
One media outlet operating in the region, Rocket News 24, has decided to review the menu at the restaurant and has documented each course.
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The publication explains that the menu includes dishes such as potato starch and dirt soup, a salad with dirt dressing, sea bass with dirt risotto, dirt gratin, dirt ice cream and dirt mint tea.
The chef in the restaurant is Japanese, although he was trained in France. Chef Toshio Tanabe has also worked at numerous Michelin-starred restaurants prior to opening Ne Quittez Pas in 1994.
Many might think that dirt is quite easy to come by, and should help to reduce the cost of the menu. However, it has been reported that Chef Toshio Tanabe only uses the best dirt - which apparently has to be shipped in from Sri Lanka and India.
The restaurant imports its dirt through dirt-selling company Protoleaf, which tests the dirt for safety and purity before distributing it.
According to ABC News, the habit of eating clay, mud or dirt is known as geophagy. Geophagy has been practiced across the globe for centuries, with the ancient Greeks and Native Americans all regularly eating soil. However, the ABC report points out that in most regions where it is practiced, the habit is "limited to women, especially women who are pregnant or of childbearing age."
Eating dirt is not known to be recommended by medical professionals though, however, over recent years there have been some nutritionists who suggest eating clay may have some real health benefits.
Dr. David L. Katz, nutrition expert at the Yale School of Medicine and a medical contributor for ABC News, has said: "It is possible that the binding effect of clay would cause it to absorb toxins."
Clay also has a well-documented ability to absorb plant toxins.
