Free Anything That Moves by Dana Goodyear Page B

the business. “Recently at San Juan market in Mexico City, monopolizers informed us that small airplanes loaded with tons of the product arrived from the United States and sold it to the highest bidders,” Ramos-Elorduy wrote in a 2006 paper.
    You can’t really buy
escamoles
in America. The head chef at José Andrés’s Oyamel, in D.C., has scoured local markets for them without success, though once, on a tip from a lady who overheard him complaining to his barber about their unavailability, he discovered some frozen Thai ant larvae (labeled as “puffed rice”) in an Asian grocery store in Virginia. José Andrés himself told me that he considers
escamoles
a delicacy, and if he could get them he’d put them on the menu at Minibar, his acclaimed six-seat restaurant.
    At the first sign of spring, I called Quenioux. He had just closed Bistro LQ because of a problem with the lease, and said he was trying to get some
escamoles
to serve at Starry Kitchen, a downtown lunch counter owned by Nguyen and Thi Tran, who had previously run it as an underground supper club out of their apartment. Quenioux was about to start a pop-up there called LQ@SK. “Basically, you need to smuggle them,” he said of the ants. His connection, a Mexican man living near Hidalgo who brought them in foam cups in his carry-on luggage, didn’t work anymore; the last two times Quenioux had placed an order, he’d prepaid, only to have his shipment confiscated by Customs at LAX.
    A week before the soft launch of Quenioux’s residency at Starry Kitchen, he told me that he had a line on some
escamoles.
He knew a guy who knew a guy who would bring them across the border from Tijuana; we simply had to drive down to a meeting place on the U.S. side and escort them back. We set a time, and I went to a street corner in Pasadena, near where Quenioux lives; when I arrived, a red Toyota Corolla was waiting. The window came down partway, and I heard someone call my name.
    Originally from Sologne, France, Quenioux—pronounced “kin
you
”—grew up hunting, learned pastry in Paris at Maxim’s, and worked in Nice alongside the German-born chef Joachim Splichal, who brought him to Los Angeles in the early eighties. He is a gentle person, with huge, pale green eyes, a bald-shaved head, a set of prayer beads around his wrist, and the endearingly antisocial habit of seeing everything he encounters as potential food: the deer near Mt. Wilson, which he hunts with a bow and arrow; the purple blossoms of the jacaranda trees; a neighbor’s chicken, which he killed and cooked when it came into his yard. Usually, he eats chicken only when he’s home in France; he thinks American chickens are disgusting.
    Certain laws just don’t make sense to Quenioux, like the one that prohibits him from serving a dessert made from chocolate hot-boxed with pot smoke. “What’s one gram of marijuana, just to have the smoke infuse the chocolate?” he said. When he read in the news that there was to be a mass culling of fifty thousand wild boars that had crossed from Texas into Chihuahua and were destroying everything in their path—not fit for consumption, warned a government official—his first thought was, Shit, can we get a few of those? “Tamales!” Daniel, his sous-chef, said. “With salsa verde!”
    As for the
escamoles,
“We do it for the culinary adventure,” Quenioux said. He has made blinis with ant eggs and caviar, and a three-egg dish of
escamoles,
quail eggs, and salmon roe. He has fantasized about making an
escamole
quiche, and, using just the albumen that drains out when the eggs are frozen, meringue. His signature dish is a corn tortilla resting on a nasturtium leaf and topped with
escamoles
sautéed in butter with epazote, shallots, and serrano chilies, served with a shot of Mexican beer and a lime gel. Insects are, to him, like any other ingredient: a