Carp.

Alright, I have to tell you all about one more adventure that Kharis and I had in Palau. This adventure is culinary, and brace yourselves: it gets weird.

I have a very strict personal policy regarding food when traveling. My rule is that I will eat absolutely any food from another culture, on one condition: I have to know what it is before I take a bite. I don’t play that game of “just taste it, then I’ll tell you.” If something is culturally acceptable and commonly eaten in another country, I’ll try it; I just have to know what it is. This policy has led me on some incredible lingual journeys. I have had smoked minke whale in the Arctic, the head of a sheep in western Norway, all sorts of seafood dishes in Brazil, and I just straight-up ate my way through Qingdao, China. So far, I have never been offered a dish that I didn’t like. In my experience, if a dish is prepared properly, it’s usually delicious.

Our first course at Carp: tuna sashimi.

I’ve known for a couple years that Palauans eat fruit bats. In fact, anytime the animal comes up in conversation or flies over our heads at a dive site (yes, that happens), every Palauan espouses how tasty the meat is. That’s the first thing most of them say. “Oh, fruit bat, very tasty.” I understand that for some Palauan families, fruit bat is a delicacy eaten together at Christmas.

You can probably tell by now where this is going. My grad student and I were feeling frisky and wanted to try fruit bat. We asked Nelson and Gil, the two Palauans who have been accompanying us on the research boat, what restaurants in Koror might serve the meat. They made a couple recommendations, so Kharis and I picked one right next to the Ranger Station. We figured that if Gil recommended a restaurant right across the street from his workplace, he had to know what he was talking about. The restaurant was called Carp.
 
The adventure started as soon as we parked. Carp is set back from the road a little bit, in this ramshackle house with a sliding wooden door. We weren’t sure we had actually found the restaurant until we were inside. The tables were covered in floral tablecloths – the kind you would find at a thrift shop – topped with protective plastic covers. There were guests at two other tables, and we could hear them speaking in low tones. Some of them looked Asian-ish, but there’s enough Japanese genetic influence in Palau that they were probably locals. We were the only white people around.
 
As soon as we sat down, we eagerly scanned the menu for the words “fruit bat.” The only dish claiming to contain the meat was a soup, so we decided to order a bowl to split. Other dishes in our order were drawn from the appetizer list – we wanted variety, not bulk.

Kamkum (I've also seen it spelled kangkum and kangkung).

Our dishes came out in the order that they were ready. First up was tuna sashimi – an obvious choice on a Pacific island. It was served with a citrus fruit with an orange interior but a green peel. We squeezed the juice on the tuna, and it tasted like lime. The sashimi was just as delicious as expected.
 
Our second dish to arrive was kamkum. It’s a spinach-like vegetable that we’ve actually seen being prepared at other restaurants. My online search for “kamkum” is coming up with nothing, so I assume the name is Palauan. We were served sautéed kamkum with bell peppers, some spices, and enormous slices of garlic mixed in. We could have defended ourselves against an onslaught of vampires, but it was delicious.

Gyoza.

Next to arrive was gyoza, a type of fried Japanese dumpling. There was some sort of a grainy filling, but I’m not even sure what it contained. We dipped the dumplings in soy sauce, and they were quite tasty.
 
By this point, we were both getting pretty curious about our fruit bat soup. It obviously took the longest to prepare out of our four dishes, which is why it showed up last. Eventually, the waitress showed up with an enormous pot – seriously, there were like 10 servings of soup in this thing – filled with a yellow broth with vegetables floating in it. The pot smelled good, but I wondered where the fruit bat was.
 
Then I saw it.
 
The fruit bat in our fruit bat soup was floating in the broth, face-up. Whole. This was not a soup with pieces of fruit bat mixed in. This was a fruit bat in a bowl of soup. Honestly, I have never seen anything like this in my life. My grad student shared some stories of soup with iguana chunks in Belize, but at least those were chunks. This was a whole bat. Fur and all. Claws, wings, teeth. Floating in our soup.
 

This was...unnerving.

I thought for a minute that I had reached the limit of my culinary tolerance. Then it crossed my mind that the Koror Ranger, Gil, might have pranked us, and I checked over my shoulder to see if he was in the restaurant. By this point, my grad student was already sipping the broth and raving about its flavor, and it was her shocking lucidity that pulled me out of my fog.

  
“Why don’t we ask the waitress what we’re supposed to do?” she queried.
 
I flagged down our waitress and posed the question. Her facial expression indicated that this was not an uncommon concern, which was a relief to me. She brought us an extra plate, some spare forks, and a sharp knife. “You can eat everything,” she said, “even the fur.”
 
“Do you eat the fur?” Kharis asked.
 
The waitress wrinkled her nose and shook her head. No fur for us then.
 
We fished the bat out of the soup with a large spoon and set it on the plate. A switch flipped in my head, and all of a sudden, I didn’t see the bat as a potentially revolting dinner; I saw it as a fascinating dissection. Carefully, I made a shallow incision down the mid-line on its torso. The connective tissue tore easily as I peeled away the skin from the muscle. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the fur was staying in place, not tearing off the skin and landing everywhere. I managed to cut off a few grams of muscle tissue from the pectoral region of the bat and placed some on each of our plates. Kharis took her turn with the knife and managed to get a little more meat from the posterior side. Obviously, we’re not skilled butchers, but the amount of meat was still extremely small for the effort. We each got two bites and no more. Ancient Palauans must have been darn near starvation to bother hunting these things.

Ok, so what does fruit bat meat taste like? It’s sweet. The bat’s diet is 100% composed of fruit, so all the natural sugars end up getting assimilated into the mammalian muscle. It reminded me of the darkest dark meat I’ve ever found on a turkey, with just a little hint of sweetness. To be perfectly honest, it was pretty good.

We paid our bill and packed up the few leftover gyoza to take home. It was an interesting meal for sure, but I’m proud to say that I have now tried Palauan fruit bat!