The food at the Explorers Club’s annual dinner wasn’t as exotic this time as the years before. There were no scorpians, honey dipped tarantula or cerviche eyeballs as before.

One of the reasons, I was told, was that the BBC ran an expose last year about the bugs that were prepared by boiling them alive. Someone questioned why it was o.k. to boil live lobsters and not live bugs, but the Waldorf Astoria chefs made up for the loss with unique variations of “normal food.”  They served the not-so-usual, barbequed electric eel which made my tongue go a bit numb and “organic” caviar from fruit.

They also served small shrimp that each had tiny medicine droppers of sauce inserted in them. You held the shrimp by the dropper and, when the shrimp was in your mouth, you squeezed the little bulb to release the sauce into the shrimp.

The chefs also presented a unique toothpick skewer of a small piece of strawberry on top of a tiny chocolate truffle that had been coated with what looked like minced pieces of nuts. In reality, the “nuts” were  pieces of pop rock candy.

The chocolate Saturn dessert topped off the evening. This was described as a combination of a dark chocolate mousse dome, a passion fruit cream nucleus, black out cake, white chocolate orbit garnish and pabana sauce.