Rats Invade Menus of Taiwan Eateries

CHIAYI, Taiwan —  Having rats in the kitchen would scare away most diners. But at the Peaceful Happiness Restaurant, customers love the critters--stir-fried, stewed or mixed with noodles.

The small, no-frills restaurant is one of several in this southern Taiwan city that are serving the rodents, whose flesh has a rubbery, chewy texture and tastes like dark turkey meat with a bit of a gamy flavor.

Many Taiwanese are adventurous eaters who have no qualms about munching on deep-fried hornets, crickets, sea slugs, snakes and dogs. Some are inspired by curiosity or the quest for novelty, while others believe unusual food has medicinal properties.

Although business was brisk during a recent lunch hour at Peaceful Happiness, cook Hung Hung-wen acknowledged that some people--especially women--draw the line when it comes to eating rats.

“The meat is tender and clean. It’s a pity that women are usually too frightened to try it,” said Hung, whose business card shows a rodent with a red bow tied to its long tail.

Dressed in a chef’s white jacket, Hung arranged ingredients for a stir fry on a stainless steel counter in his spotless kitchen: red peppers, ginger, garlic and two large rats on a plate--their fur and whiskers cleanly shaved off with a razor and their ears removed. A thick tongue stuck out of one rat’s open mouth that revealed a big yellow buck tooth.

As in other small-town restaurants in Taiwan, Hung’s kitchen is at the front of the restaurant, allowing customers to watch him as he chopped rat carcasses into chunks and threw them into a small pot with other ingredients.

He said his rats are especially tasty because they’re caught in farm fields. “Unlike house rats, these field rats exercise a lot and have strong muscles.”

At a nearby table, customer Lee Tien-hua gave a thumbs-up sign after putting a piece of rat meat into his mouth.

“It’s good,” said Lee, a Chiayi County government official.

Lee’s party of eight drank beer and joked as they feasted on rat stew in a clay pot, fried shrimp and braised pork.

Many farmers moonlight as rat catchers in Chiayi’s sugar cane fields. A pound of rat meat fetches a little over $4, five times that of chicken meat and more than double that of pork.

Much of the rat meat served at Peaceful Happiness and other restaurants is supplied by a man known locally as the “Rat catcher King”--Cheng Chiu-nan, a 46-year-old melon farmer with a dark, leathery face and a passion for stalking vermin.

Locals say Cheng holds the national rat-catching record of 600 in one night.

Some farmers use nets to catch rats, which start scurrying when they hear the roar of tractors and threshers. Others use dogs to track the rodents when they squeeze down holes.

Cheng dismisses such rat catchers as amateurs.

“They even catch skinny rats,” he scoffed. “Rats are nocturnal animals. One should do the job at night.”

Cheng’s favorite rat-hunting tool is the ankle-busting steel spring trap. His wife helps him harvest the trapped critters, which get thrown into a sack he carries over his back. For a visitor, he grabbed about seven wiggling, grayish brown rats by the tails and held them up like a trophy.

Throwing the bags into the back of his pickup truck, Cheng takes them back to his garage. The rats are kept in steel mesh cages, where they squeal and crawl over each other as they wait to be butchered and shaved with a barber’s razor by Cheng’s wife, who handles the rats with pink dishwashing gloves.

As the oldest of six sons, Cheng subsidized his father’s meager farm income by fishing in drainage ditches and rivers. But when the water became polluted and the fish disappeared, he switched to catching snakes used for soup.

He got out of the snake business when the government began levying heavy fines on those who catch rare or endangered species.

He finally found his niche with rats.

“I’d be a millionaire if I did not squander my money on gambling and womanizing when I was younger,” he said.