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Sales and Marketing
Davis Kitchens
Cabinet Sales Administrative & Professional
City of Benson
Planning & Zoning Director

KWANGCHOW, China — The She-tsan Kuan restaurant was located somewhere within the chaotic bowels of Kwangchow, a city of 3.5 million Chinese and 1 million bicycles in 1976. I'm still not certain where. But I'll never forget my meal in what is now Guangzhou.

She-tsan kuan, in Chinese, means snake.

During my world travels, I have indulged in an exotic variety of bizarre comestibles that, by Western standards, might give even Anthony Bourdain pause.

And I've eaten Arizona rattlesnake.

So the prospect of savoring a Chinese snake didn't put me off particularly. It was, after all, simply a snake of another nationality.

But I wasn't prepared to meet my dinner, as it were, eyeball-to-eyeball, before the feast. And I wasn't prepared to watch as my meal was unceremoniously dispatched and prepared at my table.

You wouldn't know the She-tsan restaurant was there unless you were looking for it.

Down a narrow, winding, congested cobblestone alleyway. Bicycles. Scooters. Hawkers. Through an inauspicious concrete-block archway. Up a short flight of neon-lit stairs to a thick wooden doorway with a peephole.The swinging metal sign above advertised a black snake coiled upon a red background. No need for calligraphy.

The spacious, noisy dining room was packed with Chinese, mostly men, seated at large round tables, 12 to a table, the white linen table cloths bearing evidence of many meals. I was told that Chinese cooks consider a soiled tablecloth — along with flatulence and belching — a flattering sign that diners enjoyed their meal.

Then on to a back room. More round tables and white tablecloths. Kwai-lo, or "foreign devils" as we are called, are always seated in back rooms. I was never told whether this was a sign of respect or a means of saving face.

My waiter was a slight, medium-height, middle-age Chinese wearing a food-spattered apron. He smiled. He spoke no English.

"Da chi," I said, dangerously exhausting my limited Chinese vocabulary. It meant "big to eat."

"She-tsan kuan?" he inquired. That was the name of the restaurant. So I assumed he meant snake.

"Duile," I acknowledged, "xiexie." Roughly translated, that meant "you are right, thank you." And I asked for one of a China's famed Tsingtao beers.

A few moments later I was greeted by a second Chinese waiter, a bit more Confucian, wizened, short hair, wearing a loose-fitting black frock, matching black long-sleeved shirt and trousers. Thick gloves and heavy boots. He was carrying a wicker basket with wire mesh shrouding the top. He was accompanied by a comely Chinese teenage girl, a waitress perhaps, who put my Tsingtao on the table while he placed his wicker basket on the floor. At my feet.

Removing the wire lid, the old Chinese smiled wryly at me, winked, inserted one gloved hand into the basket and pulled out a healthy six-foot snake. Mottled coffee-black back. White underbelly. It looked like what the Chinese call a "Rice Spoon-head Snake." A cobra. And it was not a happy cobra. I could tell because the snake's hood was flared.

"She-tsan kuan!" my waiter announced, smiling again. This time I noticed his two gold front teeth. The struggling, writhing snake was wrapping itself around his outstretched arm.

"Sure is!" I smiled back. I was more concerned about more snakes beginning to slide out of the wicker basket onto the floor. But with a surprisingly fluid, sweeping motion of one booted foot, the old Chinese flipped the escaping snakes back into the basket. He then replaced the venomous cobra and withdrew a second but anonymous reptile, this one also long but green, and offered it to me.

I assumed the nameless snake was not poisonous, otherwise he would not have allowed a kwai-lo to touch it. In retrospect, that was not particularly sound thinking.

So I gingerly grasped the second snake by what I assumed was its neck — behind the head — and allowed it to corkscrew itself around my forearm. It wasn't green. It was green and yellow. And it was now coiling itself around my biceps, and its beady black eyes were staring at me, and its arrow-thin red tongue was, well, doing what snake tongues do. Flick.

I looked over at the old Chinese snake man, who acknowledged my concern with another inscrutable smile — this time followed by a subtile nod of his head. He was enjoying himself.

Then, apparently assuming I had chosen his green- and yellow-flecked snake as my table d'hote, he gently removed the serpent's head from my hand, unwound its body from my arm and, with a violent snap of his wrist — not unlike Indiana Jones cracking his bullwhip — uncoiled the snake and sent it skittering across the wooden floor.

Moving quickly so as to pin the snake's head beneath one booted foot, the tail beneath the other, with his thumbs the old Chinese then began massaging the disabled reptile in the vicinity of its gallbladder. A thick, glutinous black mass oozed out. It was about the size of a marble.

As the snake man turned toward me, raising his arms in victory, the young Chinese waitress delicately picked up the sticky glob with her fingers and dropped it into a tall glass of Mooi Kwai Lo — Rose Dew Wine — that had somehow had materialized on my white linen tablecloth.

I subsequently learned that the glob was bile. And that, in the wine, it was a Chinese delicacy to be drunk, promising a long, vigorous and virile life.

Withdrawing a glistening butcher's knife from beneath his frock, the snake man quickly, deftly, but with a powerful flick of his wrist, sliced off the snake's head. Then the tip of its tail. And somehow, producing a zipperlike sound, he pulled the snake out of its skin. And stood up.

Before me, scattered about the wooden floor, was a naked, headless, tailless snake. To my left the flopping head. To my right the flopping tail. And at my feet lay the flopping body detached from its flopping skin. I wasn't quite certain what to do next.

After muttering something unintelligible, the old Chinese chuckled, wiped his knife blade clean on his frock, retrieved the naked snake's body, skin, head and tail from the floor, placed them in his wicker basket, and disappeared through a doorway into what I assumed was the kitchen. My young waitress arrived with another tall, 32-inch bottle of the dark Tsingtao beer.

Shortly thereafter, the snake man reappeared carrying a large ceramic bowl containing a clear soup, noodles, vegetables, and an abundance of what turned out to be a stringy, somewhat speckled white meat.

By then, however, I had prepared for this culinary adventure by consuming what remained of my Tsingtao.

The snake? It tasted like chicken.