Korean men eat all sorts of things that are supposed give them staying power in the sack. There’s dog meat, goat stew, red ginseng, deer antler whiskey, and on and on. None are quite so dramatic as sannakji, the raw, still wriggling tentacles of a recently dispatched baby octopus. It’s a popular drinking food, and as the abundance of YouTube videos attest, it’s just the sort of thing Koreans love to inflict on foreign visitors. I was no exception when I was there in 2006. Multiple hosts took us to restaurants that specialize in all preparations of the cephalopods (generally known as nakji). These sessions invariably involved much arm punching and many shots of soju downed after toasts to the embiggening powers of “Korean Viagra.” On one occasion a feisty critter caught in a waitress’s tongs reached out a tentacle and snatched the glasses out of a pal’s shirt pocket before it was dunked in a roiling hotpot. Hysterics ensued.

Mike Sula

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