Have You Ever Tried To Play Food Roulette?
Food roulette is one of a number of activities inspired by casino games such as online roulette. This should be planned as a fun activity, unlike Russian roulette which is another spin-off with a very different outcome intended!
With food roulette, the intention is usually to offer a selection of tapas-style foods. Within this selection, there is then one random food dish which has been infused with something like a searing hot chilli spice. The assembled company then participate in some kind of spin-related selection process to allocate the food. Most will be pleasantly surprised by the food dish which arrives out of the blue. But the unfortunate ‘winner’ of the spiced up dish will have to be consoled with an ice-cold soothing drink to calm those raging taste buds!
Food roulette in restaurants
Fry roulette is a speciality available at Ground House in California, and all the online roulette lovers out there will love this one. They serve you with six kinds of food dishes: tater tots, seasoned fries, crispy waffle fries, fried onion rings, sweet potato fries and French fries. These are placed on a wheel along with another wheel below containing twelve different sauces. To eat the food, you just spin the wheel of food and then let chance decide the food and sauce you actually consume.
The New Zealand pizza place Hell Pizza is another venue which provides a food roulette option. You can order a whole pizza pie, but one piece is guaranteed to contain what the restaurant calls the ‘hottest chilli known to mankind’. Even though health and safety will be pleased to hear that pizza slice comes with only a few drops of the house spicy ‘ghost pepper’ sauce, the unlucky recipient of that morsel will remember his Hell Pizza dining experience long after the meal itself is over.
Elsewhere, an Australian restaurant called Din Tai Fung has its own version of the roulette food concept. Serving dumplings in a “spin the wheel” type of game, diners get to choose from a selection of the restaurant’s delicious dumplings. This sounds delightful but surely tastes even better, because as a diner you’ll be able to try out menu fillings such as Din Tai Fung’s signature pork, Italian black truffle with pork, and a new crab and pork chilli dumpling.
A commercial version
To get in on the act, Doritos have also launched their own take on food roulette. So if you buy a packet of “Doritos Roulette Tortilla Chips”, you’ll find that the majority of chips in your bag consist of a nacho cheese flavour. However, your bag will also contain a random number of hotter chips which you’re sure to discover at some point during your snack. So, as Doritos points out, the challenge is to ‘take bold to the next level’ and try to consume these cheesy chips. You should, they say, find ‘a hot chip in every handful’.
DIY food roulette at home
Eating out roulette style is a great new way to eat and be entertained. However, with a little ingenuity, it’s quite easy to create a food roulette experience at home for yourself when eating with friends and family. Serving is often the tricky part, so address this by using what is sometimes called a ‘Lazy Susan’ – a revolving platter usually used for sandwiches, slices of cake etc. of all different kinds. This could then be customised by covering the plate surface with a picture of a roulette wheel. Then your guests can spin the wheel to receive a random piece of food.
There are no rules about your food menu. It could be a choice of foods from around the world, a selection of local or regional delicacies, or perhaps some homemade recipes which will be enjoyed by everyone. The one essential ingredient, of course, is the random piece of food with a more exotic or unusual taste. This again is best decided by local tastes and local culture. In the UK, for instance, there is a very plain-looking sauce called Worcester Sauce. Only a drop or two of this mixture (which has a very complex recipe) will be needed to convince the recipient that the sauce has a ‘kick’ all its own. Of course, there are sure to be sauces and flavourings which produce similar results all over the globe.