When Paris Ate the Zoo: The Strangest Menu in History

Restaurants turn chicken into dinosaurs, fish into little shapes and nuggets into everything from jungle animals to cartoon characters, making the connection between the animal and the food almost disappear. And apparently, kids love this stuff. Younger children are particularly drawn to fun-shaped foods because, let’s face it, a chicken nugget becomes a lot more exciting when it looks like something that once roamed the earth. So which came first, the chicken or the egg? Maybe the dinosaur. Take an animal, remove everything that reminds you it was once an animal, bread it, fry it and put it beside some fries, and suddenly dinner becomes a game. Somehow, we’ve become remarkably good at separating the animal from the food.

That made me think of Dr. Seuss’s If I Ran the Zoo, where Gerald McGrew imagines filling his zoo with increasingly bizarre creatures. The idea is wonderfully innocent: if you ran the zoo, what strange animals would you bring home? But what if we changed the question slightly? What if I ate the zoo?

That sounds like something a six-year-old would say as a joke, but during the Siege of Paris in 1870–71, it became a horrifyingly practical question. Paris was surrounded, food supplies dwindled and the city began looking for meat wherever it could find it. Horses were slaughtered in huge numbers, followed by dogs, cats and rats. Eventually, animals from the city’s menageries were being killed for food, including the famous elephants Castor and Pollux.

Then comes the part that sounds like somebody handed a Dr. Seuss book to a Parisian chef after a very bad day. On Christmas Day 1870, the fashionable Café Voisin offered a menu featuring elephant consommé, roast camel, kangaroo stew, bear ribs, wolf, cat with rats and antelope terrine with truffles. And because this was still Paris, the meal came with some seriously expensive wine, including Mouton Rothschild and Romanée-Conti.

Paris was starving, yet one of its grand restaurants was still producing an elaborate Christmas dinner. The ingredients had changed. The idea of dinner had changed with them.

In Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, he recalled working at a little SoHo restaurant that served lion, tiger and hippopotamus braciole, along with other dead zoo animals. Suddenly, the distance between a zoo and a restaurant doesn’t seem quite so enormous. Bourdain understood our strange little prejudice: familiar animals are food, unfamiliar ones are somehow outrageous. Put chicken on a plate and nobody thinks twice. Put something that looks like it escaped from the zoo in front of us and suddenly we have questions.

Maybe that’s the real lesson from Paris. The line between the zoo and the dinner plate has always been thinner than we think. Give us enough hunger or curiosity, and the zoo starts looking less like a place to visit and a lot more like a place to eat.