Durian: Thumbs down or thumbs down?

[AlohaDawg]

e. To explain all the reasons that "The Kingdom" stank like a durian full of unchanged babies would involve more comic-book dorkery than I think anyone really wants to see.

Ben, where are you from that you would mention a durian? Mostly I only hear those mentioned by Filipinos or people from SE Asia.

[slink]

Ben, where are you from that you would mention a durian? Mostly I only hear those mentioned by Filipinos or people from SE Asia.

My ex's father eats durian sweets, having gotten a taste for them living in Singapore when she was born. Vile stuff.

[AlohaDawg]

You can make SWEETS from something that smelly? unbelievable.

[Ben-San]

I am from Boston and Philadelphia respectively, and for various reasons I spend a significant amount of time in Chinatown, where I have had a few face-to-face encounters with the world's unfriendliest fruit. However, the origin of my durian derogation lies with James "Kibo" Parry, who has a magnificent hate-on for the durian.

[Carlos del Vaca]

Now you've done it.  I must post Carlos' Tale of Durian.


There's a huge Vietnamese market in Seven Corners.  Some years ago, when I had just moved to the area, I brought my roommate Rob with me to this place.

I'm picking out hoisin sauce and the like, and he's just marveling at the variety of stuff available, dead giraffe in boxes, etc.  He says "Let's get something to eat right now."  So we're wandering around and we find an aisle with cookies.  They have these wafer cookies, that are common enough here in flavors like vanilla, chocolate, peanut butter, and CUNT.  They have these flavors too, and also some others that we don't know what they are.  There's about three languages on the label. So we decide that's what we want, something we've never heard of, so we pick up a flavor called "durian" with a picture of a greenish fruit on the label.  They're only a dollar or so, so what the heck.

We get out to the car, Rob breaks these things open, and we each eat one.  Well, I ate half of one.  It was like eating wood and paste.  It was just very, very not good.  We're looking at each other with that look that says "bleah."  I threw the other half of mine out the window as we were driving up the street.

Then we stopped at a CD store, and when we came back out, the durian wafers had stunk up the car so bad we had to pull into a gas station and throw them away.

The next day, I looked up "durian" in the dictionary, and it said "a pale green, tasty but foul-smelling fruit grown in southeast Asia." Um, wait a minute.  You just used "tasty" and "foul-smelling" to describe the same thing.  "Here, try this casserole.  It may smell foul, it may smell like the deepest pit of hell, but I assure you it's quite tasty.  Hey, wait, where you going?"

I understand that these things smell so damn bad, Asian airlines won't let people bring them on planes.  And yet people eat them.

[Limmo]

I had durian with sticky rice for dessert at Noodle Planet in Westwood village.  It tasted of nothing much at all, certainly nothing like the vanilla pudding flavor I had read about somewhere.  A poor second for mango with sticky rice.

No experience with the rest of the fruit, fortunately.