Gator- tastes like chicken, kind of tough and chewy, but come on, have you ever seen an alligator? Of course it was going to be chewy.

Frog legs- pretty much a dead ringer for chicken wings if you didn’t know what a wing was supposed to look like. Maybe just the tiniest hint of something fishy going on there.

Escargot - an excellent excuse to eat a bunch of butter and garlic and for some reason it’s fancy even though you’re eating a garden pest

Squirrel - kind of greasy, but not bad, darker meat than I expected. Not really enough meat on them to be worth it though, at least not the squirrels we have in my neck of the woods, I’ve seen some pretty big squirrels in other parts of the country though, so maybe they’re a little more worthwhile. If you had a handful of squirrels I suspect they could make a pretty good soup or stew though.

Rabbit- tastes like chicken, I’ve had it a few different ways, I don’t know that I would know the difference if you swapped rabbit for chicken in any of them, but I had a rabbit pot pie at a restaurant a few years ago that has been my happy thought ever since, probably the tastiest thing I have ever eaten.

Deer venison - very similar to beef, a bit gamey but I dig that.

Quail - tiny chicken, that’s pretty much all there is to it.

Pigeon- much darker than chicken, a bit greasy, overall pretty tasty (these were country pigeons, I don’t recommend eating city pigeons) a single pigeon breast is pretty much exactly the right size to make a pigeon nugget.

Bison- lean beef, maybe a bit stronger tasting but overall pretty well within the beef spectrum. If you didn’t tell me it was bison, I’d probably assume it was either really cheap or moderately expensive beef.

Wild boar- pork but not, kind of hard to explain this one, and the way I had it prepared had a lot of spices and seasoning so I can’t really give a straight appraisal of the meat itself.

Kangaroo- it tastes like it evolved on a different continent than any other mammal you’ve ever eaten. It’s still very much in the red meat family but there’s something else going on there that’s kind of hard to place, sort of gamey and stronger tasting.

Goose- kind of like a mix of duck and turkey, leaning more duck-like, and yeah, that tracks, you could probably just about assume that from looking at a goose.

I wouldn’t really consider these to be exotic, but a surprising amount of people don’t seem to have tried them, and they’re some of my all-time favorite meats.

Duck- its more like a red meat than chicken, can be kind of greasy/fatty but in a good way

Lamb- red meat, kind of a strong gamey taste (that again, I personally really like) oddly somehow gamier than venison despite venison actually being a game meat and lamb being domesticated. You could probably serve me deer and tell me it was beef and slip it by me, but I don’t think you could pull it off with lamb.

Goat- lamb, but moreso.

Liver- it’s kind of hard to describe liver in any way but livery, but iron-y and minneral-y are probably the best adjectives I can come up with. I’ve had beef liver and chicken liver, beef is definitely a stronger flavor but both are recognizably livery. Chicken liver is probably mild enough that as long as it’s prepared well most people could enjoy it, beef liver is definitely more of an acquired taste.

Chicken hearts- stronger flavored and tougher than regular chicken, but still recognizably chicken, imagine dark meat but lean. Little bit of a irony/mineraly taste, but not in a livery way, can be a little tough/chewy, and if you’re inclined to batter and fry them, they are the perfect size to make sort of a popcorn chicken thing with, or if you want to have little bits of meat for a stir fry or something and don’t feel like chopping up the meat yourself. They are also dirt cheap, at least around me.

Tripe- a bit chewy, honestly not too much going on flavor-wise, there’s something going on that tastes/smells of a barnyard but in a very pleasant way, but it’s almost more of a suggestion of a taste than an actual flavor.

Beef tongue- recognizably beefy, but definitely has something going else on, not quite livery but leaning that direction. Definitely something you need to braise or sous vide or something for a long time because it will be damn near impossible to chew otherwise, and it has its own unique texture, it will probably make you think a lot about your own tongue while eating it.

Chicken feet- look, there’s really no meat worth speaking of on a chicken foot, it’s basically all skin and connective tissue which is tasty and an interesting texture, but not worth it to me to eat themselves, some people do, but it’s not for me. ut if you want to take you chicken stock to the next level, use some chicken feet.

And these are probably the opposite of exotic, just weird or have bad press

Pickled pigs feet- salty vinegary vaguely porky jello with bones in it. I like salty vinegary things, so that’s not a bad thing in my book.

Scrapple- local delicacy for those of us in the Delaware valley, if you’ve ever heard spam described as everything but the oink, well scrapple has some oink in it too. It’s soft and mushy and fries up to a real nice crisp on the outside. Taste is sort of in a similar vein as a breakfast sausage, really nothing too wild about it.

Pork roll (you north jersey folk calling it Taylor Ham are crazy, it says pork roll right on the package, you’re wrong) is basically just spam with a better PR department, less salty, slightly different spices, doesn’t come in a can.

And on that note- spam, it’s delicious but very salty. If you like ham you’ll probably like spam.

I used to compulsively rip chunks out of my fingers using my teeth as a form of anxiety driven self harm. I’d say it’s close to pork, but I haven’t tasted raw pork

Rattlesnake in the wild, thanks to an insane ex-military Scout leader I had that was trying to prove a point to us (his Scout troop).

It was actually a lot better than I expected, but I wouldn’t recommend it for a number of (hopefully) obvious reasons.

Snake ate the ducks we were going to eat so it was allowed to digest them then we ate the snake.

Not bad, tasted a bit like duck weirdly. Lots of bones.

Ostrich is delicious. I’ve eaten it in a restaurant once and cooked it myself two or three times. It tastes like a red meat, but cooks like white meat, so you have to be careful because it can overlook in a snap.

Horse. A friend of mine brought some from Iceland and was kind enough to share. Its somewhere between pork and beef to me.

The fermented shark he brought back on the other hand, was the worst thing I have ever tasted. The smell alone cleared the room, and as one chef instructor said, “it smells like dirty pussy”.

Flamingo, but the meat is a bit tough…

Sawagani - Japanese river crab. They’re tiny; about the size of a US nickel and you eat them fried whole, shell and all. Apparently they aren’t exported any more, but I had them at a sushi restaurant in Austin around 2000. They were delicious, like extra-crunchy crab-flavored popcorn.

I once ate a baby camel. Had some rice with it as well.

While visiting Norway, I had a reindeer burger which was simply awesome. I also had reindeer meat prepared like they prepare antilope in the country the cook was from. Expensive and worth it.

Ate ostrich and kangaroo. Were alright.

For some rabbit and horse is exotic, or even deer, elk, reindeer, but I wouldn’t count that.

Gator, croc, moose, ostrich, caribou, elk, cow brain, squid ink.

The cow brain was bland and I did not care for the squid ink. The rest were great.

I can get you exotic meats. Hippo steaks, giraffe burgers…

It’ll all be goat.

Alligator - oddly enough as fritters at a Margaritaville in New Orleans. Like most say, flaky like fish, tastes like chicken.

Horseneat served and packaged like baloney in Sweden, eating with crisp bead and breakfast cheese. Was not a fan.

Moose in Sweden. Like beef, only the “grains” of the meat were really large.

Reindeer in Sweden. Like venison, but I am told “less gamey.” I say I am told, because apparently I cannot taste the “gamey” in meat. That is, I have had gamey venison and non-gamey venison and can’t taste whatever gameyness is.

Cicada - tastes like weak shrimp.

Very low end: goat. There was an Indian restaurant near a museum we visited, and I saw it as an option and figured why not. Turns out it’s mostly like lamb. Quelle surprise.

Haven’t had it since. It’s hard enough finding anywhere that serves lamb, in the US. It’s just not on our radar. I think everywhere I’ve seen it is either some kind of ethnic cuisine (mostly Indian and Greek, since a few years in Bavaria had quite an impact on my palette) or some upscale restaurant treating it as exotic. Otherwise you have to buy a shoulder and slow-cook it yourself.