Can laypeople shuck Babylonia genus easily?

Question

Blogger just wrote Babylonia. Anyone know the Species name?

Can laymen extract meat easily? How? I don't know how extract meat! When I last ate this at Japanese restaurant,  I asked restaurant manager to ask chef to extract meat. But manager was dumbfound, and it took five minutes to explain. When the manager came back with the extracted meat, he acted upset.

Stephie · Accepted Answer

Once snails are cooked, they can simply be extracted from the shell with a skewer or a tiny fork. Poke into the flesh, pull if necessary, lift it out.
This YouTube video shows it at 3:55 for sea snails (Babylonia areata), the same principle applies for other maritime snails like winkles and land snails, aka the famous escargot.
In fine dining, the restaurant would supply a set of special tools for escargot, consisting of small tongs and a narrow fork, to protect the guests fingers from the copious amounts of herb butter classic escargot are served with. In a less refined setting, any kind of skewer will do just fine, even a toothpick. Although I never tried it, I would assume that a set of chopsticks would also work.
We can only speculate, but I would assume that the waiter was just surprised that you ordered a dish without knowing the proper technique of eating it - especially as cooked snails can simply be pulled out of the shell without much effort. (Raw snails can be trickier, though, but a well-trained chef will know how to deal with the animals in the kitchen.)

Joe · Answer

Snails aren't a common dish around here, but I remember seeing someone eating them on some TV show (might've been a travel show, like Rick Steves), and the person with them mentioned that you had to spin them in a certain direction based on the direction of the spiral of the snail.  (I think it was with the spiral, but it might've been opposite to the spiral)
So it's possible that there's a trick to extracting them, but that once you know it, anyone would be able to do it easily.
I wouldn't expect a restaurant to serve something that's exceptionally difficult to eat, although it's possible that some might require knowledge that's not universally known (like artichokes)

Can laypeople shuck Babylonia genus easily?

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