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Japanese Seafood NIGHTMARE!!! RARE Deep Sea Creature Cooking!!

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A giant armored crustacean from 1,000 meters down just became dinner off the coast of Shizuoka.

Sonny Side, host of the Best Ever Food Review Show, heads to Shizuoka Prefecture to find out what happens when Japan’s deep-sea fishing boats haul up something that looks like it crawled out of a horror movie. His guide is Mr. Hasegawa, a veteran local fisherman who’s spent his career pulling catch from waters most people never think about — the kind of depths where sunlight doesn’t reach and the animals look built for a different planet. The centerpiece of the trip is the giant isopod, an armored deep-sea scavenger that gets cooked right on the boat, in the last place you’d expect: the vessel’s own exhaust pipe.

• Sonny Side joins fisherman Mr. Hasegawa aboard his boat off Shizuoka to haul in and inspect deep-water catches, with giant isopods as the main attraction.
• The isopods are grilled inside the boat’s chimney/exhaust pipe area for roughly five minutes before being pulled out and tasted.
• The segment plays up the contrast between the isopod’s alien, menacing shell and meat that’s compared to crab and lobster.

Shizuoka’s Deep-Water Haul

Shizuoka sits along Suruga Bay, one of the deepest bays in Japan, which is exactly why it’s become a hotspot for deep-sea fishing operations that bring up creatures rarely seen on a dinner table. Mr. Hasegawa’s boat works those depths the traditional way, and Sonny tags along to see what actually comes up in the nets before any of it reaches a plate. It’s the same instinct that’s driven other Best Ever Food Review Show stops — the idea that the best seafood stories start at the source, not the restaurant, a theme that shows up in pieces like Fishpeople | Lives Transformed by the Sea.

Giant isopods live at depths over 1,000 meters, where crushing pressure and near-freezing cold have shaped them into scavengers built like tanks — segmented shells, multiple jointed legs, and a look that’s more insect than crustacean. They’re bottom feeders, which is part of why Shizuoka’s fishing crews occasionally pull them up alongside other deep-water catch. For Mr. Hasegawa, hauling one in isn’t a novelty; it’s just another day working water that most people will never see below the surface.

Grilled in the Chimney

Once the isopod is on deck, the boat itself becomes the kitchen. Rather than firing up a separate grill, the crew places the creature directly into the chimney area around the boat’s exhaust pipe, using the heat generated there to cook it in place for about five minutes. It’s a rough, improvised method that fits the setting — no restaurant equipment, no plating, just the tools already on the vessel.

It looks like something out of a nightmare — and it tastes like crab and lobster.

That gap between appearance and flavor is the whole point of the segment. The shell comes off looking like armor plating from a deep-sea horror set, but once Sonny cracks into the meat, the texture and taste land somewhere between crab and lobster — familiar seafood flavor packed inside an unfamiliar, intimidating shell. It’s the same shock-to-payoff formula that’s made other extreme-eating stops work, echoing the approach in How to BEAT a LUXURY BUFFET!!! UNLIMITED SEAFOOD!!, where the size and strangeness of the catch is the hook before the taste even comes into play.

Working Waters, Not a Novelty Act

What separates this trip from a stunt is Mr. Hasegawa’s role in it. He’s not performing for the camera — he’s showing Sonny how a career deep-sea fisherman actually handles an unpredictable catch, on a boat he’s worked for years off Shizuoka’s coast. That authenticity is the same thread running through hands-on fishing content like Bare-handed shark fishing, where the appeal isn’t the danger for its own sake but watching someone genuinely skilled work a method most viewers will never try themselves.

By the time Sonny finishes tasting the grilled isopod meat, the segment has made its case: Japan’s deep-sea coastline still produces catch strange enough to stop a viewer mid-scroll, and Shizuoka’s fishermen have quietly figured out how to turn a nightmare-looking scavenger into something you’d actually want to eat off a boat deck in the middle of the bay.