22nd September 2026 – (Hong Kong) Bring a strong stomach: the world’s first Disgusting Food Museum lands at Kai Tak’s AIRSIDE from 29th September, packing more than 80 polarising dishes from 35 countries into Gate33 Gallery and handing every visitor a specially made vomit bag.
Founded in Malmö, Sweden, in 2018, the show has already stopped in Los Angeles, Berlin, Bordeaux and Taipei, drawing more than 500,000 visitors. The Hong Kong run combines real foods and models with film, scent installations and interactive displays across five zones: a wild feast, tonic oddities, a stink workshop, a table of choices and a feast of tomorrow’s leftovers.
Headline exhibits include Swedish Surströmming, the fermented herring long called the world’s smelliest canned food; Icelandic fermented shark with its sharp ammonia reek; and Casu Marzu, the Sardinian cheese that still holds live maggots and is banned for sale in the European Union. Also on the menu of horrors are Peruvian frog juice, Mongolian sheep-eyeball juice, Greenland’s fermented auk, Iranian offal soup and Rocky Mountain oysters, the American deep-fried bull’s testicles dressed up with a seafood name.
The point is not only to shock. The museum asks what makes a food “disgusting” when the same dishes are ordinary at home, and how cultural bias shapes the gag reflex. The later zones turn to crickets, mopane worms and other high-protein, low-carbon insects, plus lab-grown meat, as possible answers to future food security.
For Hong Kong, the Swedish team has reworked the route with local creatives and asked local perfumers to invent city-specific food smells, so the immersion is not a straight import from Malmö. After the walk-through, the Last Bite tasting bar lets visitors, under staff guidance, try cricket snacks, Australian Vegemite, pickled-vegetable juice, Surströmming and fermented shark free of charge. Finish the challenge and you may call yourself a Tastebud Warrior.
The show runs from 29th September to 26th November on the third floor of AIRSIDE. Opening hours are noon to 8.00pm Monday to Thursday, and 11.00am to 9.00pm on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays. Standard tickets are HK$68 on weekdays from Monday to Thursday and HK$88 from Friday to Sunday, with concessions and group rates. A limited run of 200 early-bird passes from HK$48 is already on sale for those who want first crack at the sensory gauntlet.
