MEXICO CITY — "Ya tenemos escamoles!" the sandwich board in front of the pretty restaurant announced in a cheery font.

Great, I thought, wishing I hadn't understood it. I had intended to sample some adventurous food, but maybe not this adventurous — not escamoles — and not on my first night in the Mexican capital.

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But here I was, in town for a conference on the Latin American diet sponsored by the Oldways Preservation Trust (see related article). At the opening cocktail reception, I fell in with a fun group of people who invited me to join them for dinner. Ditching my champagne and breadstick, I followed them out the door of the hotel to Los Almendros, a restaurant that specializes in the foods of the Yucatan and southeast Mexico.

"Does anyone want to try escamoles?" a woman in our party asked as soon as we were seated.

"What are escamoles?" the man across the table wondered.

"Ant eggs," I said, deciding then to begin the meal with a shot of tequila rather than the house specialty hibiscus margarita. The morning's grits and eggs rumbled ominously in my stomach.

Oh, I've read about escamoles (es-ca-MO-lays), usually called ant eggs, but also "ant spawn" or, most accurately, "ant larvae." Writers often remark that Mexicans "consider this pre-Columbian foodstuff a delicacy," straining every drop of cultural superiority from the word "delicacy." This word, as commonly understood, has no relation to "delicate," "delicious" or "delight." It means barf. A thousand times barf. Delicacies are the ram's testicles and putrefied shark eaten in Iceland, the rodent jerky consumed in Venezuela and the scarab beetles that are the subject of chow envy in Africa.

And escamoles.

I've read that escamoles are harvested in Hidalgo state — near Mexico City — from giant black ant colonies that live along the root systems of the maguey (agave) plant. The harvesters have to wear protective gear to ward off the furious stinging ants who want their spawn back. Sometimes they rush into a riverbed to chase off the ants and rinse the sand from their precious larval booty. Yum . . .

Since one writer dubbed escamoles "Mexican caviar," I pictured them to be black, with hard membranes and juicy insides that burst on your tongue with the flavor of a bike-ride mosquito.

But the escamoles that came to our table were nothing like that. They were — I promise on a dozen anthills — delicious. Delicate. A delight.

OK, the appearance and subsequent first bite were scary. Escamoles are a pearlescent white, the size of Rice Krispies and the texture of cottage cheese. At Los Almendros, they came sautéed with thin threads of onion and bits of cilantro. On the side was a borracha sauce made with blackened pasilla chiles and tequila that seemed too pungent and bitter for the softness of escamoles.

I put a spoonful on a soft corn tortilla and bit. Once I could get the "Fear Factor" flinch out of my mouth, out of my brain, out of my post-Columbian soul, I tasted. Soft. Creamy. Buttery. Nutty. There was a back flavor, a suggestion of pointy sharpness, of menthol, but the coating mildness kept negating it.

Say, I like this ant spawn, Sam-I-Am. And I could eat it on a boat . . .

The next day, I joined my new friends for lunch at a nice, nontrendy restaurant downtown called Fonda del Refugio. The day's special was . . . escamoles. Mexico was in the height of the spring harvest, and restaurants throughout the city were celebrating. They would resort to frozen escamoles soon enough; now was the time for fresh.

I loved this version — very buttery, served with black bean refritos and a luscious guacamole to lavish on tor-tillas.

That evening, we ate at El Izote, the nueva mexicana restaurant from star chef Patricia Quintana. Need I say that the escamoles were the highlight of the meal? A close second were the gusanos de maguey — worms fried into hollow tubes of crunch.

When I came home, I couldn't stop thinking about my new favorite delicacy. Quintana e-mailed me a recipe that, as expected, contained little but olive oil and butter to bring out the natural antsy goodness.

Lucero Martinez-Obregon, a self-professed escamoles nut, has spent years trying to source them in the United States. "I've looked on Web sites and gone to specialty food purveyors, without any luck," sighed the partner in the Decatur branch of Zocalo. "I even talked to someone in the Mexican Embassy in [Washington] D.C. to see if there was some kind of health problem, but it was complicated, and I didn't get far."

Zarela Martinez, the cookbook author and owner of Zarela restaurant in Manhattan, doesn't know of any restaurants in New York serving escamoles, nor has she seen them at markets in Queens, where she knows she can find maguey worms.

Then again, she's not looking too hard.

"I'm not an escamole fan," Martinez says in a definite voice. "That gelatinous texture — there's something about it. Ewwww!

"But," she adds with a laugh and an explanation, "I don't like tapioca, either."