A Fruit With a Future 'Dragon Fruite'

On the continents where the cactus normally grows, bats and moths take care of pollination duties, Mr. Schueller said. Farmers who grow dragon fruit domestically — mostly in Southern California — have to go out into the fields under a full moon and pollinate the flowers by hand.

It’s easy to see why American farmers took their time and began cultivating dragon fruit crops only a decade ago. And it’s easy to see why a few wound up backing out. “We ventured into it years ago, before it hit the U.S., and dropped out of it for cost reasons,” Margaret D’Arrigo-Martin, an executive at D’Arrigo Brothers of California, a produce powerhouse, said in an e-mail.

The Department of Agriculture started allowing the fruit to be imported from Vietnam — where most of them come from — in the summer of 2008. But shipping them without squishing or spoiling them can be a challenge. “It’s a very sensitive fruit,” Mr. Schueller said. That helps make it expensive. “The large ones can go for anywhere from four to six dollars apiece,” he added.

Stroll through the aisles at Whole Foods, though, and it’s clear that Americans are keen on broadening their fruit spectrum. “When I was a kid, you walked into an A&P market and you saw apples, oranges, lemons, limes,” said Mr. Conzonato, who is 42. “If there was a pineapple, that was crazy. We were flavor settlers. Now we’ve kind of changed our behavioral patterns. We’re flavor nomads. We’re much more willing to explore.”

As Mr. Gardner was gearing up to create his cream liqueur, he studied the momentum that had built around “superfruits” like açaí and pomegranate and found himself asking, “What’s the next hot fruit?” Because of his travels in Asia, he knew of at least one promising contender — the freaky-looking one with an easy-to-pronounce name and a blooms-under-a-full-moon back story that seemed to have been dreamed up by a screenwriter. (There also has been much flag-waving for dragon fruit’s alleged bounty of antioxidants, but “I haven’t seen any nutritional profiles that back that claim,” Mr. Schueller said.)

Taste hunters from Givaudan, the flavor-and-fragrance company, had been on the same trail for a while. Jeff Peppet, Givaudan’s head of marketing communications for North America, remembers traveling in Vietnam on a “taste trek” in 2002 and picking up a dragon fruit in Ho Chi Minh City. The team subjected the fruit to what’s known as a “headspace capture,” using filters and tubes to pick up molecules of aroma and flavor that “we take back to the lab for analysis,” Mr. Peppet said.

But herein lies what you might call the headspace catch: Sure, dragon fruit may look glamorous, but the way it performs — on a plate or in a glass — is open to debate. “It’s interesting for me because the dragon fruit doesn’t have much flavor impact,” said Derek Elefson, a marketing specialist at Givaudan. “It’s almost like a fantasy flavor — there is a lot of room for interpretation.”

In other words, the thing doesn’t taste as wild as it looks.

“Because the dragon fruit is so pretty, your expectations are a little different when you bite into it for the first time,” Mr. Schueller said. “You think, ‘Wow, this thing is going to be really spectacular.’ And it’s really mild.” In some of the trendy drinks that emblazon the word “dragon fruit” across the bottle, “you cannot taste dragon fruit in there,” he said.

In fact, attempts to describe what it does taste like — depending on who’s doing the talking, it might be compared to a kiwi, a strawberry, a pear, a melon or a litchi, or it might simply be pegged as “refreshing” — suggest a conundrum at the core of the dragon fruit trend: What if the blockbuster flavor of the moment isn’t much of a flavor at all?

“If you’ve ever bitten into a dragon fruit, there’s not that much going on,” said Meghann Seidner, a brand manager for Emergen-C, the vitamin-supplement mix. “It’s not that intense on its own.” Dragon fruit plays well with others, though, which helps explains why it’s accompanied by strawberry powder in the dragon-fruit-flavored Emergen-C mix — and why customers often see it paired with other soft flavors that help prop it up.

“Dragon fruit is very subtle, very delicate,” Mr. Andrés, the chef, said in an e-mail. “So you want to be careful not to kill it with things that have very strong flavor.” In his fried quail dish at China Poblano, he couples it with rose petals.

It remains to be seen, naturally, whether dragon fruit has enough juice to move beyond its niche status and grow into a box-office powerhouse. For now, its fans probably ought to enjoy the warmth of the spotlight while it lasts — there’s always a new star around the corner, after all.

“Have you ever heard of rambutan?” “That’s my next obsession. That is a weird-looking fruit, and hugely delicious. I’m going to convince somebody to let me do that vodka.”