SOMETHING happened when Kisha Moorehead looked into the bowl of live worms.

She was midway through a five-course Mexican feast at the Brooklyn Kitchen in Williamsburg last Saturday night, a meal engineered to introduce New Yorkers to the succulent wonders of edible insects. Throughout the first couple of courses (yucca frites dotted with mealworms, a smoked corn custard sprinkled with crispy moth larvae), Ms. Moorehead’s response had been muted. Earlier that evening, in fact, out on the sidewalk, she and her date, Harold Bradley, had considered fleeing the event altogether, even though they’d spent $85 each.

“We kept asking ourselves: ‘Are you ready? Do you want to turn back?’ ” Mr. Bradley said.

But they stayed, and at some point during dinner a bowl of squirming wax moth larvae was passed around. Ms. Moorehead, 38, who most days can be found driving the morning G train, dived in. “They’re moving,” she said. “Oh, I want to try that. Oh! Oh!”

Suddenly almost trembling with excitement, she stuck her fingers into the bowl, grabbed a pale yellow worm, popped it into her mouth and munched down. She closed her eyes. She seemed to swoon.

“I ain’t gonna do that,” Mr. Bradley said.

“Just try one, please,” Ms. Moorehead said.

“It tastes like raw corn,” a fellow diner, Alfredo Lamus, said from across the table.