A Fruit With a Future

It’s not uncommon to hear a chorus of beguiled gasps when a dragon fruit — also known as pitaya or pitahaya — is placed in front of an audience. From the outside the fruit looks like a hot pink bulb ringed with a jester’s crown of curly greenish petals. Slice it open, and there’s a white (or, on rare occasions, fuchsia) scoop of sweet pulp speckled with tiny black seeds. Either way, it suggests an Easter bonnet that Cruella de Vil might wear in a drag remake of “101 Dalmatians,” or an Italian ice meant to be spooned up for space freaks in the cantina scene in “Star Wars.”

“The fruit is beautiful and at the same time very strange-looking, maybe like something from Tim Burton — from ‘Beetlejuice,’ ” said José Andrés, the Spanish-born chef, who arranges fried quail on dragon fruit sauce in a dish he calls Like Water for Chocolate. It appears on the menu at China Poblano, his new restaurant at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas.

The silver-screen comparisons are hard to resist, and lately they also happen to be apt. If dragon fruit were an aspiring actress, the Hollywood press would be hailing her as the latest “it” girl.

Suddenly the cactus-bred curio is appearing in too many places to count. Skyy is introducing a dragon-fruit-flavored vodka this spring. Celestial Seasonings, the Colorado-based stalwart of herbal infusions, recently began pairing powdered dragon fruit with green tea. There’s a Sumatra Dragonfruit version of Bai, a thirst quencher made from the unroasted fruit of the coffee plant; a line of Lite Pom that blends a few swigs of dragon fruit with pomegranate juice; and a new pitaya-tinged cream liqueur called Dragon Kiss.

The fruit has made cameo appearances as an ingredient on shows like “Marcel’s Quantum Kitchen” and “Top Chef Masters” and at a few local bars. Dennis Cooleen, an owner of Alias on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, conjured up a dragon fruit margarita for a Mexican-themed dinner not long ago, and it was popular enough that he brought it back for Cinco de Mayo. “It went with the Day of the Dead theme, because it’s white and milky with black dots,” Mr. Cooleen said. “So it kind of reminded me of an eyeball.”

Whatever the context, dragon fruit has a knack for getting noticed. “A lot of people aren’t even aware of what the fruit is, but I can tell you that everyone is attracted to it,” said Kevin Gardner, the entrepreneur who has been introducing Dragon Kiss liqueur around the country. “When they see it, it seems to stimulate the senses of men and women.”

Especially, it seems, if those men and women specialize in marketing. “For a marketer, it’s a dream come true, because how many dragon puns can you come up with?” said Andrea Conzonato, the chief marketing officer for Skyy vodka. “An orange is an orange. A raspberry is a raspberry. But then you find a dragon fruit, and you’re like, Where did this come from? Why did I not know about this before?”

Cultivated largely in Vietnam and in Central and South America, dragon fruit sprouts like a psychedelic hood ornament from the arms of a cactus. That can happen, however, only if the flower of the cactus is properly pollinated, and pollination happens only after the sun goes down.

“The flower can’t bloom during the day because the sun would burn the flower,” said Robert Schueller, a produce expert at Melissa’s, a California-based distributor that has played an instrumental role in raising dragon fruit awareness — even to the point of encouraging farmers to grow it — in the United States. “It pops out at night. It blooms to the full moon. If the flower does not get pollinated, the bloom will fall to the ground. And if the bloom falls to the ground, no fruit.”