The smell and texture were such that I felt an urgent need to temporarily become a vegetarian. But one other HN'er was present at that dinner and gave in to peer pressure, maybe he'll chime in.
Same in the Philippines. The smell will drive non-Filipino's out of the area. The locals love it, but I never heard of such a thing before arriving here.
Depends on the fishhead. One of the best meals of my life involved lingcod cheeks at the Tjoruhusid in Isafjordur, Iceland.
If you can imagine the difference between leavened bread and non-yeasted bread - it's a bit like that. The cheeks specifically were lighter, fluffier, and more buttery in comparison to the otherwise delicious but more dense fillet.
I don't usually eat fish that are big enough to have big meaty ones but even on tiny fish they're amazing and usually worth the effort to dig em out. Even on Salmon its worth it.
[I'm also Icelandic] when people say they eat "cod heads" they usually don't mean you eat the head whole, although it's also boiled for e.g. broth or stew. They usually mean that they eat the cheeks and tongue of the fish, and sometimes the eyes.
This is a delicacy in Iceland (gellur & kinnar) and I'm surprised you haven't heard of it., you've been missing out. Here's a video of a fishmonger (in Icelandic, but it mostly speaks for itself) extracting the two. Gellur (tounge) at around 1m30s, kinnar (cheeks) at 3m50s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcmHCoMQ01c
The cheek or other head tissue on the fish is usually the most delicious. On cods the cheeks are particularly big, but on most fish there's a small and tender cheek muscle you can easily get to.
Fun story: I was once at a wedding in Singapore where they served fish, and all the ethnic Chinese there were getting the whole fish including the head, but the waiters were serving all the foreigners (mostly Europeans) fillets. The natives were shocked and impressed when I asked for what they were having, and proceeded to eat edible parts of the head, including e.g. the eyes.
I had to explain that Iceland was a bit unusual as European cuisine goes, and much closer to the Chinese tradition of not needlessly throwing away useful food just because it looks odd.
