Tag Archives: street food

by | 09/12/2014 · 1:47 pm

Chicken rice for the articles

The full deal at Mongkolchai

The full deal at Mongkolchai

Chicken rice in Thailand can in many ways be a fraught affair. This is because a dish that supposedly leans so heavily on its essence — boiled, plain chicken meat and fluffy, white rice, stripped of any artifice — is being served in a country that has never heard of a food that couldn’t take another chili pepper or another dollop of shrimp paste. Thailand is about the grand gesture: great big flavors married to overwhelmingly pungent smells. Chicken rice is retiring, minimalistic, almost bare.

So, as with just about every dish of Chinese origin, chicken rice undergoes a little bit of a makeover every time it appears on a Thai plate. There is the chicken, breast or thigh meat, skin or no skin, of course. The rice, grains plumped by chicken broth, no duh. And finally, a tranche of cucumber slices with fresh coriander, paired with a cube of congealed chicken blood or two, and a clear soup in which a sad old hunk of winter melon or turnip swims, possibly with a coriander leaf or cut-up scallion for company.

But in Thailand, everyone who is anyone knows that the dipping sauce is the most important thing on that table. At least, according to my mother. “There is no good khao man gai without a good dipping sauce,” she says, echoing what every Thai has ever really thought: that there is no food on earth that cannot be complete without the perfect sauce. This is the basic premise behind what many consider the gold standard of Bangkok chicken rice dishes, what every khao man gai purveyor strives for: the plump pillow of chicken and rice at Montien Hotel over which not one, not two, not three, but FOUR sauces are meant to drape themselves. Khao man gai is supposed to be about the sauce. Or is it?

It took me a long time to get to Mongkolchai (314 Samsen Road, 02-282-1991). It’s not really about the location, because I will go that far for Sukhothai noodles, or Chinese-style roasted duck on rice, or pork satay. It’s not about the dish, either. I love chicken rice, because I love sauce — specifically, the inky salt sauce dotted with garlic, ginger and chilies that makes Thai chicken rice something beyond the ordinary. It’s how people invariably describe the attraction: this street food place far far away that serves boiled chicken on rice and, oh btw, their soup is really great. This brings on a great big WTF from me, because … come on, SOUP? That side dish you take sips of to help your real food along? These people are like the guys who read Playboy for the articles.

I went anyway. It’s predictably good, tender chicken breast with the option of skin on or off, the requisite Thai-spiked sauce that there is never enough of, the cube of blood and the cucumber. My soup was darker than the average clear broth, awash in pepper and sprinkled with pickled lime flesh. When I got home, I did a little research and read that my soup was probably twice-boiled duck broth.

The pillow and the cube

The pillow and the cube

Would I go back? Yes, because the service was fast and solicitous and friendly. Whether that was because they thought I was a tourist from Hong Kong doesn’t matter to me. But there is more chicken rice a few steps away on my street corner and another half a block away. And the one, the chicken rice that really speaks to me, with its battery of sauce and excess of flesh, awaiting me at the Montien Hotel coffee shop, should I really want to take that trip. I guess I am super Thai after all.

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by | 09/05/2014 · 2:25 pm

Back to the starting point

Chicken-bitter melon noodles at Guaythiew Gai Mara

Chicken-bitter melon noodles at Guaythiew Gai Mara

Chicken and bitter melon noodles can be tricky. They are the blind date that seems normal enough, but who rarely sets off very many sparks. “Sparky” is reserved for the Cristiano Ronaldos of this world, the tom yum noodles, the egg noodles with barely cooked egg threatening to break all over the strands at the slightest tap of the spoon. Meanwhile, chicken is boring and bitter melon is for old people. It is very, very hard to make alluring.

That is why I like to seek them out. I feel like they are one of the greater challenges of the Thai street food scene: how to make dumpy grandma Spanx something you would actively seek out? There are those aforementioned tom yum noodles sprawled out all over the street, after all. So I dip into street side bowls set atop tables on rickety sidewalks, or buy them from carts parked perilously close to oncoming traffic. There is always something wrong with them. Not to get too Goldilocks on it, but they are either bland, or sweet. Too much watery broth. Not saucy enough — not with the right kind of sauce. And almost never spicy enough.

It’s in the accoutrements. Not in the quality of the chicken itself, or on how young the bitter melon is. I feel like people who don’t really get chicken-bitter melon noodles emphasize those two main ingredients, like they are the end-all be-all of this dish. They really aren’t. Any old dead chicken will do, and as long as that bitter melon doesn’t come at you all moldy and dog-eared like present-day Vince Neil, you’ll do all right. No, it’s more about lashings of that dark sweet soy sauce, the bits of deep-fried garlic, the fresh basil and coriander strewn across the noodles, the pickled chili vinegar, and the chili oil. It should be — as you probably already suspected — a balance of sweet, salt, tart, spicy and bitter.

The bowls I ranged far and wide for were rarely good. It reminds me of that Survivor song — no, please give me a break here — about some dude who looked far and wide for a soulmate, only to find that she was there the whole time right in front of him. I know this song because of my mother, who would stop what she was doing anytime that song came on the radio. Now that former lead singer Jimi Jamison is gone, I bring it up again, in case you have a soft spot for arena rock ballads clearly written for the end credits of a movie. Go ahead and look it up. The soulmate was there all along. Clearly marked by a line like this:

line

To a normal person, this line is a bright red flashing sign reading “EAT HERE! EAT HERE!” But not to me. It was too close to my house. I needed to suffer for my noodles before I could sit down to them. So when I did finally deign to set my butt onto one of those little plastic stools, a Thai basil-heavy bowl of chicken and bitter melon in front of me, I had wandered through enough alleyways to realize that this bowl was the best of them all.

The stall is open most mornings at 8am until they sell out, at about 3pm — sometimes they take the day off on Mondays, but sometimes they aren’t here on a Tuesday or Wednesday. They are never here on a Sunday. The cart is located in the street between Emporium and the park, set across from Emporium garage, and run by a man wearing a Japanese ramen chef-type kerchief and his wife. If you come by at lunchtime, you will probably be able to find this stall by the long line of hopeful diners at the side of the road, the promise of a perfect bowl of chicken-bitter melon noodles right before their eyes.

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by | 05/04/2014 · 2:58 pm

Color My World

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“Vegetable parade” Japanese curry at J-Curry

I want to say from the outset that in no way am I a Chicago fan. I am not a 65-year-old man, despite what you may have heard/seen. But I did recently give Chicago IX and Jefferson Airplane’s Volunteers — recorded by two bands that the late great music critic Lester Bangs reportedly loathed — another listen and found that they were better than I remembered. I know this makes me hopelessly middle-aged.

I mean, I haven’t completely lost my mind; “Color My World” still makes me want to jump off the nearest cliff (RIP rock flute solos. RIP forever). But it’s nice to hear something sometimes that sounds like humans had actually put their hands to something and played it; that they had made mouth-noises which had been captured the way they had sung it. When compared to a lot of the popular music out today, it actually sounds like it has some sort of authenticity to it, in a way that it may not have had when it was actually released. Issue me that AARP membership card now.

A lot of the food in Bangkok is very good, but some of it also has this abnormally polished, blank quality, like it has emerged from the flagship restaurant of the nearest Aman resort. It’s engineered to be “good” and “tasteful”, the way Banana Republic clothes are engineered, or the stuff at Pottery Barn. Sometimes, if you go really upscale, you can get — oh, I don’t know — the culinary equivalents of Tory Burch and Restoration Hardware. The point is this food is designed to please as many people as possible, regardless of where they are from, what they really favor, or who they are. This renders it seamless and kind of neutered — sort of like what I imagine the Velvet Underground-loving Lester Bangs hated about Chicago. Maybe this means that this is the sort of food I’ll be missing in 30 years’ time.

This is why street food is so popular here. Although you do get the “tourist trap” places that specialize in sloppy fried rice and hot dogs on sticks, the very best ones take great care in their food despite their humble surroundings. That sincerity has translated so well that some Thais are just starting to accept that maybe, just maybe, non-Thais want to eat street food too. Street food vendors become more confident and begin to experiment with new things and new formats. This is how you get a place like J-Curry in the basement of the UBC II Building (591 Sukhumvit 33), a place my friend Chris (christao.net) first took me to a little while ago.

It might not strike you as street food, but I think it is: an open-air stand serviced by a couple of tables and chairs, but with backs on them and a neon sign because, hey, it’s Japanese food, so it’s a little fancy. A straightforward menu of different Japanese curries — from simple broccoli (110 baht) to beef, cheese and egg (195 baht) — is obviously the main focus here. And, this being Thailand where everyone reserves the right to re-season everything they are served because that’s just how it is, each plate arrives with your own personal shaker of curry powder, chili powder, black pepper and soy sauce — just like the condiment trays that arrive with your bowl of noodles.

 

 

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