Thai Meals for Thai People

The name of this post is a really rough translation of the name for Chef Prin Polsuk and Mint Jarukittikun’s restaurant, Samrub Samrub Thai. Come to think of it, I really should have started this post with a photo of their food.

It’s fancy food, as you can see, served in courses, which is not particularly Thai. But the main part of the meal, with rice, is served “family-style”, which in this case, is “Thai-style”, all the elements working together to form a harmonious whole that is meant to create the one perfect bite on your spoon. David Thompson’s Aksorn also serves its food this way, with courses and then a Thai “samrub”. Both restaurants have a Michelin star, if you pay attention to that sort of thing. But both also try to maintain some sort of connection with how Thai food is traditionally (some would say “used to be”) served.

Because the idea of a Thai “samrub” — a collection of dishes that are meant to work together — is disappearing from Thai food. Typically it’s all meant to harmonize on the spoon with your rice (you can’t miss rice); if you have rice, you have to have a soup, or at least a curry, or everything will be too “dry”; you need something to combat the possible fattiness of a coconut milk-rich curry, like a spicy salad yum or a chili dip (nam prik); but if you don’t have a coconut milk-rich curry you can indulge in a coconut milk-based dip like lon; then there’s the extra fiber of a stir-fried veg; and then something even more extra so that the pigs at the table (me) don’t feel hungry later, like a non-spicy meat dish if your curry is spicy or a comfortingly bland soup … you get the picture. This sense for putting together a “samrub” used to be intuitive to Thais, ingrained after decades of eating the same way. For me, raised in my teens on Domino’s and McDonald’s, it’s taken years to figure it out properly.

Presented together, the bounty of the meal is supposed to be as pleasing to the eye and as warming to the heart as any beautifully presented terrine of foie gras festooned in beluga caviar could ever hope to be. If this sounds outrageous to you, think of a dim sum meal: you wouldn’t want those dumplings and noodles to be served course-style, would you? Of course not! You would want them collected all together on the lazy Susan, silently cursing your dining companions for hogging all the abalone.

Unfortunately, this is not a normal way to eat anymore. People don’t have time to sit together as a family to enjoy five or six dishes with rice. Today, it’s all about aharn jan diew (one-plate meals), and if you’re not eating khao man gai (chicken rice) and, say, pad kaprao (holy basil stir-fry), you often don’t even get a soup with it, and you probably end up throwing away the cucumbers too because what the hell are those for?

All of which is to say, all those old Thai eating rules — always soup with rice, always bland with spicy, always crunchy with smooth, always fresh with cooked — are slipping away. Eating that way, with so many dishes, is a privilege, even luxurious, the Thai equivalent of one of those enormous steaks you get covered in gold foil with a Turkish man sprinkling even more salt on it table-side before he reluctantly agrees to take a selfie with you … you get what I’m saying.

So maybe that’s why many fine-dining Thai restaurants (particularly those with an eye towards their own Michelin star) are ignoring the rules of the Thai “samrub” in favor of a Western-style procession of courses: some sort of amuse-bouche, the entrée (or even more ghastly) the “appetizer”, a salad, soup, fish, poultry, meat, pre-dessert, dessert, avant-dessert, petits fours and coffee and/or digestif. Don’t forget the wine pairing. Yes, Thai restaurants are doing this.

I probably don’t need to tell you how I feel about this, but I will, because it’s been a while (like three weeks? This year is already crazy) since my last food rant. This is colonization, the biggest expression of it since Thais were forced to use cutlery and sit on chairs (my mortal enemy!) in the face of threatening moves by both the British and French empires. Because of encroaching colonizers, we willingly colonized ourselves in a bid to look more “civilized” (the dreaded word sivilai is still used today!) Is this any different from what we see today, when the threat of encroaching bankruptcy spurs us to bow to our European ratings agency masters?

I had a meal at a promising restaurant helmed by a chef that I like, where the &*&%^$ing rice (from Surin, mind you, so it was very good rice) was cooked French pilaf-style and served with a $^&#@*ing fork and knife. Only a couple days later, I was at the new restaurant of another chef and can honestly swear I was served &*(#)@ing mixed salad from a bag as garnish for every dish that was served (“samrub”-style, admittedly). Needless to say, I did not enjoy these meals. I can’t believe that any people did. I mean (I’m not done yet), you can cut down on costs by serving Thai vegetables from a market. Thailand is known for growing a lot of them. But of course, you’d have to clean and prepare them yourself.

In case you think I am one of those Thai traditionalists who bemoan the fact that the food of their childhoods is slipping ever farther away, I did enjoy a recent fine dining meal at Coda. They, too, served Thai dishes Western-style, and they even did reinterpretations of Thai favorites like drunken noodles and (gasp) som tum. Here’s their take on gang som, with foam and everything, normally the nadir of all my food thoughts and prayers:

I can’t believe I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the dumb som tum Thai sorbet, the squid ink from the drunken noodles smudging my face, even the finishing flourish of surprise duck rice porridge after the dessert, mirroring Chef Tap Kokpol’s no doubt past experience of heading to a late-night khao thom restaurant after an unsatisfying fine dining meal. I liked it all. And what I liked best about it was that it proved to me that I’m not a traditional Thai food gremlin, not at all. I just like what I like.