Author Archives: Bangkok Glutton

Taking a friend out to eat in a city that’s neither yours nor theirs is a tricky thing. Don’t get me wrong — it can even be difficult in Bangkok, if you don’t know someone well enough. People can say they “love food” and “will eat anything”, but when push comes to shove and you’re facing an oozy oyster omelet or a glass of water that someone has chucked a couple of ice cubes in, all of a sudden there’s hemming and hawing and “Oh, I think I’ll pass” with all the subtlety of an auntie who sits gingerly on the edge of a subway seat that you’ve just vacated.

That’s the problem Lauren and I faced, when friends we hadn’t seen for years asked us to take them out. They were excited about Asian food, and they wanted to explore the delights of one Dominion Road, the “Chinatown” in Auckland that’s not really Chinatown (that would, in fact, be Albany, a northern suburb to Auckland that is the NZ equivalent to Flushing in New York.)

Yet we balked. Lauren, cognizant of the fact that this was their first time in NZ, wanted to show them all the heights to which NZ food is capable of reaching (elevated Kiwiana at Ahi, upscale Korean at Tokii, fun Japanese at Azabu, etc). Me, cognizant that I wanted to eat greasy street food, wanted to get as down and dirty as possible, simply roaming the sidewalk down Dominion Road like a feral pack of dogs. There was a moment when we were very much aware of being at loggerheads and very much not liking that. And then it passed when we reached a compromise solution, Speaker of the House-style: we would go to Sri Penang, beloved of everyone (including Conde Nast Traveler for some reason), and then intuit where to go from there.

Ordering on a food crawl is a tricky tightrope walk of greed: too much and you’re a goner before you’ve even started; too little and you want to kill everyone around you, especially your hosts (aka me). So we took the prudent route and got the highlights: Sri Penang’s most famous dish, a melt-in-your-mouth beef rendang, a soupy and mild chicken curry, and the flakiest roti this side of, well, Penang. All was well-received, even if no one would partake of the local IPA, red vino or sparkling wine that Lauren and I had painstakingly picked out on an afternoon jaunt to two different liquor stores (all the more for me. Seriously.)

Next, I originally meant to take everyone to a personal favorite, Barilla Dumpling, where I fell down the stairs the first time I visited. I love dumplings, and Barilla takes care of that craving (and then some). There are umpteen fried, steamed and soup versions; so many, in fact, that I once, in a fit of greed, ordered an entire tableful and had to call my daughter and her friends to help bail me out of indigestion jail.

Alas, a stray review on Trip Advisor convinced me to take the group to Jolin, where I was promised the best soup dumplings in the city. Reader, there were no xiao long bao to be had. So instead we contented ourselves with the “kung fu” noodles, a mish-mash of all the noodles at the restaurant’s disposal and served by a gloriously surly Chinese man.

No worries: we saved the best for last. A trip to Eden Noodles is tough at even off-times because this place is just that popular (and tiny). I once walked away after being told that the wait would be 40 minutes, something that my husband still complains about (I went to Barilla Dumpling instead!) In any case, our visit this time was at just the right moment, and we scored a table for 5 without too much trouble. The favorites here are the dan dan noodles and the dumplings in spicy sauce, so that’s exactly what we had.

I love any and all dan dan noodles, but this one was special: tender, even melting noodles in a clear yet aromatic broth, topped with soft and sweet butter lettuce leaves and a beautifully crunchy toss of umami pork. The dumplings were even better, spicy with a big thump of savory and, dare I say it, quite sweet as well.

With all the food we ate that night, Lauren and I were surprised to discover that our friends wanted to have dinner with us AGAIN, and where should we go? It was easy this time — Nanam, a nouveau-Filipino restaurant helmed by chefs Jessabel Granada and Andrew Soriano, where standards like sisig and lechon get a sophisticated glow-up. I feel like Filipino food is on the cusp of really breaking out; people already know Thai and Vietnamese cuisines, but there are talented chefs all around the world starting to do new and interesting things with the food of the Philippines.

So we ordered, and then ordered some more. This is when I suspected that our friends only ate one meal a day — that was how much food we ended up ordering. My suspicions were justified after they told me they had shared a single minced meat pie on the ferry back from Waiheke. Los Angelenos! What do you expect?

We ordered a mashed eggplant salad that reminded me of a chili-less “soup makuea”, punctuated with black rice crisps.

There was also a lovely ceviche, and a platter of serrano croquettes, and a knockout starter of longannisa — a traditional sausage usually served with a fried egg and rice — that, in this case, is spiked with lemongrass, grilled over coals and stuffed into a tortilla with a drizzle of chipotle mayo. If that sounds good to you, don’t worry, it is. If you would like to see what it looks like, sorry, I ate them all. (However, Lauren does have a great recipe for them, in a book that was rejected by our publisher. Call us!)

That wasn’t all. We also had juicy roast chicken in a tamarind “sinigang” rub, a red snapper baked in a banana leaf, and a pork belly “lechon” with apple sauce and artichoke. It all ended up being so good that our friends ultimately didn’t care (or cared less) when my son the diplomat told one of them, the writer of a longtime cartoon series, that his favorite show was “Family Guy” and the other, the writer of a well-known comedy, that his favorite show was “Friends” (they said “That’s interesting” and “Thanks for being honest”, which is code for “Your opinions are terrible”). At least we were well fed.

I finally got around to watching “Hunger” on Netflix, and I have to say, I’m not sure any chef would saddle their restaurant — much less a private chef service — with that name. Too on the nose, or maybe just plain too pretentious, I think; I mean, can you imagine excitedly asking your friends, “Have you been to Hunger yet” without wanting to punch yourself in the face? But what do I know, I don’t have either a restaurant or a private chef service.

One of the major points of this movie, if you haven’t seen it yet, is that food is purely a status symbol, aspirational, with people only eating things like caviar, foie gras, lobster, wagyu et al because they signify the diner’s wealth to the world. Although I am sure this might be true for some people, and why many chefs garnish their dishes with these ingredients like an edible (INSERT BRAND NAME HERE) logo, I think this far too simply summarizes what fine dining has become. It’s true that, with the world as it is now, the old model of the 3-Michelin-star restaurant that has stood for centuries is fading; no one can afford three servers per diner anymore or the enormous kitchen brigades of Paul Bocuse’s time. Instead, you get “chef’s tables” where oftentimes the chef is cooking in front of you, and who ever said that was guaranteed to be terribly exciting? So you end up with nonsense like a chef cutting up a cow carcass from a hook suspended in the middle of the dining room, or a dude self-immolating on his restaurant floor during the dessert course alongside his team and his diners (these things did not happen irl). This is why some chefs have been put up on a pedestal like a Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp, marketed as celebrities that are wholesome (Jamie Oliver, aka “English Spice”) or “artistes” (Hunger’s Chef Paul, aka “Artistic Thai Spice”). This is what you get when restaurants become purely interested in making money, but in a way where they can still look down on Olive Garden and Taco Bell even though that is what they are, at heart.

Another reason why “Hunger” approaches fine dining too simplistically: Can you imagine the overarching sadness of the person who only eats something so that other people can see it and then define them for it? I like the occasional caviar and foie gras terrine (never foie gras pan-seared), but really: how joyless would that kind of dining be if personal enjoyment was not a factor?

That said, while aspirational eating is a thing, the eating of our pasts is much more obvious and far-reaching. This is because it’s frequently the happiest and most comforting eating to be had, what we ate in our childhoods. And although a lot of that food, in my case, seems incongruous (I grew up in a mainly Italian town in Western Pennsylvania, so my comfort food is wedding soup and cavatelli with meatballs, not kai jiew with rice), it makes it no less nostalgic.

I did not grow up in a Thai-Chinese household, but I did marry into one. We ordered e-mee (pan-fried crispy egg noodles with shredded chicken and ham and Chinese vinegar on the side) every Saturday from a place called Bamee Gua on Langsuan, which no longer exists. I had not had this dish since Covid, but I was lucky enough to get in touch with Thai journalist Pailin, who has Teochew roots and who recommended having e-mee at Yim Yim, a very longstanding restaurant on the corner of an offshoot of Yaowarat Road.

The restaurant is on the second floor only and well into its second or third generation — I honestly had lost count. I was busy with the food, as Pailin had also ordered an or suan, or traditional-style oyster omelet, fried rice with Chinese olive, a handful of nice kanom jeeb, or steamed pork-filled dumplings under a shower of deep-fried garlic, and sausages stuffed with chestnuts, which our dining companion Adam said he hadn’t seen on menus outside of China.

But the highlight was definitely the Chinese mullet, steamed under a blanket of garlic and pickled turnip, which Pailin usually ordered cold but which today arrived hot. Fatty, juicy, salty and meaty, if this fish was a food that could connote high status to the diner, I would have no problem showing off every day (if you are curious, it costs 600-700 baht a fish, depending on the size. Not really Jay Fai crab omelet-level prices).

But we weren’t done. Pailin took us on a walk through the market after lunch, showing us where to get her favorite snack, e-guay, a hand pie stuffed with savory things like cabbage, taro or beans. I ate it as we walked, getting cabbage all over myself and oil all over my face and hands. Strangely, no one seemed to mind.

We ended our walk, which was really hot and sweaty, at Pailin’s favorite bamee wan (sweet egg noodles with ice) stall on Trok Issaranuphap. Almost magically, we felt better again, even if it only leant us enough energy to hail a cab back home.

There is a lot of talk in “Hunger” about how noodles are “humble” and how cooking street food is simple. When the heroine decides (SPOILER ALERT) to go back to cooking this kind of food, there is a sense that we are supposed to be surprised. But why would that be? If food has no emotion, there is no point to it. Isn’t that why (SPOILER ALERT) her grandmother’s recipe “ngo ngae” noodles are presented at the climax of the movie? Chef Paul then (SPOILER ALERT) shows his cynicism and moral bankruptcy in response, but does that mean he is supposed to be (SPOILER ALERT) the personification of caviar and foie gras? Come on. These can be good ingredients, when not plopped onto a ramen or hamburger haphazardly in the name of high prices “art”. Capitalism is the villain, not champagne! (Wagyu however … maybe).

Because people know that I mainly write about Thai food and can get riled up easily, they like to show me this-or-that made-up list that presumes to rank all of the foods (or eateries) of the world. Let’s just call this what it is and say that this is straight up, professional trolling, in guises ranging from intentionally provocative to “fake it till you make it”-style authoritative. For this reason, I don’t like to name these kinds of organizations, but I’ve written about the provocative one before.

That said, I can’t help but admire these people. Who knew that a bunch of Croatians could just get together in their office someday and throw around a bunch of ideas long enough to create a completely arbitrary list that gets clicks from outraged people and others who actually take their opinions seriously alike? I applaud this hustle. I, myself, cannot get arrested for my terrible opinions, but these guys actually get reposted, with people cheering on/bewailing this or that string of words they’ve made, and/or bemoaning the publication of some other half-baked barely-researched thing told to them by their local takeout person down the street. Congrats, guys! Or, I mean, “Čestitamo”.

Another person I applaud for their hustle, and I mean this without any tinge of the sarcasm or sour grapes that I’ve displayed above, is Jay Nok. You might know her from Mark’s video from the “Fruit Queen of Thailand“, which has brought people from all over the world to this little open-air fruit shack on the outskirts of Bangkok. Or you just might know her because you just really love fruit. Her place is called “Jay Nok Gratawn Song Krueng”, which centers on the Thai dish of santol fruit in a sweet-and-savory dressing, especially popular in the rainy season. But her place really sells every fruit, from plums and strawberries to seasonal specialties like custard apples or durian, along with a profusion of juices, curries, chili dips, snacks, and even fermented rice noodles. As Jay Nok told me when I went there as a fixer with the Street Eats team: “I just really like pretty things”. And it’s true — all the colorful fruits and juices and pre-prepared foods are beautiful.

But the one thing that is really clever is this:

This is an ice cream “sundae” made of Jay Nok’s home made “ruam mitr” (Thai sweets in coconut milk) ice cream, topped with fried mung beans and maybe an ice cream cone or two, but instead of being placed in a traditional hot dog bun like you would get elsewhere in Thailand, you get two enormous durian pods. What I’m talking about is this, modeled by our producer Ali:

This is fever dream stuff, sprouting from the recesses of the brain when you’re deep in REM sleep and your eyeballs are moving back and forth like a Chinese ping pong game. The ice cream and crunchy mung beans are great in and of themselves; add the ice cream cones and you’re well and truly in business; but then the durian pods — enormous, the size of a jumbo hot dog bun — just take this beyond into Crazytown, population everyone in line for this dish. And believe me, there is a line, a long one.

So if you have the time (and maybe your own transport, because getting a taxi out there is really hard, no joke), head on over the Jay Nok and visit her beautiful fruit for yourself. Gaze at the mangosteens, gape at the young dates suspended from the ceiling, consider the curries. Get a scoop of ice cream or two, maybe in a cone. Crazytown is optional.