Author Archives: Bangkok Glutton

The sky in Mardin is a stark, bright turquoise, and completely devoid of clouds. Unfettered by floating water crystals, amplified by the ancient yellow limestone of the city, the sun makes a walk down the street feel like 5 minutes in the microwave. It may be climate change, but it feels like the sun has been here forever. And if this was what the weather was like when the “cradle of civilization” was first crafted, I cannot believe that humanity got off the ground.

Still, the beautiful Syrian brides lining up for photos on the walls around 3,000-year-old Mardin Castle are unbothered by the heat, even in their bead-encrusted white dresses and full makeup. They pose with the countryside in the background, overlooking the border with Syria 30 km away. It seems like an illustration of the cycle of life: against the background of a region where millions of people have lived and died since the paleolithic era, now we document the stirrings of new families, moved to come together even in this deeply shitty age.

It was a rocky start for me, personally, in Mardin. After a 10-hour drive from Cappadocia, where gusty winds grounded our hot air balloon plans but aided our purchase of about 500 carpets, Mardin initially felt like a serotonin-free morning after a bachelor night bender. My husband refused to follow Google Maps’ directions, insisting on driving directly to the hotel “parking lot”, which ended up being whatever free space was available on a windy mountain road on which cars had to take turns to move forward. Once we park, there comes the issue of finding a way into the hotel, but all doors marked with the hotel’s name appear to be locked. My husband tells us to split up, heading down the mountain towards the lobby, while we search for an entrance uphill.

Rounding around the corner of the hotel (door-free), we bump into three young men heading up from a coffee shop. “Where are you going?” they ask in English that is far better than our Turkish. When we say we are trying to find an open door into our hotel, they offer their services. “We are Mardin,” they say. “You are NOT Mardin.”

They take us back up the path, and then when it splits, tell us to turn right into the unknown instead of left, where we would be heading back to our starting point. “This is hotel,” they say, and I think it’s clear that our objectives are diverging: us, to get into the hotel; them, to isolate and rob us.

“No,” I say, pointing at the structure that definitely has our hotel somewhere inside. Even though there are people around us, I no longer feel that safe. Unsure what to do, I walk back towards our car, where my husband’s septuagenarian parents and my 12-year-old son are waiting — to help in case there is a fight? To also get robbed? I’m not sure. “We are fucked,” I say to a horse, dressed up in finery and tied to a stone wall in the sweltering heat.

Like a deus ex machina in a movie, my husband pokes his head out of one of the previously closed doors. My mother-in-law had somehow gained entry earlier, seeking a bathroom. Bless this woman’s bladder! The youths disperse, us saying “thank you” as they depart. Later, my daughter tells me they simply wanted to show us some of the town’s famous sights, seeking a tip for their guide services. I’m not sure if I am being a shriveled up husk of a human being for casting aspersions on their intentions, or if I was actually right.

Later that night, we get lost on the way to our restaurant. The glowing limestone, which gradually changes color as the sun sets, emits a luminescent moonstone sheen in the moonlight, and everything ends up looking the same. So when we finally stumble to the entrance of Leyli Muse Mutfak (https://www.facebook.com/LeyliMuseMutfak/), bordered with greenery and fronted by a tree-filled garden, it feels literally like Paradise.

Because everything in town is made of the same limestone, eating inside is cooler than outside. The interiors are outfitted with vintage radios, record players and clocks, exhibiting a design sensibility similar to Fred Sanford (no one will get this joke). The food, for its part, is excellent, even though it’s so hot I’m not even that hungry. We order a bottle of the local Shiraz and flatbread stuffed with minced meat, as well as minced meat shaped like flatbread, the Mardin version of meatloaf.

The next day, it’s also hot. We go to every museum in town, where we learn that Mardin is smack dab in the northern region of what used to be Mesopotamia, home of the birth of human civilization. At the better of the two museums (helpfully called “Mardin Museum”), we get the approximation of an ancient beef stew recipe from the Assyrian period:

“Chop/slice/dice (many) onions, shallots, garlic, chives, leeks, and scallions. Fry in oil until soft. Remove to bowl. In remaining oil, brown all sides of an eye round pot roast. Add reserved vegetables and season with salt. Turn down heat and simmer in small amount of water to which a half bottle of Guinness out has been added, turning once or twice during cooking. Remove meat. Reduce onion-beer mixture until it is a thick vegetable-rich gravy. Pour over meat, carve and serve.”

We manage to reward ourselves with a late lunch at swanky El Bagdadi, where, inspired by the museums, we get the sprawling “Mesopotamia platter”, comprising every single cold starter on the menu. It is beautiful and we ask for doubles of the artichoke bottoms, even though I have doubts that Mesopotamians actually ate any of this.

As night falls, we sit on the hotel terrace, where we have great views of the sundown over the minarets of the mosque. This is the one great thing about our hotel and something that makes a stay here almost worth it…even in spite of the difficult doors and the poky bidet thing that stabs my butt when I am just minding my own business on the toilet. I will come back to Mardin, maybe. When they install escalators.

The first time I had pork trotter jelly (jelly ka muu) was at a family gathering of my husband’s. It was my first time meeting his family en masse, and it was a big deal: we had just been engaged in an odd ceremony in which his relatives had to bribe his way through various doorways in order to ask for my hand in marriage (my sister allowed him through the final door for a mere 20 baht). He now had to introduce me to the rest of his family. Needless to say, my husband’s family is very large — the descendants of 35 children birthed by seven wives — and there were many people to meet. It was an anxious night, and I didn’t really feel like eating.

The only thing that was easy for me to partake of without too much fuss was the gelatinous rectangle of pork meat in brown aspic right in front of me. It was cut in tranches like a meatloaf, and garlanded generously with fresh coriander leaves. Although there might have been a sauce to accompany it, everyone ate it with several furious dashes of Tabasco on top. It reminded me a lot of the jellied cubes that you get with a foie gras terrine in France, or the nice layer of gelatin on top of a high-quality pate. It was good enough, and I ate it without complaint at family gatherings for many years after.

I don’t know when it got to the point where I started looking forward to the jelly loaf of pig trotter meat, but, as with gravity on the jowls or gray hair in the eyebrows, that day just somehow emerged, as if in hindsight, a fait accompli. So when some family members of my husband’s invited us to a restaurant famous for its pork trotter jelly, I agreed to go without hesitation.

Jelly ka muu is a Teochew (or Chiu Chow) creation, common enough in Chinese restaurants in Thailand thanks to the fact that the majority of Thai-Chinese in Bangkok are Teochew. Out of all of the Teochew restaurants in the city, S.B.L. Restaurant is quite possibly the most famous. Yes, there is that time-consuming pork trotter jelly, accompanied by a bracing red chili sauce that beats Tabasco in terms of heat; but there is also its drunken chicken with two sauces, a garlicky green and a tangy chili-flecked brown; sautéed sea asparagus with bitter green Chinese kale stalks; a thick fried tranche of zero fish under a salt and pepper crust; two types of guaythiew lod, or stuffed flat noodles; and fried pigeon, drier than the European style but more aromatic. In short, this restaurant abounds in “signature dishes” and I haven’t touched them all. There were only 8 of us at the table, after all!

Do what you must to consume your way through the specialties, but make sure to keep room for S.B.L.s own “bua loy” (a Chinese dessert usually of black sesame-filled dumplings in a hot ginger soup). Here, the dumplings are deep-fried and rolled in sugar and sesame seeds, and they are delicious, quite possibly my favorite version of this old school dessert now. If you cannot stomach this dessert at the table, make sure to bring them back with you on your way home. You’ll thank me later.

I got my first copy of “Hounds of Love” during a hot 1985 summer from a Bangkok vendor selling tapes on the sidewalk. The lavender color of the cover, framing the beautiful woman with her hair spread out behind her, flanked by glossy dog heads with adoring lovestruck eyes, was what hit me first. I bought the tape, having never heard of Kate Bush before. It became my most-played tape for months on end, only to be replaced in my affections by XTC’s “Skylarking” in early 1987. Listening to it now, many many years later, brings me back to my 13-year-old self in the mid-1980s, sequestered in my bedroom with nowhere else to go.

So it was with a bit (or a lot) of surprise when I came upon the many, many, many stories on different media outlets discussing the Kate Bush “renaissance” sparked by the latest season of “Stranger Things”. Indeed, streams of the song “Running up That Hill” jumped more than 8,000 percent after the series debuted, prompting the singer-songwriter to release a rare statement thanking her new fans. There was also discussion about sad pathetic old Kate Bush gatekeepers who were unhappy about Kate Bush’s renewed success. These stories were probably written by people who know me, but honestly, I swear, I am happy for Kate Bush (even though my three favorite tracks on this album go like this: 1. “Cloudbusting”, 2. “Hounds of Love”, 3. “Running up that Hill.”) At least no one thinks Placebo came out with the original version of this song anymore. The gorgeously moody, atmospheric opening, the odd echoing synth blasts that sound like underwater war bugles, the tremulous soprano — these are all Kate (I am on a first-name basis with Kate, because I listened to her first).

I remember reading the original review of “Hounds of Love” in “Rolling Stone” magazine written by a man in a condescending tone that one would normally reserve for someone’s pretentious niece at St. Martin’s. He gave her three stars out of five. In attempting to dredge up that first review, I have since discovered that “Rolling Stone” has ranked “Hounds of Love” at #68 in its “Greatest 500 Albums of All Time” list, a stark example of retconning one’s own terrible opinions if there ever was one (although I like the part in the new review where the writer compares side 2 to David Gilmour-era Pink Floyd, then hastily insists that he didn’t mean it as an insult).

Pe Aor’s tom yum noodle shop on Petchburi Soi 5 has also never really caught the attention of critics aside from one Mark Wiens (@migrationology). Instead, outlets like Michelin have preferred to focus on the enormous vat of tom yum Mama noodles served by Jay Oh. That doesn’t mean that Pe Aor is bereft of her own cheerleaders; diners throng the shop at lunchtime daily, in search of the similarly enormous vat of tom yum noodles for which this shophouse is now renowned. Unlike at Jay Oh, these noodles are crowned with a veritable grocery store seafood counter, explaining why the most pricey of these options — “Lobster and the Gang” (and there is indeed a gang) — clocks in at a hefty 1,500 baht (aka Jay Fai-level prices).

I hadn’t been to Pe Aor since COVID hit, but I found myself there with a group of 5 last week, when we managed to skip the queues by rolling in at 5 pm (too early for most customers seeking dinner, too late for most lunch-havers). Upon entering, we saw only one occupied table, with one diner inhaling an order of “Lobster and the Gang” all by himself. Although there was a good-sized group of us, we were too cowed by the size of the gang and opted instead for the “Perfect Combination”, a lobster-less-yet-nonetheless-imposing bowl of tom yum noodles topped by mussels, salmon, squid, river prawns, and prawn roe.

The seafood was super-fresh, and tender, and the fact that the bowl resembled the seafood bar section of a hotel brunch buffet didn’t hurt either. There have, however, been comments online about how the popularity of Pe Aor — ushered in by Mark Wiens — has changed the flavor of the tom yum broth to something creamier, sweeter, and less spicy.

I cannot say if this is true myself (Mark is the person who brought Pe Aor to my attention as well!) but I can say that it’s the kind of broth that would be acceptable for any visitors you have who want to try tom yum and fresh seafood. In Pe Aor’s case, Mark was kind of like “Stranger Things”, and I am kind of like those people who just started streaming Kate Bush. I’m just lucky that the only gatekeeper that I know of is me.