Category Archives: Asia

Coconut milk-basted grilled chicken at Lang Ram Mieng Pla Pow

The last Friday of every month is a guaranteed traffic nightmare in Bangkok, because it’s the day most people get paid. This means that everyone takes that monthly salary check, cashes it, and proceeds to blow their hard-earned money on stuff like karaoke and mixed whiskey drinks. It’s a night that, for fuddy-duddies like me, is better spent at home drinking red wine and watching “Orphan Black”.

But my friend Cha is having none of it. Last year while out on the interminable Camino de Santiago, we passed the time by talking about all the Thai food that we missed back home and where we would go the second we touched Thai soil. He talked about succulent grilled chicken and mieng pla pow, or skewered fresh fish cooking over open charcoal, sizzling flesh enveloped in cool lettuce leaves and slathered in a green chili sauce. He said he would take me to his places, a clutch of Isaan-inspired vendors worth waiting for after the gazillion-km trek to the far side of Spain. Then we got home and life intervened. Until that night. So there was no postponing this food journey, even if these vendors were located on the other end of town and it was payday.

We reached Lang Ram Mieng Pla Pow (located at the back entrance of the Rajamangala Stadium) after a 3-hour drive for Cha (and one measly hour for us). Despite being named after a grilled fish dish, Lang Ram had no mieng pla to offer us. It didn’t really matter, because this place is actually better loved for its incredible, luscious, tasty (insert more yummy adjectives here) chicken. This chicken is so good that I would actually go back to Ramkhamhaeng for it. And when paired with a battery of pounded Isaan-style salads (som tum) and Thai-style spicy yum, a plate of sticky rice or two, and a soda or three (no alcohol at this Thai Muslim-owned spot), you’ve got enough reason to spend three hours in traffic on payday. Include a big vat of tom sab (spicy Isaan-style soup) to be absolutely sure.

Cucumber som tum with fermented anchovy and pickled crab

It’s easy to be full after a meal like that, but we are made of sterner stuff. All we had to do was go right next door for an actual shot at some mieng pla pow, since vendors selling similar things are frequently clustered together — as is the Thai way (are my words making any sense right now? That photo of grilled chicken up top is really distracting). What’s next door? Well, it’s called Racha Mieng Pla Pow Jay Goong, and its grilled fish are actually cooked over an open pit filled with flaming charcoal, which is deeply unpleasant to stand next to in the height of the hot season, but a great way to cook your grilled fish:

Hot to trot

Racha is also staffed with a highly-efficient coterie of transgender servers dressed in pink air hostess outfits. They offer beer here as well as mieng pla, plus all the Isaan bells and whistles — som tum, sticky rice, eye-wateringly spicy soups — that one comes to expect from Northeastern Thai specialists. I dare you to find something better than a pla tubtim (red snapper) fresh off the grill, crusted lightly with salt and stuffed with lemongrass and kaffir lime leaf, surrounded by a mountain of fresh greens and rice vermicelli. Even better, Racha offers two sauces: one, a tamarind base garnished with chopped roasted peanuts, and the second, a bewitching green chili sauce leavened with a dash of coconut milk that is out of this world. It was almost enough to make me forget that it was payday and there were even more hours of traffic awaiting us on the ride home. Almost.

Mieng pla pow at Racha Mieng Pla Pow Jay Goong

Shrimp paste fried rice at Sid Paak

This morning, at a family gathering over breakfast, my husband’s aunt turned to me and whispered, “Are we the only two who aren’t wearing makeup?”

I was surprised because I almost never wear makeup, even when I do wear makeup, which always slides off about 10 seconds after I go outside. So I said, “Does it matter?”

She — this formidable lady who has a PhD and is a khunying, by the way — said, “I myself don’t mind at all, but other people might think we don’t care about them!”

And then I realized that OMG I LOOK LIKE CRAP ALL THE TIME. I go out with my hair tied into listing bun looking like the Asian female version of the Scarecrow in the “Wizard of Oz,” but only if that Scarecrow is fat and has mosquito bites on her face. NO WONDER NO ONE LIKES ME. I AM BEING RUDE TO THEM EVERY DAY.

And then I remembered when my mother would yell at me for LOOKING LIKE CRAP right before we were due to go out to dinner or church or something (and then I remembered that she still does that, and that now when she makes me turn back and change into something else, she is doing that to a 41-year-old mother of two). “You look like you work in a factory”, she’d say, or “You’re not one of those women who can get away without wearing makeup.” I used to think this was a crazy Tiger Mother thing, but this morning at breakfast, I realized it was a Thai thing. You belong to everyone. You are not on your own.

Looking nice is an expression of concern for how an individual’s actions may negatively affect other people. It’s saying, “I made this effort for you, because you are important to me.” It’s a way to show the beauty and harmony that Thais are known for loving. “Land of Smiles,” right? Even when you don’t feel like smiling? It also explains all the times Thais tell you “You’ve gained weight!” or when my parents criticized my na bung (grouchy face, which, like Jay-Z’s, is my default facial expression. That is the only thing Jay-Z and I have in common. The end).

It was deeply confusing to me as a child, because in the US we are constantly indoctrinated with the message that “It’s my life” and “You do you”. Here, it is not unusual to hear “I’m sorry I look so som (unkempt)” or feel embarrassed for not bothering to dress up. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just a different way of looking at the world. And it made me think, is it really so different in the West? Especially for women? When we try to lose weight, try to look pretty, try to smile, are we really doing it for ourselves?

This is a roundabout way to get to talking about street food centers, I know. But I think they are an arrangement that fits in well with the Thai penchant for community and pitching in together. Food centers are the way Singapore’s street food is organized, but I have to admit I am not a big fan of them. I think they dampen creativity and competition, two very marked characteristics of Thai street food. However, I can see them being the future for a lot of street food in Bangkok. There are a lot of informal arrangements between friendly vendors: you sell duck noodles, I’ll sell stuffed noodles, he sells drinks, let’s share tables and maybe our customers will buy stuff from all of us.

And there are the full-on food courts, which are like what you get in the department store, only outdoors. These, too, are usually connected to a market of some kind. This is where I found myself after asking someone — at a Swiss restaurant, no less — where to find the best som tum in Bangkok. “Go to the end of Sukhumvit Soi 23, past Baan Khanitha,” they said, and so there I was, completely bewildered because there was nothing like green papaya salad to be found.

When in doubt, ask a security guard. He told me to turn left at the end of the road, right before you get onto the campus of a local university. There, past a sign reading “Petch Asoke” (Asoke Diamond), is an outdoor market selling all the types of clothes one would find at Siam Square (in all the same sizes: -2 to 2). Past those clothes, way inside, is a food court with a surprisingly wide range of Thai street food: southern Thai curries, Chinese deep-fried pork on rice, soup noodles, and, yes, som tum alongside yum (Thai spicy salad), which tells me you can’t be Bangkok’s best som tum vendor because you’re hedging your bets.

There is, however, this lady:

At Sid Paak (084-006-7597), she sells different types of nam prik (chili dips) along with all the different fixings, which are the best part of the dish: hard-boiled eggs, every fresh and blanched vegetable in Thailand, deep-fried whatever. Seeing this, I’m into it already, because I love nam prik, and I love piling my plate high with everything I can find. The most popular dips she sells are nam prik long ruea (shrimp paste and sweet pork chili dip), nam prik goong sieb (grilled shrimp chili dip) and of course the ubiquitous nam prik gapi (shrimp paste chili dip), which is my favorite here and super tasty.

Selection of chili dips

That said, I cannot pass up the khao kluk kapi (fried rice with shrimp paste), which comes with dried chilies, julienned green mango, sliced raw shallots, dried shrimp, Chinese sweet sausage and, in some cases, thin strips of omelet. Here it’s a utilitarian, stripped-down mishmash, but it sure beats dragging yourself all the way to Banglamphu just for the street food version of this fantastic (and largely unsung) dish.