Category Archives: restaurant

by | 11/25/2011 · 1:18 pm

The Thanksgiving Post

Because I can't not use this photo

Somehow, the sacrifice of many turkeys puts people in the sort of mood to count their blessings. I am one of them (albeit a day later than everyone else). Of course, there is being thankful for my family, and friends, and people who are willing to put up with me for a few hours during the day in general. I can understand your pain, kind people. Thank you for that.

I am also thankful for the many great experiences I have had over the past year — especially the food-based kind. How lucky I’ve been! So here is, pretty much, a slide show of some snippets of my year, which has passed by far too quickly for my liking. Just imagine sitting in a rec room somewhere, wanting desperately to escape while I drone on and on about boring stuff. Ah, Thanksgiving!

1. While in France in the autumn, we escaped from our tour long enough to score a dinner at Alain Chapel for my birthday. It was a great birthday! My choice was simple: a roasted veal kidney, sliced at the table and served with a thick ‘n glossy red wine sauce.

 

 

2. Delicious China. Need I say more? Like many many other people, my favorite dish is the ultimate in Sichuan comfort food: mapo tofu, cubes of jiggly blank goodness coated in chilies and beans and good ol’ oil, one of the more bewitching combinations known to man.

 

3. Berlin is one of my favorite cities in the world. I look forward to going almost every year, when my husband attends a travel fair and I end up having the entire city to myself. I love that Berlin’s possibilities are endless. There is always something new to discover, and always something I end up missing out on. On my next visit, a trip to the pirate-themed restaurant will be an absolute must!

Here, the beef goulash with spaetzle at the Reinhard’s on Kurfurstendamm, otherwise known as Thai Tourist Central.

 

4. When my family go on holiday together, my dad always ends up being the cook. This might suck for my dad, but it’s a real treat for us, a throwback to when we were kids and dad had to cook dinner after he came home from work.

Quite sensibly, dad tries to shy away from cooking duties now, but sometimes, in a foreign country and surrounded by hungry family members demanding perfectly fried rice or a well-seasoned larb, he cannot say no. Here is his yum nuea, a spicy beef salad made with the local Limousin beef of the Perigord region.

 

5.  Obvious alert: street food. I can’t say I love it in all its permutations and varieties — you may not have guessed, but I’m not the biggest jok (Chinese-style rice porridge) fan in the world, and I actually dislike Thai-style som tum (pounded spicy salad) — but I am truly thankful for the vast range of street food out there right now.

And the variety keeps growing! We are getting Japanese-style okonomiyaki (savory crepes) and pasta sauced with different curries and even, I hear, stabs at Western food. Thai food is at an incredible moment in time when it is figuring out, again, what it really is, expanding and changing its parameters, to the delight or dismay of many. What’s next? I don’t know, but it’s definitely something to be thankful for.

Dry thin noodles (sen lek) with pork, "yum"-style, at Baan Jik in Udon Thani

 

6 Comments

Filed under Asia, Bangkok, Chinese, food, food stalls, France, French food, noodles, restaurant, Thailand

by | 11/18/2011 · 1:49 pm

Stuffed in Isaan

Lunch at Jay Gai Som Tum in Udon Thani

It’s 10 in the morning, and I am already stuffed. I cannot imagine what lunch holds in store for us.

Yes, I am starting this all over again. The first book, researched while I was pregnant with my second child, gave me … well, the joy of publishing my first solo effort, and 25 extra kilos. This second, well, who knows? I certainly don’t want 25 extra kilos, and I’m not sure if I could do it, even if I wanted to. My digestive system is screaming, What are you thinking?! even as I lurch my way through downtown Udon Thani. And this is only the beginning.

After landing in Udon Thani, our gracious hosts promptly whisk us off to VT Nam Nueng (www.vtnamnueng1997.com), a Vietnamese restaurant that, well into its second generation, is just about as big as any enterprise can get in Udon Thani. Every day, an assembly line churns out thousands of sticks of nam nueng (pork sausage wrapped in a flat rice noodle, lettuce and herbs and drizzled with a sweet-tart dipping sauce) and goong pan aui (shrimp mince wrapped around a sugarcane stick), later to be sold at either the restaurant, replete with air-conditioning and imposing Chinese-style furniture, or at the aggressively efficient take-out counter. There is even a hotline, where a motorcycle awaits your call should any nam nueng emergency arise. Not to mention the branches at the airport, or the various other Vietnamese-Thai restaurant chains in town, helmed by cousins or children of the original VT founder, who made his dipping sauces in a secret room so as to minimize infighting among his children.

The namesake dish at VT Nam Nueng

But Udon Thani isn’t all about Vietnamese food (though it does boast a sizable Vietnamese community, said to have fled the country during the French colonial era). Newcomers to the city jonesing for street food but unsure of where exactly to go should simply get themselves to Naresuan Road, which appears to be Street Food Central for the entire town. Here, you will get anything you could possibly want: toothsome Chinese-style rice porridge (jok) as well as the looser Thai kind (khao thom), boiled with pork cartilage to a porky mellowness; hunks of muu satay, pork slathered in coconut milk and grilled on bamboo skewers; winningly large portions of silky, golden, whisper-soft homemade egg noodles — what it must feel like to eat Jennifer Aniston’s hair, if her hair was delicious.

But the standout, for me, has to be the Isaan food — fiery, acidic, deep with the bass note of the fishy and fermented, without any fancy-fingers gimmickry or sugar. At Jay Gai Som Tum, you have to pick up a number and wait in line for a gander at one of the maestro’s artfully pounded concoctions: thum pa, a jimble-jamble of fermented rice noodles, some slivered green papaya, boiled snails, green pak grachet and bamboo shoots, perhaps? Maybe a thum lao, green papaya mixed with the bewitching brew of fermented Thai anchovies (pla rah) and pickled field crabs, or thum mamuang, julienned mango topped with tiny field shrimp and flavored with the juices of an especially large mashed field crab. Or maybe you’re a traditionalist and want to stick with thum Thai, in which case — why are you here again? The point is, there’s a lot of different kinds of som tum, from the traditional green papaya version to mango, to gratawn (the sweet-tart santol) to the rice noodle, or kanom jeen-based som tums that appear to be the default setting for the som tums here  — Thai fusion in action, a Central Thai ingredient getting the Isaan treatment.

Jay Gai's mango som tum

What perfectly sets off all that fire and acidity? A simply prepared bowl of snails, a mere 10 baht per dish, boiled with kaffir lime leaves.

Udon Thani is a great town that I must visit again, but I had to venture up to Khon Kaen, today one of Thailand’s biggest, fastest-growing cities. So we girded our stomach linings and made a special effort to go to Saeb Nua (Mitraphab Road across from Srinakarin Hospital), which ended up not being street food but special nonetheless, despite its factory cafeteria ambiance. Another long menu of som tums here, as well as delicious larbs (minced meat salads, including larb goy, or raw beef larb) and nam toks (grilled, rare meats in a spicy dressing). But the stars here are the gai yang, or whole chicken, pressed flat within the recesses of a wooden stick and grilled, and pla pow, freshwater fish encrusted in salt, stuffed with an herb parcel and also grilled. There is a lot of grilling in Isaan food.

Saeb Nua's grilled fish

At night, a meal of jaew hon (Isaan-style sukiyaki, with a chili-touched broth and strong, spicy dipping sauce that leaves every other sweet, cloying dipping sauce in the dust) at lakeside stall Tik Jaew Hon and we were done, clutching at our charcoal pills and glasses of water.  A “not spicy” salad of naem (cured pork sausage) arrives looking like a crime scene out of CSI, splattered with a lurid coat of smashed red chilies. If you haven’t noticed, Isaan food also likes its chilies. Alas, I do not. I will have to return to Isaan, later. After my stomach has a nice long rest.

10 Comments

Filed under Asia, chicken, fish, food, food stalls, Isaan, restaurant, som tum, Thailand

by | 11/10/2011 · 2:59 pm

Chiang Mai Redux

Chicken khao soy at Lamduan Faham

When people go to Chiang Mai, they usually want to eat the local food — aharn muang. Not all Chiang Mai-ers are as infatuated with northern Thai fare, of course, but as a resident of Bangkok — where good northern Thai cuisine is as hard to get as a pair of rubber boots — there was no way I would not hit all the typical places that one goes to for this food. Anything else would be a waste of time.

Now, I am a northerner. Yes, I grew up in Pittsburgh, and yes, my dad would make kanom jeen nam ngiew and call it “Thai spaghetti” in order to get us to eat it. But having grown up with a dad from Chiang Rai and a mom from Chiang Mai, I feel pretty qualified to figure out what is northern Thai food and what is not. What drives me crazy is that a lot of times, people do not know what northern food actually is. I hate this about myself, that this petty little thing drives me crazy. But it does.

So when a guy who is couched as a “northern Thai food expert” calls the central Thai dish yum samun prai (lemongrass spicy salad) northern, it drives me crazy. When some other dude asks me if, while on my trip up north, I ate mieng kum (a DIY central Thai appetizer of betel leaves, sometimes Chinese kale leaves, with dried shrimp, cubed lime, chilies, what have you), that drives me crazy. When yet another person asks me if khao chae (cold rice porridge with deep-fried sides eaten in the hot season) is northern I … you get the point. Many people don’t know what aharn muang is, Thai people included.

I think this is because northern Thai food — with the exception of khao soy — isn’t particularly friendly. It lacks the sweet-tart overtones that make central Thai food so appealing, or the in-your-face sour-fire that Isaan food boasts. It’s salty and heavy; it has weight and gravitas and a bitter backbone, echoed by all the lawn clippings and this-should-be-in-a-compost-pile tree leaves that usually accompany it. It’s flecked with blood and bile, fat and parts — we Northerners do love our pig parts. All this, because we live in the mountains where it is “cold” — the weather dips below 30 degrees C sometimes OMG!  The further north you go, the more “northern” food gets. Chiang Mai is actually aharn muang lite.

Yet I do love Chiang Mai. I have been there twice in the past three weeks: first, with @ChefMcDang, who was filming something I can only describe as an “unnamed chef competition series” (I was designated Shirt Holder); then, with my mother’s family, meeting up for the annual katin, which is essentially  an opportunity to “make merit” at the family temple. Both times were thinly-veiled grabs at eating as much northern Thai food as I could.

Making merit

Yes, I am that person: next to the food table at parties, hiding in the kitchen at big get-togethers, in the self-styled “market” next to the temple during prayers. But would you blame me?

Kanom toei at the "market"

Every year, there is khao soy and kanom jeen nam ngiew. There is pork on skewers grilling over an open flame, hunks of grilled chili dip (nam prik num) wrapped in banana leaves, soft, comforting bowls of fried noodles, garnished with purple orchids. Som tum, muang-style, flavored with nam pu, or the juice from pulverized field crabs. Yum pakkad dong, or a spicy salad made out of pickled cabbage. No, not everything is northern, but it is served with a gracious smile, ravenous cousins poking you from behind with their bamboo baskets, waiting for their turn. And it is FREE … as long as you are willing to wear a pa sin (old-fashioned sarong), and make awkward small talk at various intervals.

 

Sugarcane on a stick

So that was a place I would call very familiar. But I made a new discovery too, thanks to the New York Times story on “northern Thai food” in Chiang Mai. I am glad I read it (thanks @DwightTurner!), or I would not have found out that Krua Phech Doi Ngam (125/3 Moo 3, Mahidon Road) has some of Chiang Mai’s best northern food, better than (dare I say it?) even Huen Phen.

Not to mean that it’s perfect. There’s that lemongrass salad, which is award-winning, apparently, but, uh … not Northern. Nice recipe though! There is their insistence on calling what is basically a beef version of Northern gaeng om a gaeng jin hoom, which is a different dish entirely, usually made of fatty pork stewed with turmeric and lemongrass until the juices evaporate and all that is left is a salty and (you guessed it) fatty glob. There is the nam prik pla rah (chili dip with Thai “anchovies”), marred by the strange addition of cherry tomatoes.

But there is also everything else, which is pretty pretty good. In fact, it’s great, even the faux gaeng jin hoom, which I wish I had taken home on the airplane — stewed-til-tender slivers of thick, melt-in-the-mouth beef in a deliciously unctuous sauce. The chicken gaeng om (here, with the same base as jin hoom), pepped up with the addition of chicken livers. The fabulous thum kanoon (pounded young jackfruit), which makes Huen Phen’s version an anemic, sad little pretender.

Krua Phech Doi Ngam's jackfruit

So next time I go to Chiang Mai, there may be a new must-go-to in town, alongside Lamduan Faham and Aunt Ton’s house and, yes, Love At First Bite (I hate that I like this place, but what can I say? I love pie). Even better: the hordes snapping up all the food in front of your eyes at Huen Phen are, strangely, absent at Krua Phech Doi Ngam. All the more food for me.

Because I love pie: LAFB's coconut cream

 

11 Comments

Filed under Asia, Chiang Mai, dessert, food, Northern Thailand, pork, restaurant, Thailand