Category Archives: restaurant

by | 06/08/2012 · 2:01 pm

Glutton Abroad: HK if you’re hungry

Yes, it happens. There are times when you just don’t wanna. So in an attempt to get back that elusive mojo, that ever-flickering desire to inflict myself onto the blogosphere again, to throw myself once again into that fathomless void of nothing — I went away. Specifically, to Hong Kong.

Hong Kong seems full of mojo. While Europe flounders and the U.S. seethes, Hong Kong appears to be soaring, buzzing, full of brio and activity. Sidewalks are teeming, hotels are fully booked, and, yes, restaurants are full. So, while I’ve seen my Hong Kong and my HK friends’ Hong Kong, I thought it was time to see the HK that my friends Cha and Nat (of the wildly popular website catandnat.com) like to see.

Of course, that involved a good helping of Cantonese food. Let me tell you about Cantonese food. I don’t know so much about it. All I know about it I gleaned from dozens of faceless Cantonese restaurants scattered across the American Midwest, at countless lacquered wooden tables where I cursed the gods and my fate and the people who invented this food. I know that’s a funny thing to think for a person who likes to go to Hong Kong so much. But HK is full of all types of great cuisines. Until now, it was something that was easy to avoid and dismiss as something that I just didn’t get. Just like I don’t get classical music. Or the Stone Roses. When some (inevitably British) person starts to wax nostalgic about the genius of the Stone Roses, and we actually have to listen to something by them, it’s like my brain goes “Okay, let’s find something interesting about thi-aw drat got me againzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz”. You know it’s supposed to be good, you know you should appreciate it, but damned if you can get through a couple of minutes of it. It’s like the musical equivalent of reading The Economist.

A lot of Cantonese food is also like The Economist. It’s full of finesse, and subtlety. Fresh ingredients are paramount, because there is nothing to hide bad stuff behind. It’s one of those cuisines that, like French food, require great technique. Except that French cuisine has butter. Cantonese food is a rich person’s food, where only the best will do. It doesn’t have to hide its protein behind a layer of chilies or coat it in a sauce mounted with a stick of butter or stuff it into sausages to carry it long distances. Cantonese food just is.

Green beans coated in egg yolks at Xia Mian Guan

Although I had only one night in Hong Kong (devoted mainly to a wine-soaked 11-course dinner at Caprice), we managed to snatch up some time to explore some great Cantonese dishes. Such as these fresh green beans sauteed with egg yolk, giving them a rich, hefty savor perfectly complemented by a bean-y crunch. Or this:

Crab congee at Chee Kei

A smooth, unctuous rice porridge dotted with crab meat, crab claws and — best of all — globs of crab roe, punctuated with bits of ginger and green onion and just the slightest hint of saltiness. I really, really wanted to add stuff to it — chili oil and black vinegar and whatever else I could get my hands on, the way a Thai would add condiments to his jok — but it ended up changing the flavor, obscuring what had been rich and even slightly sweet. Consider that a lesson learned. Next time, Hong Kong. I’ll be back.

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Filed under Asia, Chinese, food, Hong Kong, restaurant, rice porridge

by | 05/11/2012 · 1:31 pm

Accidents can happen

Beef tongue stew at Yong Lee

People can make mistakes. Take, for example, this Bangkok Post story , which shows that when you try to make a point (prices are under control guys, don’t panic), it could all end up backfiring in your face (oops! Turns out prices are, in fact, more than we thought), rendering everything you said before (the inflation rate for April is 2.47 percent) about as useful as Ros’s merkin on “Game of Thrones” (very few people will get that).

Bottom line: mistakes are made all the time. It sucks, but we can’t be perfect at everything, or people would hate us even more than they do now. And, yes, “Accidents Can Happen” has little to do with the theme of this post (winter is coming…I mean, mistakes can be made), but it is an Elvis Costello song, and hence makes everything I say from here on out instantly cool.

So I might be forgiven for mistaking Yong Lee, a hole-in-the-wall restaurant near the entrance to Sukhumvit 39, for Yui Lee, a made-to-order stall and khao soy emporium about 100 m down Sukhumvit 31 (not to mention the other Yong Lee on Sukhumvit 15 that serves an entirely different menu). These restaurants are close to each other, after all, and tomato to-mah-to (although who says to-mah-to?), you get my point.

The fact is, these places have very little in common with each other. While Yui Lee specializes in northern noodle dishes (khao soy and kanom jeen nam ngiew) and the made-to-order staples that form the bulk of every Thai’s favorite lunch (slivers of pork stir-fried with garlic and peppercorns atop a mound of rice; minced pork or chicken stir-fried with copious chili and holy basil, topped with a runny fried egg), Yong Lee offers a menu that is part of a dying breed. Like the for-sale 87-year-old institution known as Silom Pattakarn (which I wrote about here), Yong Lee serves “luxury Thai fusion”, circa 1950: Anglicized chicken curry; cornstarch-thickened “stews” of beef tongue or beef; a red sauce-coated pork chop strewn with sweet peas; well-done bits of beefsteak garnished with a tart-sweet salad; and, best of all, its particular specialty, deep-fried slabs of fish coated in a bewitchingly garlicky syrup and stir-fried with peppercorns (@DwightTurner had two orders!)

The atmosphere is charmingly retro, the clientele reassuringly sedate. Food is out in a jiffy, while service is laid-back and pleasant. There is even a tiny air-conditioned room to the side with three tables for patrons who threaten to melt in the sweltering heat. There is very, very little not to like at this particular Yong Lee. Now, to make sure you don’t mistakenly go to another one:

Yong Lee (the less famous one)

10/4-5 Soi Phromphong Sukhumvit 39

02-258-8863

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Filed under Asia, Bangkok, fish, food, pork, restaurant, Thailand

by | 05/04/2012 · 5:03 pm

Mysterious alchemy

This is a story that has absolutely nothing to do with me. It, uh, happened to a friend. Let’s call her Shmangkok Shmutton*.

Anyway, she was at a party last night. She doesn’t get invited to many parties. So her default behavior at parties is either abject terror or overzealous socializing, with much European-style kissy-kissy and blithe misreading of obvious body language.  She was in the latter mode.

About halfway into the evening, it gradually dawned on me, I mean her: no one was coming up to me to talk. All my conversations were because of me coming up to other people, and with the exception of a couple of extremely heroic people, almost all conversations ended with pleas to go get beer/wine/noodles/haircut/lobotomy within the span of a few minutes. I was that person at the party. I was That Person At The Party! Oh, I mean She. Shmangkok Shmutton.

You know that person. Who goes up to talk to a group of people, and one person politely obliges, taking the flack for the benefit of the herd, who form their own self-protective little circle, leaving their friend out in the cold until the threat passes. You know what I’m talking about.

It takes a while, but she gradually gets it. They’re just not that into you. And when I say “you”, I mean “me”. And when I say “me”, I mean “she”. Things change, people change, and that mysterious alchemy that dictates alliances and connections: work, money, fat, success or lack of it — all of these things tinker with the balance of things, rearranging the world by degrees as the years press inexorably on. Some people will like you (I mean her. Is this tiresome yet?) Some people will not. It is supposed to be a natural thing, this liking and disliking, this shift that dictates one person is awesome while another is The Worst. Why fight it?

So I’ll come clean. Even though I like to think of myself as a “food person”, I thought I hated Chinese food. It was hard, because it is a big country and my parents are both the most gigantimongous fans of this food ever. Like most Thais, they see it as the epitome of cuisine, particularly Cantonese, the abalone and the shark’s fin, edible Louis Vuitton. But I was just not that into it, remembering the countless 2-hour journeys to Cleveland to a Cantonese restaurant called Bo Loong, sitting with my forehead to the table with dry rice on my plate as my parents ate their fill.

But that mysterious alchemy has since worked its magic. Now, I cannot get enough of it. I’m not talking gloopy canned asparagus and evil shark’s fin. I’m talking the Sichuan security blanket that is mabo tofu, garlicky long beans, the long list of dumplings that come in every possible variation.

Potstickers at Dalian

Because there is a blossoming of northern Chinese-style restaurants in Bangkok that shun the usual trappings — Cantonese prestige dishes, Peking duck (there must always be Peking duck), lobster sashimi. They are the anti-status restaurants: dingy, hole-in-the-wall places with no-nonsense service still redolent of the mainland, staff who barely speak Thai, and a menu brimming with dumplings, green beans, sweet lacquered eggplant “fries”, and, of course, tofu slathered in a black bean sauce studded with pork.

Boiled dumplings at Sun Moon Dumpling Restaurant

They all have basically the same menu. They are either off of Sukhumvit (Dalian behind Villa supermarket on Sukhumvit 33, or the suspiciously slick one off of Sukhumvit 39); on Rama IV (Longcheu near the entrance to Sukhumvit 22, or Sun Moon on Ngam Dumplee Road); or in the business district (Ran Nam Toahu Yung Her near Chong Nonsi BTS stop). And although those dishes are executed with varying degrees of skill and enjoy varying degrees of popularity, these restaurants are all delicious. In short: I am into them.

*Names are changed in this story.

Dalian’s green beans

 

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Filed under Asia, Bangkok, Chinese, food, pork, restaurant, Thai-Chinese, Thailand