Category Archives: rice porridge

by | 11/19/2010 · 8:08 am

Home in a Bowl

It’s been a hard transition back after three weeks of being a guest to other people’s lives. Now, it’s back to my own, and as great as it is, it also bears its own strange frustrations. For example, I’m working on a project that will never be finished. It just won’t. I have made a handful of sacrifices to edge it along to this point: throwing good money after bad, poisoning what used to be healthy relationships, transforming into a dyspeptic harpy. I have decided that these sacrifices are not worth it. I have moved beyond denial and anger to acceptance. TIT. This Is Thailand.

Is this bowl of comfortingly soggy rice, doused in pork broth and topped with a dusting of sliced scallions and indifferently poached egg, the taste of resignation? If so, resignation tastes pretty good to me. Located at the entrance to Charoen Krung Soi 16, this no-frills food cart employs a similarly Spartan approach to its rice porridges: good quality broth, stewed with pork bones for so long it has taken on an opaque, cloudy quality and a generous spoonful of bone-in pork pieces to guarantee a bowl full of piggy flavor.

Regular pork-rib porridge with egg

Regular (tamada) bowls are 35 baht, 40 baht with egg or for an extra-big serving of rice or pork (piset). And the guardian of this enterprise comes in the form of a gregarious gentleman, partial to form-fitting white tank tops, who is patient with questions and with giving directions. What more can you ask for? Thailand can confound and frustrate, yes, but it also harbors the path toward your own redemption. I am eagerly awaiting mine.

Khao Thom Gradook Moo, entrance to Charoen Krung 16. 089-682-0016.

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Filed under Asia, Bangkok, Chinatown, Chinese, food, food stalls, pork, rice porridge, Thai-Chinese, Thailand

by | 08/15/2010 · 2:52 pm

Fish Porridge, Again

The old man looked at us under a thatch of eyebrow hair that would move Frida Kahlo to tears.

“Just so you know — the fish porridge here is at least 250 baht,” he warned my mom.

I know I’ve written about Sieng Gi, the khao thom pla shop in Yaowaraj, before, but I can’t help but love this place. Every visit there is like entering a land where ancient beings stalk the tiny storefront dining area, flinging delicious bowls of porridge onto the marble-topped tables and bellowing at each other. @SpecialKRB, who loathes this place with a passion, said it was like spending a night at the Chinatown chapter of the AARP. But I take a more benign view; it’s a place conducive to happy accidents. That night alone was worth seeing the look on my mom’s face. 

Sieng Gi has seen a lot of competitors rise up and subsequently fall by the wayside. Yet no one can touch this place. The broth is ever so much more more, rich with a fish flavored muchness. And the brown bean dipping sauce, its deeply concentrated flavor worth three bowlfuls of its lesser rivals’. That’s not even getting to the fresh dollops of pomfret, seabass or oyster, garnished with cubes of batheng  or sweet pork, tiny dried shrimp and deep-fried garlic. If you are inclined toward soupy seafood rice (and not everyone is), there is nothing better. 

Oyster porridge with strips of deep-fried tofu

So find a way to go here. That is, as long as you have 250 baht.

(Sieng Gi, Trok Ma Geng, behind Grand China Princess Hotel)

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Filed under Asia, Bangkok, Chinatown, fish, food, food stalls, rice porridge, seafood, Thai-Chinese

by | 06/27/2010 · 3:22 pm

Back in the Old City

A rose vendor making a delivery at the flower market

 

I love the old part of town. The roughly square-shaped parcel of land along the Chao Phraya river and Phra Arthit Road on one side and the Chinese Swing, Rachadamnern Avenue and Tanao Road on the other is probably my favorite place to go in Bangkok — not least because this area has some of the city’s very best food.

Case in point: Khao Thom Bowon, a rice porridge vendor across from Bowonniwet Temple which has been serving up tasty bowls for the past six decades. This shop has mushroomed from a few tables in an alleyway to more than 50, some even grouped inside an air-conditioned room (locals gamely sweat it out; the a/c is for when you bring your parents). Its ownership has advanced into its second generation, but I like to think the old-fashioned feel and care for its food remains.

Featuring more than 30 kinds of side dishes

Khao tom is meant to be a sort of restorative concoction, which is why it is known as being particularly popular with the elderly. To facilitate digestion, the liquid in each bowl is meant to be sipped before the soggy rice is eaten with a type of side dish — be it spicy, salty, crispy or fatty, the better to go with the nursing-food blandness of the rice. That is why Thais eat rice porridge with a variety of sides, not just one: usually a crunchy pickled vegetable for its tartness; a fatty tranche of salted, dried fish; a sort of yum, or a spicy, tart salad; and a stir-fried green vegetable (indeed, Khao Tom Bowon claims to have been the first to stir-fry morning glory, or pad pak bung).

Poached prawns in a lime-chili sauce

But what sets Bowon apart are its dazzling variety of other sides — the fresh fish, the succulent crayfish, the range of gaeng jued (clear soups), the daily specials, and things like this: fresh sea prawns drizzled in a tart-spicy chili-lime sauce and dotted with mint leaves. Pillowy, sharp and green, all at once.

But the best part of Bowon, just like what sets the Old City apart from the rest of Bangkok, are the unexpected touches: solicitous, friendly service and a surprisingly beautiful canal-side view in back … a reprieve from the chaotic clamor of Banglamphu at nighttime. Stumbling across this view after dinner, we enjoyed a quiet moment in the breeze next to a dozing old man in a lawn chair listening to an iPod. The best part of Bangkok, compressed into a few seconds.

What sets Bangkok apart -- the unexpected

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Filed under Asia, Bangkok, food, food stalls, rice porridge, Thailand