Category Archives: Thailand

by | 05/25/2012 · 1:28 pm

Not just for old people

Noodles with chicken and bitter melon

Someone once asked me “Why the obsession with age?” I was surprised; I hadn’t noticed how much I was writing about my old, old oldness. But why wouldn’t I be — I am staring down the barrel of 80, people I knew five years ago no longer recognize me, and, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I can’t eat like I used to. I cannot even be bothered to work, which is okay, since it gives me time to focus on the truly important things in life, like watching reruns of “Revenge”. Ah, youth! Its innate arrogance and unconscious cruelty and all the things we took for granted. Never to return again.

Another sign of my inexorable march to watching “Dancing With the Stars” on a religious basis: my newfound appreciation for guaythiew gai mara, or chicken-and-bitter melon noodles. Bitter melon, also known as bitter gourd or bitter squash and indigenous to the tropics, is one of those fruits that is hard to make out. Like taciturn people, they seem to offer nothing — wrinkled, waxy green flesh; a bitter, dry-mouth crunch — without a lot of work. But everyone that grows them has found some sort of use for them: sliced and scrambled with eggs in Okinawa; curried in India; souped up with shrimp in Vietnam. In Thailand, they are stuffed with minced pork and stewed for hours in a broth coaxed from pork bones to make gaeng jued mara yad sai, or stuffed bitter melon in clear soup. It’s one of those dishes that requires an introduction like “This is very good for you” (it’s supposed to be good for sore throats). Thais like to joke that you are starting to get old if you begin to appreciate it.

But rarely is there any mention of chicken-and-bitter melon noodles. That’s strange, because they are not hard to find at all. Tucked in amongst the ubiquitous papaya salad, egg noodle and rice porridge stalls are the vendors who display halved bitter melons and chickens on their carts, the ones who, inevitably, already have two or three people waiting in line. They are open for breakfast and lunch, because chicken-and-bitter melon noodles are a daytime dish. They are almost always mobile vendors, or vendors who, like the one between Emporium and Benjasiri Park, offer stools as tables with shorter stools as chairs (you are supposed to eat with your back to the traffic so road dust doesn’t fall into your bowl, but really, is this really cheaper than springing for a couple of tables?).

My favorite is the one on Sukhumvit 24 road, in front of a massage parlor and kitty-corner to another one (and a few feet down from yet another one). Noodle choices are thick (sen yai), egg (bamee), Mama (yes I know), and rice vermicelli (sen mee). The chicken, which from a distance looks like it is smoked, is actually gai jae, or boiled chicken. And the piece de resistance, the broth: sweet to offset the bitterness of the melon, aromatic with an almost cinnamon-y scent, stewed with bits of mara, old bones, and the remnants of my writing career.

Chicken-and-bitter melon broth

Before you take it home, you are invited to juice up your noodles with any combination of condiments: sugar, dried chili flakes, pickled peppers in white vinegar, crushed peanuts, roasted chili paste. The end result is what the best Thai food always is: a study in contrasts between the flavors of the melon and the broth, the texture of the crisp crunchy greens with the soft give of the noodles, the comfort implied in the chicken and the spice of the roasted chili paste. Really, can you blame me for giving this a go?

Condiment bar

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Filed under Asia, bamee, Bangkok, chicken, food, food stalls, noodles, Thailand

by | 05/17/2012 · 1:32 pm

Adventures in Thonburi

Hoy klang, or “blood cockles”, across the river

“Run,” he said. “If you want to leave, go now. Or you won’t be able to leave until closing time.”

For the last three hours, Christina and I had been sitting riverside, enjoying a beautiful sunset, and getting gently — but irretrievably — sloshed on a steady diet of designer cocktails with no food. Every move we made to leave was greeted with exhortations to “Stay! Enjoy!” by the bar’s disarmingly generous owner, cocktails turning into glasses of wine and then wine bottles as a silent young man smiled blankly next to her. It was like being held prisoner in a booze-filled tower by an especially charming sorceress. And the smiling sphinx at our table was our way out.

So we did what any person of honor would do in our situation. We ran. We ditched. We didn’t ask about money. We didn’t look back. Later, floating for what seemed like an eternity on the river, I thought of karma as the wine threatened to make a reappearance on the Chao Phraya, the boat bobbing its slow, aimless way to freedom. But we had more pressing things to think about. Like dinner.

Thonburi is often ignored, because it’s all the way over there, across the river, in the no man’s land also known as Collection of Big Places that are Hard to Get To. It’s the Queens of Bangkok. You have to really want to go. Tonight, Christina was giving me two good reasons to trek over from my safe place of cake shops and sushi bars.

Our shrimp, pre-baking, at Jay Piek

The first, called Jay Piek (Charoen Rat Road near Soi 1 at Wong Wien Yai, 086-613-0587) specializes in something of a rarity in Thai street food stalls — the Thai-Chinese dish known as goong ob woonsen, prawns wrapped in glass vermicelli and baked in a metal container, a method which ensures maximum juiciness and aroma. What sets the shrimp at Jay Piek apart is the seasoning: packed full of scallions and coriander roots, coriander seeds, shreds of pork fat, and a finishing dash of ground white pepper before it is sent over to your table.

The finished product, in half-light

There is also crab given similar treatment, grilled salt-encrusted seabass, baked mussels in herbs, and the Thai shellfish known as “blood cockles” because of the blood-like liquid they ooze when they are cooked. It’s a small menu, but a smart one, and Jay Piek — as its constantly-crowded tables attest — seems to do it the best.

But as awesome as Jay Piek is, we found something even better. I mean, people talk about things being a “revelation” a lot, and that’s when you know to turn off the computer and never go back, but I’m doing it now. Because this nameless ice cream place in the tent at Wong Wien Lek, fronted by satay and egg noodle vendors and flanked by a Chinese restaurant called Ah Gu, is my personal revelation, the best thing I’ve had in years.

Serving a type of old-style ice cream known as i thim kai dip (raw egg ice cream), this stall specializes in a dessert that has gone out of vogue for obvious reasons. The ice cream container must be very, very cold. The eggs must be very, very fresh, coddled right then and there. The vendor must be very, very sure that those yolks will be frozen.

“Raw egg ice cream”, pre-freezing

But when everything is right, the stars are aligned, and the vendor finally looks your way, the results are mind-blowingly delicious: vanilla-scented cream shot through with streaks of savory sunshine, an extra oomph and push to something that already has a whole lot of egg yolks. What’s one more, right? And when it’s dotted with look chid, or syrupy lotus seeds, and set in front of you after what seems like an eternity spent waiting for that yolk to freeze, it is hard not to consume the entire three or four scoops, all by yourself.

Streaks of sunshine

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Filed under Asia, Bangkok, food, food stalls, seafood, Thai-Chinese, Thailand, Thonburi

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