Bangkok Glutton

Pork leg on rice at Khao Kha Tungnung

If you are or have ever been in the vicinity of a middle-aged woman, it is likely you have heard the old adage that once a woman reaches a certain age, she must choose between her body and her face. If a woman chooses her body (and many do), she has a slim and toned physique at the expense of her face, which might end up looking a bit gaunt or hollow. A woman who chooses her face, well, you can imagine that must also come at some sort of price. The basic point is, every woman must pay. Unless you are Halle Berry, you can’t have both.

It has been pointed out to me a couple of times that I, too, am a woman. And, though I am no Helen of Troy, and my face only capable of launching a dinghy at best (and maybe a couple of rubber duckies), I, too, have had to make this onerous decision: my face or my body?

You know what I choose. And you would too, if you had any sort of brain. On the one hand, you starve and work and sweat in order to walk into a store and not have the salesgirl titter behind her hand when you ask her if they have your size. On the other, well, you are starving and working and sweating.  STARVING, mind you. Did I mention you are starving?

“Face” people have it easy. “Face” people can stuff their pieholes with anything they please, and then claim they are simply smoothing out their lines and incipient wrinkles via internal injections of delicious, unctuous fat. “Face” people have it all figured out. “Face” people are geniuses. I choose my face.

The best way to cultivate your youthfully plump visage? Why, fatty pig trotter (khao kha moo) on rice, obviously. Braised for two hours in pork broth, plopped atop a juice-soaked bed of white rice and paired with a handful of braised Chinese kale with a pinch of pickled mustard greens — this is the food that brings all the fat you could ever hope for. And if that fat ends up somewhere other than your face, well, try try again. It will get there eventually.

Across from Somerset on Sukhumvit 16, Khun Sasinee gets up at 5 in the morning and commutes from her home in Minburi in order to give her pig’s trotters enough time to soften before opening up shop at 8am. Until 2:30 in the afternoon, she serves portions of khao kha moo (broth in a bowl optional) to a steady stream of office workers and regulars drawn to her reliably fatty, filling food. With a pinch of fresh garlic and a fresh chili or two, her pork leg is reason enough to choose your face.

Sardines wrapped in grape leaves and grilled at Inciralti Meyhanesi

It’s the tail end of our holiday, and our eating takes on the kind of frenzied single-mindedness one would associate with sailors on Shore Leave. Our first meal in Istanbul is spent with a platter of beefsteaks, chicken wings, lamb tenderloin and kidneys, courtesy of the remarkable teppanyaki-like indoor grills at Zubeyir Ocakbasi & Restaurant. This, coupled with a skewer of   freshly-grilled garlic cloves coated in a sauce of reduced vinegar, leavened with a generous slick of olive oil that should accompany everything, everywhere from now on.

Sweet grilled garlic

At Turkish confectionary Hafiz Mustafa we get menu fright (the food-ordering version of stage fright) and end up with a strange milk pudding and syrupy quince showered with pulverized pistachios instead of the Turkish delight and baklava one is supposed to order at this place. At Meze by Lemon Tree (who are these Lemon Tree people? What a name), we feast on a salad of nettles, glasswort, and spinach roots scattered with cubes of beetroot, curried shredded chicken and pickled cherries and plums. We eat so much that I think, briefly and fondly, of the vomitoriums that Romans supposedly threw up in to save room in their stomachs for more food.

But there’s even better food to be had. Under the Bosphorus Bridge on the Asian side sits the neighborhood of Beylerbeyi, known as one of the oldest seashore settlements in Istanbul. There, Inciralti (which means “under the fig tree”) churns out a miss-mash of Turkish, Armenian, Jewish and Greek dishes meant to reflect the “melting pot” that is Istanbul. This shows most clearly in the vast selection of mezze that number more than 20 every day.

A selection of cold mezze at Inciralti Meyhanesi

There are so many things to choose from that, to avoid menu fright, we just order everything. We get seabass pickled in 14 types of herbs, based on an 18th century court recipe; mackerel in walnuts and lemon juice (19th-century Ottoman palace recipe); sweet onions, blackcurrants and pine nuts in a paste of chickpea and potato (Armenian); and smashed cucumbers with cream cheese and pistachio (the Ottoman court again, 17th-century). We get deep-fried lamb’s brains and veal spleen stuffed with currants, rice and pine nuts (old Armenian, and so fiddly to make that the dish is practically extinct). And then there are the sardines, wrapped in vine leaves and grilled, enlivened with a squeeze of lemon, a handful of fresh arugula and a thick slab of red onion.  

It’s basically food for food nerds, and a great send-off from a great city.

Deep-fried lamb’s brains with Dijon and stuffed veal spleen

Inciralti Meyhanesi

Arabacilar Sok no. 4, Beylerbeyi

+90 216 557 6686

A New York favorite: matzoh ball soup at Barney Greengrass

More than in any other city, people in New York appear to use each restaurant as a way to broadcast the different sides to their identities, much as one would use a jacket or theater tickets. So you can play the part of the foodie hipster at Roberta’s, or the appearances-obsessed scenester at Acme, or the highly-strung middle-aged yuppie on a blind date at Union Square Cafe. You can negotiate the surprisingly fraught life of a young Upper East Side boozehound at Earl’s Beer and Cheese or bask in the luxuriant faces of hair at … well, anywhere in Brooklyn. New York offers so many choices, each attached to such a dizzying range of glimpses into NY life, that it’s possible to be just about anyone you want, at least for the two hours it takes to eat your meal.

So when someone asks me to go to a Thai restaurant here, I naturally give pause. This is for a variety of reasons. The main one is obvious: I live in Bangkok, yo. Also, I take Thai food personally. It’s hard to make an eater like me forget that I live in Bangkok.

But New York has plenty of places that are game. The truth is, there isn’t a better time than right now to enjoy Asian food in New York. It seems that restaurant-goers are more receptive to different regions (Sichuan) and more idiosyncratic menus that mirror a chef’s personal history or tastes (Red Rooster, Mission Chinese Food). The same is true for Thai, where diners — on the prowl for more authentic food experiences — have moved on from the Great Trifecta: pad Thai, green curry, spicy lemongrass soup.

That is why places like Pure Thai Cookhouse work right now. A place that featured a full-service guaythiew (soup noodle) bar might have had a hard time finding an audience even five years ago; today, the line for dinner snakes out the door, and the people waiting wear the kind of stressed, unhappy look on their faces that only the most successful restauranteurs can boast of. If my yentafo (seafood noodles with fermented tofu) was a little mild and the condiment tray lacked the vitally-important (to Thais) granulated sugar, it was ok — this place actually HAD yentafo and condiment trays, after all. Baby steps.

But where to next? It’s hard to say. After all, a mediocre meal at some Thai place takes extremely valuable real estate (in my stomach) away from, say, a saucer-sized burger at Peter Luger’s, a smoked fish platter at Barney Greengrass, or the delicious brussel sprouts slices at Roberta’s. I decide to enlist the help of the very best critic of Thai food I know, my friend Noy, who found revered NY standard Sripraphai below-par after being served a green curry dotted with broccoli.

I’m thinking “highly eccentric menu” and “personal” interpretations of Asian food using Thai ingredients. That’s surely Kin Shop, the Thai-ish restaurant opened by chefs Harols Dieterle and Alicia Nosenzo. But when confronted with the squid ink and hot sesame oil soup, red leaf and blood orange salad and stir-fried rice flakes with cauliflower and rock shrimp, Noy balks. “Mansai,” she says, using the Thai word for a person who elicits feelings of annoyance, through entirely every fault of their own.

Okay. There’s also relatively new entrant Pig and Khao, which specializes in Southeast Asian cuisine with a particular focus on Thailand and the Philippines. After scanning the menu, it’s the both of us who have the problem: first of all, Pabst Blue Ribbon?! Have lumberjack types moved over onto Clinton St?! And then there’s the “tomato and cucumber salad”, inexplicably saddled with Chinese sausage (“Ajad should be refreshing, not sweet and meaty,” says Noy). And THEN there’s the quail adobo with soy sauce and szechuan peppercorns, which gives me a temporary fit of rage (“That’s all-y’all-look-alike-type fusion,” I say). Moving on.

There’s no way I can ignore Pok Pok. It’s full-service Thai, the way Sripraphai is, but with specialties tailored to the “now” of Thai food in NY. This means the kind of core Isaan food that every Thai food lover loves (the new trifecta: grilled chicken, sticky rice, and the spicy green papaya salad that here is called pok pok), plus the newer crowd favorites like duck larb and khao soi. Sure, a few of the little explanations accompanying some dishes (“Another Singha please. And more sticky rice”) make us both want to gouge our eyes out with our bare hands, but we understand that Andy Ricker is an educator, and some people don’t know that bread is the traditional accompaniment to pork satay.

It’s just too bad that Pok Pok is trapped in the bowels of Deepest Brooklyn, a hard-to-find kingdom protected by viney brambles with razor-sharp thorns and a fire-breathing dragon in a plaid shirt. As much of a pig as I am, I cannot for the life of me traipse 10 blocks from the subway stop to the restaurant in sub-zero cold.

We make a booking for Eleven Madison Park instead.