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 | 05/25/2012 · 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