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

by | 04/28/2012 · 10:52 am

Glutton Abroad: Qatarific


Feeling nutty?

(Photo by @SpecialKRB)

The message came as I was eating my second lunch of the day. James was unsure about the food options in Doha, where he works and where I’d be crashing for an entire week. “Maybe you should bring some protein bars with you and write about that,” he texted. “Ha ha!” I replied. “You know I can eat anywhere.”

Fast forward to the Jean-Georges restaurant at the W Doha, where @SpecialKRB — still in her TEDx NY t-shirt — James, and I are huddled around a small table groaning with crab, lobster, steak, burgers, and one or two other things I have completely forgotten about. I cannot taste a thing. My stomach feels like it’s trying to ‘asplode me from the inside, like the bad swarthy man in an episode of “24”. Is this what middle age has brought me: panic attacks on airplanes and a digestive system in revolt when I eat after 6pm Thai time? And what indeed am I to do here if this affliction does not go away?

The answer may be to eat something you don’t like all that much. We find this out the next day, after getting kicked out of a TEDx event on the waterfront at the Katara Cultural Village. We wander into Mamig (Armenian for “grandma”), which serves, of course, Armenian specialties and the Lebanese dishes that every Middle Eastern restaurant has to provide if they want to please any customer ever.

Beef "mortadella" with pickles at Mamig

We focus on Armenian, and the results are … different. Full of nuts, wholesome enough to be tree-hugger fodder, but big on citrus and sweet pomegranate flavors, this food gives you the sense you are eating something that is good for you, but if you have to keep reminding yourself that, something must be wrong. Along with a pistachio-studded beef “mortadella” and an entire bowl of pickled vegetables, we get these tiny little birds, like sparrows, coated in honey and pomegranate juice and lemon and full of little bones that crunch when you bite into them. It’s weird.

“This is like Game of Thrones food,” says James. Coming from a man who falls asleep once the opening credits stop running, this is not a compliment.

Maybe we’re not going authentic enough. We hit a restaurant called an “institution” by Time Out Doha magazine, Al Shami Home Restaurant (in case you don’t get it from the name, this is “home cooking”) and order all the dishes we should have ordered before, all the hummus and baba ghanouj and light, fluffy pitas that flop onto the plate. And it’s unmemorable, maybe marred by the clouds of smoke coming from every other table in the room. But I would like to report that it’s true: people can indeed set themselves on fire from the shisha set so perilously close to the table. A man’s sleeve caught on fire. You must watch your shisha, people.

Baba ghanouj and hummus at Al Shami

Do I want American food? Is that it? We head to Ric’s Kountry Kitchen (yes, really), where we order biscuits and gravy and get beef sausage and cheesy grits. We also get a pecan “pie”, set on a crust that is literally indestructible.

Me: “I can’t cut through this crust!”

James: “Maybe they want to reuse it for their next pie.”

Me: “It’s uncanny!”

James: “Is this the stuff they make the new Airbuses out of?”

And so on and so on.

Ric Kountry Kitchen's pekan pie

No. We’ve been relying on restaurants. The answer to our dietary malaise is, obviously, street food. At Souq Waqqib, we come upon an entire courtyard of ladies who make mankouche, or crispy, thin crepes that are slathered with either Nutella (sweet option) or labneh and a heavy sprinkle of za’atar (sesame seeds, thyme, sumac). We ambush an entire row of women who provide real home cooking: they make their food at home and haul it over to the souq at nightfall. We try everything, selecting harees, a creamy mix of chicken, wheat and ghee; keshari, a tomato-based stew ladled over a spaghetti-macaroni mix; madrooba, flaked fish in, again, a creamy sauce; malfouf, cabbage stuffed with meat; and waraganab, stuffed grape leaves. We discover that much of this is a whole lot like baby food, and that this may be the point: it’s hot in Qatar, there are a lot of people, you’ve got a lot of things to do. Maybe you need the ultimate comfort food when you get home.

Checking out the wares

(Photo by @SpecialKRB)

So (barring a lunch at a secret restaurant that I can’t talk about), this is my vote for best meal of the week: cartons of take-away, eaten with plastic utensils on the sidewalk next to the neighboring Thai restaurant, shared with a stray cat. Somehow, my rebellious stomach stayed quiet that entire evening.

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Filed under chicken, food, food stalls, markets, Middle East