Bangkok Glutton

I am not a nature lover, unless I am being paid to be one. On my off-duty trips, I only want to pursue the interests dearest to my heart. Unfortunately, I have very few interests: 1. what I eat; 2. what I drink; and 3. how do I get something to eat and to drink? Anything that falls outside of the purview of this admittedly very narrow scope is something that I am not interested in, and if I’m not interested in it, I want you to know that.

Unfortunately, I don’t travel alone. I have to deal with other people’s interests, and they have to deal with mine. This is how I found myself on an 8-day trip traversing the island of Iceland, which is known for its stark natural beauty, its mountains, its black sand beaches, its glaciers, its volcanoes, and its many, many waterfalls. You might ask, how did you end up on this trip? to which I would answer, I think I agreed to it while I was writing something, which is when most people who know me know to ask me to do things I normally would say no to (“Can I invite my investor’s extremely talkative secretary to your birthday party?” “Will you go to a Friends trivia tournament with me?” You get the picture.)

George R.R. Martin started “A Song of Ice and Fire” many, many years ago and only now have I realized that he probably took that “song” (theorized to mean Jon Snow, but I digress) from Iceland’s very apt name for itself (as opposed to Thailand’s “Land of Smiles”, which is not always a land of smiles) but simply reversed the order. I will now attempt to chronicle my own trip through this land, even though I am now in an airport and have forgotten most of it.

Day 1

Reykjavik makes me think that maybe I won’t have such a hard time of it after all. It is super, super cold, yes, but not as mind-numbingly icy as it was in Harbin, where I could only walk one block before worrying that my nose would fall off (looking for a drink, I found a Russian discotheque, but didn’t go in because they had a cover charge. I bought a Tsingtao from a convenience store and drank it in the hotel lobby). Our first meal is at a place called Kol, which will be the first of many, many instances in which I see a sign marketing the Icelandic lamb (“Roaming Free since 874”). The thing is, how do they know this? Did they carbon date some lamb bones or something? Or is it a myth along the lines of the famous Thai saying “There is fish in the water and rice in the fields” a la King Narai the Great? The other guests having dinner at the unholy hour of 6pm are an American honeymooning couple (they told everyone, which is how I know) and four French men. The fish of the day is Arctic wolf fish, which I later learn looks like this. The meat is surprisingly light, tender and flaky.

Day 2

I have lunch at the Seafood Grill after an aimless morning walking all over the place. I do not spot Bjork, or even Damon Albarn, although I’m not sure I would recognize him even if I did. I imagine I see Alan Wilder at the church’s bell tower, the highest point of Reykjavik, looking over the rooftops like any other boring tourist (me).

Everyone goes to sleep at 5pm, having just traveled from Thailand, but a few of us paint the town mildly pink by staying up until 8pm. We go to a bar where there are only locals, and I have my first pink gin and soda, which quickly becomes the best thing I have discovered in Iceland up to that point.

Day 3

We are slated to go to Vik, in the south of Iceland, which is when I realize that I am not here to stuff my face, imagine myself in the same room with a former member of Depeche Mode, and drink pink gin. Instead, I am here to bear witness to Iceland’s many, many, many waterfalls. This puts me in a terrible mood, which is only slightly alleviated by my first trip to a gas station convenience store where I have my first hot dog.

Day 4

Guess what we are doing? If you guessed walking out of a toasty car to face stiff winds while walking half an hour to see some water trickle through some icicles into a lake below, you would be correct! I now know how visitors to Thailand feel when they are expected to fill their days with trips to various temples, as suggested by the all-wise Tourism Authority of Thailand. After a few hours, all of these things start blending into each other. One waterfall is much like any other. Sorry, Tourism Authority of Iceland. We go to one where you can walk behind the water (Googling “waterfall in Iceland that you can walk behind” gets me Seljalandfoss) and, because it’s freezing and I quite sensibly don’t want to get wet when it’s freezing, I opt to watch as everyone else in my party chooses to venture behind the falls. Everyone, not just our Thai group, poses with their arms flung out wide like they are going to hug all of Iceland. I start to actively hate them all. This includes my husband, who is standing tantalizingly close to the edge of the falls. Alas, he does not fall in.

The bright point is, again, the gas station convenience store where I once again get a hot dog. I also get two gloriously cozy pairs of alpaca socks and a packet of licorice, because this is Scandinavia. It doesn’t even bother me when I try the licorice and it tastes like a burning puddle of melted rubber, plus sugar. I tell the cashier, “I never want to leave”, and I can tell she thinks that I mean Iceland. I don’t. I mean this particular gas station convenience store.

Day 5

We have moved beyond the waterfalls section of our trip, on to the annoyingly-far-from-the-parking-lot-in-typhoon-like-winds-glacier-lake part. The winds are so strong that I am occasionally blown backwards. The experience is so ghastly that I am led to believe that the tour guide is trying to kill me. I know he thinks it’s for the good of the group.

That night, however, we see our first set of northern lights. They are not bright green and glow like you see in photographs. They are like spotlights from a building, if that building was in Gotham. They only glow green (and other colors!) when you view them through your camera. They are easy to miss, because if you are from the city, you are used to seeing bright lights in the sky. You only realize it’s strange when you are in the middle of nowhere, which is very much exactly where we are.

Day 6

We are close to the far-eastern edge of the island, which I guess means lots of great lobster and langoustines. We take advantage of this wonderful bounty, and I, for once, am transcendently happy to be there.

I have also become a huge, huge fan of Icelandic lamb. It is the most tender lamb I have ever eaten, so tender that I even Google “why is icelandic lamb so tender”. I learn that the lambs are slaughtered abnormally early, in the fall after 4-5 months as opposed to New Zealand lamb, which is considered “early lamb” and slaughtered after 6-7 months. I am glad I do not have to slaughter the lamb in order to enjoy it.

Day 7

I get to walk for the first time on an actual glacier, strapping on crampons (or are they clampons?) in order to gain purchase on the ice, which is coated in volcanic ash. Our guide tells us that ice coated in this fashion is doomed, although I have just spent a whole day in a Reykjavik museum learning that all ice is pretty much doomed. In spite of myself and the fact that I cannot eat the 1,000-year-old ice, I enjoy my day, imagining that the ice is hiding all manner of ancient viruses/bacteria/man-eating organisms/aliens that will be unleashed by one hapless tourist who stumbles and falls in exactly the wrong spot.

Day 8

We head back to Reykjavik, with a strong grounding of knowledge about what the waterfalls, lakes and beaches of Southern and Eastern Iceland look like in November. I cannot say that I would definitely rush back to this island. But I can say that I have softened, a bit, towards this country. Before we leave, we take a group photo to commemorate the trip. I take a deep breath and spread my arms like I am hugging the whole island.

Taking a friend out to eat in a city that’s neither yours nor theirs is a tricky thing. Don’t get me wrong — it can even be difficult in Bangkok, if you don’t know someone well enough. People can say they “love food” and “will eat anything”, but when push comes to shove and you’re facing an oozy oyster omelet or a glass of water that someone has chucked a couple of ice cubes in, all of a sudden there’s hemming and hawing and “Oh, I think I’ll pass” with all the subtlety of an auntie who sits gingerly on the edge of a subway seat that you’ve just vacated.

That’s the problem Lauren and I faced, when friends we hadn’t seen for years asked us to take them out. They were excited about Asian food, and they wanted to explore the delights of one Dominion Road, the “Chinatown” in Auckland that’s not really Chinatown (that would, in fact, be Albany, a northern suburb to Auckland that is the NZ equivalent to Flushing in New York.)

Yet we balked. Lauren, cognizant of the fact that this was their first time in NZ, wanted to show them all the heights to which NZ food is capable of reaching (elevated Kiwiana at Ahi, upscale Korean at Tokii, fun Japanese at Azabu, etc). Me, cognizant that I wanted to eat greasy street food, wanted to get as down and dirty as possible, simply roaming the sidewalk down Dominion Road like a feral pack of dogs. There was a moment when we were very much aware of being at loggerheads and very much not liking that. And then it passed when we reached a compromise solution, Speaker of the House-style: we would go to Sri Penang, beloved of everyone (including Conde Nast Traveler for some reason), and then intuit where to go from there.

Ordering on a food crawl is a tricky tightrope walk of greed: too much and you’re a goner before you’ve even started; too little and you want to kill everyone around you, especially your hosts (aka me). So we took the prudent route and got the highlights: Sri Penang’s most famous dish, a melt-in-your-mouth beef rendang, a soupy and mild chicken curry, and the flakiest roti this side of, well, Penang. All was well-received, even if no one would partake of the local IPA, red vino or sparkling wine that Lauren and I had painstakingly picked out on an afternoon jaunt to two different liquor stores (all the more for me. Seriously.)

Next, I originally meant to take everyone to a personal favorite, Barilla Dumpling, where I fell down the stairs the first time I visited. I love dumplings, and Barilla takes care of that craving (and then some). There are umpteen fried, steamed and soup versions; so many, in fact, that I once, in a fit of greed, ordered an entire tableful and had to call my daughter and her friends to help bail me out of indigestion jail.

Alas, a stray review on Trip Advisor convinced me to take the group to Jolin, where I was promised the best soup dumplings in the city. Reader, there were no xiao long bao to be had. So instead we contented ourselves with the “kung fu” noodles, a mish-mash of all the noodles at the restaurant’s disposal and served by a gloriously surly Chinese man.

No worries: we saved the best for last. A trip to Eden Noodles is tough at even off-times because this place is just that popular (and tiny). I once walked away after being told that the wait would be 40 minutes, something that my husband still complains about (I went to Barilla Dumpling instead!) In any case, our visit this time was at just the right moment, and we scored a table for 5 without too much trouble. The favorites here are the dan dan noodles and the dumplings in spicy sauce, so that’s exactly what we had.

I love any and all dan dan noodles, but this one was special: tender, even melting noodles in a clear yet aromatic broth, topped with soft and sweet butter lettuce leaves and a beautifully crunchy toss of umami pork. The dumplings were even better, spicy with a big thump of savory and, dare I say it, quite sweet as well.

With all the food we ate that night, Lauren and I were surprised to discover that our friends wanted to have dinner with us AGAIN, and where should we go? It was easy this time — Nanam, a nouveau-Filipino restaurant helmed by chefs Jessabel Granada and Andrew Soriano, where standards like sisig and lechon get a sophisticated glow-up. I feel like Filipino food is on the cusp of really breaking out; people already know Thai and Vietnamese cuisines, but there are talented chefs all around the world starting to do new and interesting things with the food of the Philippines.

So we ordered, and then ordered some more. This is when I suspected that our friends only ate one meal a day — that was how much food we ended up ordering. My suspicions were justified after they told me they had shared a single minced meat pie on the ferry back from Waiheke. Los Angelenos! What do you expect?

We ordered a mashed eggplant salad that reminded me of a chili-less “soup makuea”, punctuated with black rice crisps.

There was also a lovely ceviche, and a platter of serrano croquettes, and a knockout starter of longannisa — a traditional sausage usually served with a fried egg and rice — that, in this case, is spiked with lemongrass, grilled over coals and stuffed into a tortilla with a drizzle of chipotle mayo. If that sounds good to you, don’t worry, it is. If you would like to see what it looks like, sorry, I ate them all. (However, Lauren does have a great recipe for them, in a book that was rejected by our publisher. Call us!)

That wasn’t all. We also had juicy roast chicken in a tamarind “sinigang” rub, a red snapper baked in a banana leaf, and a pork belly “lechon” with apple sauce and artichoke. It all ended up being so good that our friends ultimately didn’t care (or cared less) when my son the diplomat told one of them, the writer of a longtime cartoon series, that his favorite show was “Family Guy” and the other, the writer of a well-known comedy, that his favorite show was “Friends” (they said “That’s interesting” and “Thanks for being honest”, which is code for “Your opinions are terrible”). At least we were well fed.

I finally got around to watching “Hunger” on Netflix, and I have to say, I’m not sure any chef would saddle their restaurant — much less a private chef service — with that name. Too on the nose, or maybe just plain too pretentious, I think; I mean, can you imagine excitedly asking your friends, “Have you been to Hunger yet” without wanting to punch yourself in the face? But what do I know, I don’t have either a restaurant or a private chef service.

One of the major points of this movie, if you haven’t seen it yet, is that food is purely a status symbol, aspirational, with people only eating things like caviar, foie gras, lobster, wagyu et al because they signify the diner’s wealth to the world. Although I am sure this might be true for some people, and why many chefs garnish their dishes with these ingredients like an edible (INSERT BRAND NAME HERE) logo, I think this far too simply summarizes what fine dining has become. It’s true that, with the world as it is now, the old model of the 3-Michelin-star restaurant that has stood for centuries is fading; no one can afford three servers per diner anymore or the enormous kitchen brigades of Paul Bocuse’s time. Instead, you get “chef’s tables” where oftentimes the chef is cooking in front of you, and who ever said that was guaranteed to be terribly exciting? So you end up with nonsense like a chef cutting up a cow carcass from a hook suspended in the middle of the dining room, or a dude self-immolating on his restaurant floor during the dessert course alongside his team and his diners (these things did not happen irl). This is why some chefs have been put up on a pedestal like a Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp, marketed as celebrities that are wholesome (Jamie Oliver, aka “English Spice”) or “artistes” (Hunger’s Chef Paul, aka “Artistic Thai Spice”). This is what you get when restaurants become purely interested in making money, but in a way where they can still look down on Olive Garden and Taco Bell even though that is what they are, at heart.

Another reason why “Hunger” approaches fine dining too simplistically: Can you imagine the overarching sadness of the person who only eats something so that other people can see it and then define them for it? I like the occasional caviar and foie gras terrine (never foie gras pan-seared), but really: how joyless would that kind of dining be if personal enjoyment was not a factor?

That said, while aspirational eating is a thing, the eating of our pasts is much more obvious and far-reaching. This is because it’s frequently the happiest and most comforting eating to be had, what we ate in our childhoods. And although a lot of that food, in my case, seems incongruous (I grew up in a mainly Italian town in Western Pennsylvania, so my comfort food is wedding soup and cavatelli with meatballs, not kai jiew with rice), it makes it no less nostalgic.

I did not grow up in a Thai-Chinese household, but I did marry into one. We ordered e-mee (pan-fried crispy egg noodles with shredded chicken and ham and Chinese vinegar on the side) every Saturday from a place called Bamee Gua on Langsuan, which no longer exists. I had not had this dish since Covid, but I was lucky enough to get in touch with Thai journalist Pailin, who has Teochew roots and who recommended having e-mee at Yim Yim, a very longstanding restaurant on the corner of an offshoot of Yaowarat Road.

The restaurant is on the second floor only and well into its second or third generation — I honestly had lost count. I was busy with the food, as Pailin had also ordered an or suan, or traditional-style oyster omelet, fried rice with Chinese olive, a handful of nice kanom jeeb, or steamed pork-filled dumplings under a shower of deep-fried garlic, and sausages stuffed with chestnuts, which our dining companion Adam said he hadn’t seen on menus outside of China.

But the highlight was definitely the Chinese mullet, steamed under a blanket of garlic and pickled turnip, which Pailin usually ordered cold but which today arrived hot. Fatty, juicy, salty and meaty, if this fish was a food that could connote high status to the diner, I would have no problem showing off every day (if you are curious, it costs 600-700 baht a fish, depending on the size. Not really Jay Fai crab omelet-level prices).

But we weren’t done. Pailin took us on a walk through the market after lunch, showing us where to get her favorite snack, e-guay, a hand pie stuffed with savory things like cabbage, taro or beans. I ate it as we walked, getting cabbage all over myself and oil all over my face and hands. Strangely, no one seemed to mind.

We ended our walk, which was really hot and sweaty, at Pailin’s favorite bamee wan (sweet egg noodles with ice) stall on Trok Issaranuphap. Almost magically, we felt better again, even if it only leant us enough energy to hail a cab back home.

There is a lot of talk in “Hunger” about how noodles are “humble” and how cooking street food is simple. When the heroine decides (SPOILER ALERT) to go back to cooking this kind of food, there is a sense that we are supposed to be surprised. But why would that be? If food has no emotion, there is no point to it. Isn’t that why (SPOILER ALERT) her grandmother’s recipe “ngo ngae” noodles are presented at the climax of the movie? Chef Paul then (SPOILER ALERT) shows his cynicism and moral bankruptcy in response, but does that mean he is supposed to be (SPOILER ALERT) the personification of caviar and foie gras? Come on. These can be good ingredients, when not plopped onto a ramen or hamburger haphazardly in the name of high prices “art”. Capitalism is the villain, not champagne! (Wagyu however … maybe).