Bangkok Glutton

For the past few months, people who have been unlucky enough to dine with me have had to endure listening to my hot takes on “Bon Appétit, Your Majesty”, a Korean historical rom-com in which a modern woman pulls an “Outlander” but for food, not sexy times. Whereas “Outlander” is for woman who fantasize about having two husbands, but in a way that’s not their fault, “Bon Appétit” is for people who fantasize about having their food skills applauded and revered without having to actually think of anything ground-breaking themselves. Thus, our modern-day heroine finds herself back in the Joseon Dynasty, where the king is really mean but also really cute in an Edward Cullen “I might kill you someday” way.

To stay alive, she has to keep making dishes that our discerning gourmet monarch — again, this is historical fiction — will appreciate. Cue the parade of “Korean” dishes: pasta, steak, macarons, a stew made with a freaking pressure cooker, all of which dazzle everyone who is lucky enough to try them, none of which is strictly of the time (or even of the country). Obviously, she is hailed as a culinary genius (this is the fantasy part).

So stricken was I with this fantasy that I ended up watching the entirety of a Thai take on this concept, “Good Heavens! I’m a Goose not a Swan” (it must sound catchier in Thai). A woman goes back to Rama III-era Bangkok, where she catches the eye of the capital’s most eligible bachelor and comes up with an all-you-can-eat “moo kata” (pork BBQ) buffet, a nail salon, and freaking bubble tea.

As ingenious as all of these creations are, neither of these women invents a flushing toilet.

Now we find ourselves at another culinary crossroads, one not kickstarted by any time-traveling heroine (that we know of) but by the vicissitudes of modern times. I think most people who follow the current Bangkok dining scene would agree with me that the days of slavishly recreating royal Thai and even aristocratic recipes are over. What I mean by this is that royal and aristocratic Thai menus are not the only avenues for winning accolades and stars. A new type of Thai food, driven by people like Chef Prin of Samrub x2 Thai and Chef Jai of all the Charms, has been percolating for a while, inspired by the regional cuisines of Thailand’s various nooks and crannies and made by regular people for regular people. This kind of food is malleable, open to interpretation, and flexible enough to accommodate each chef’s various experiences and points of view. This is the type of food that “Bon Appétit”‘s heroine would have given rise to among later generations of chefs, if she had stayed long enough to see it (spoiler alert).

All the same, restaurants driven by aristocratic family recipes are still bubbling up all around Bangkok (this is Thailand, after all), following the precedent set by forebears like Thanying and Kalaprapruek. One of these is Somdet Cuisine by Chatcharee Bunnag, which is only open by reservation. Not surprisingly given the name, the recipes here hail from the Bunnag family, of which my husband is a member (the Bunnag family has a million different branches; you might be a member too).

My friend James who lives close by booked a table for us, and we had fun imagining what the food might be without actually looking it up. James wrote up his own imagined menu, which included dishes like “Genealogical Fish Cakes — minced sea bass hand-shaped by a third cousin twice removed from the Bunnag line who now works in finance (B1280)”, “Massaman Verification Stew — rich, tender beef in a cardamom-heavy curry ‘exactly like Grandmother made,’ according to an uncle who’s never cooked (B1620)” and “Sticky Rice Inheritance Dispute — served warm with mango, coconut cream, and the bitterness of three siblings fighting over Chanthaburi land (B1240)”.

It may surprise you to learn that none of these dishes was on the actual menu. Instead, there was a green curry with beef (there always has to be a green curry with beef) but with slivered long beans instead of pea eggplants (which is kind of sacrilegious to my husband’s branch of the family). There was a nice fish fried in fish sauce with an accompanying green mango salad, and mee krob (deep-fried noodles), another difficult dish for me to make personally. There was even chicken with cashew nuts and pad Thai (which we’re told is popular at lunchtime).

After dinner, we lingered in the courtyard, part of the compound where everyone actually lives, and listened to stories about the founding of the restaurant from the current-generation owner: so many family members came over to eat after events at the nearby temple that people thought it was a restaurant, so the owners thought, why not? Although the restaurant is over on the Thonburi side, it’s in a charming neighborhood within walking distance from the Chao Phraya Sky Park and the river, making it a great evening option right now. The best part: you won’t have to go back in time to enjoy this piece of history.

At the risk of flogging a dead horse, I’m going to talk about music again, if only briefly. I’m talking about Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti”. You’ve heard it, yes? Of course you have, or if you haven’t, you should; “Tutti Frutti” a rock history classic, for people who still want to know about rock history, at least. But have you heard the Pat Boone version?, asked no one, ever. If you have, as I have, then you would know what I’m saying; it is a sad, pathetic echo of its predecessor, one of many examples of remakes that can’t hold a candle to the original. That is what Thai som tum is to the som tum in Laos.

I know people are fond of the sugary, dried shrimp- and peanut-strewn concoction that is “som tum Thai”, a dish that has made its way all over the world. But I’ve been looking for the funkier, earlier — dare I say more “authentic”? — version of this salad since I first began visiting northeastern Thailand years ago. In Isan, som tum was a revelation, graced with big, bold flavors that eschewed the bright and easy notes of lime juice and sugar in favor of something murkier and a little more primeval: fish sauce and, of course, pla rah, the fermented fish extract that makes Isan hum. Some legends say that fermented fish was so valuable that it once served as currency, but today it’s simply the backbone for almost every Isan dish there is.

So imagine my surprise to discover that, in Luang Prabang, pla rah (called “pla daek” in Laotian) is simply one in a set of possibilities when it comes to seasoning som tum (“tum mak hoong” in Laotian). The first big bite I had was on my very first day in Luang Prabang, at a tourist-friendly restaurant called Malaisone. The green papaya was shaven into big thick strips, the dressing dark and opaque like something out of a swamp, with umami from nam poo (the juice of pulverized field crabs), spice from lethal chartreuse-colored chilies, and acidity from magorg (water olive) and sour red tomatoes. The salad was accompanied by fresh young morning glory and sponge gourd, perfect for sopping up the juices.

I was smitten from first bite. Resolved to learn more, I ordered it every chance I got, even though we had eaten so much by this point that I no longer had an appetite. Our next stop was Kuang Si Falls 29 km south of the city, where the dressing (frankly even more delicious) omitted nam poo and pla rah for shrimp paste, with added crunch from purple Thai eggplant and extra brightness from tiny green tomatoes with so many seeds that we thought they were sesame.

So charmed was I that I woke up extra early for the morning market the next day in order to avoid the crowds of mostly Chinese tourists. Of course we got our share of exotica: cow placentas for boiling into a soup; dried cow lungs grilled over an open flame; a powdery, furikake-like “nam prik” festooned with deep-fried shallots made from the local Mekong seaweed.

We even had our share of Laotian spirit houses, these ones red Fanta-free. My favorite showed its own inhabitants:

Moved by the market offerings, we bought everything that caught our eye to add to our planned lunch on the Mekong that day. Because it was November, rice was newly harvested; we bought plenty of that to go with grilled tilapia, fat from the cooler water:

We got grilled local chicken too, because of course, and it was better than what you’d get at Khao Suan Kwang or Wichienburi:

But most striking of all was a dish I wasn’t able to try at the market because we had no time. “Khao soi”, they called it, but it was nothing like the khao soi we were familiar with. The name comes from the noodles (“khao”), which are hand-cut into thin strips (“soi”). Even more confusingly, it was made with meat, tomatoes and fermented beans (“tua nao”), just like the “kanom jeen nam ngiew” back home.

From then on, I was struck with a new obsession. Determined to have my own taste of “khao soi” before finally heading home, we went to “Raan Pho-Khao Soi Nang Tho” for breakfast before the airport, where some of us had “khao piek” (the udon-like noodles also known as “guay jab yuan” but which are, again confusingly, called “pho” in Laos) while the smarter ones had “khao soi”. Here, it was topped with crispy pork, rendering it criminally irresistible.

Every order came with fresh herbs, limes, those brutal chilies, and green beans to be dipped into a peanut sauce.

It was the best meal we’d had the entire trip. I told the chef so, even if she might not have understood me, and left the shop with plans to return. Now back in Bangkok, I have my own field crab juice and my own little tiny tomatoes, and harbor plans to bring a little bit of Luang Prabang into my kitchen sometime soon.

I’ve been a low-key fan of the Spinners for a while now. I really do think one of the great love songs of the past century is “Do You Think I’m Falling in Love” — up there with Peter Gabriel and the boom boxes, Robert Smith with his Mary Poole, the Police and the umbrella and whatever else prompted their song. Every Gen X girl dreams of songs like that eventually written for them, but none of these songs really captures the uncertainty and vulnerability of actually falling in love, not the certainty but the gradual realization and all of the happiness but also terror that this means. I feel all of that in the Spinners song, even in the easy tempo and lovely melody and beautiful voice. To copy from Greg Kihn, “They don’t write like that anymore.”

Another song I really love — if only for the first 4 minutes — is, of course, “Rubberband Man”. It’s a song I don’t play often because, let’s face it, it lasts forever and ever and doesn’t end until you’ve given up all hope for the next song to begin. At least, I really believed that until I listened to it, again, on the way to Hua Hin where I am thinking of living for 50 percent of the time, but that’s neither here nor there and not a story for this post. I realized, finally, after hearing it for so many times, that the latter half of the song is a series of variations on a theme, a “jam”, as it were, the band jamming until the song has reached its natural end, playing just like the Rubberband Man himself. Sometimes a couple of the variations sound similar, and sometimes there’s a big twist, but the theme is still there, even if what you hear is a little different.

The Thai “tom” — always spelling “tom” in English even if it’s really “thom” — is one of Thailand’s best known yet simultaneously underrated categories of food. It’s also one of Thailand’s oldest. Everyone knows “tom yum goong”, or thinks they know it, even when the broth is muddied up with some kind of milk and it tastes like sweet-and-sour cream. Chef Andy Ricker once called it a “cliché”, but it’s only a cliché because it’s so good (when it’s a clear broth) that everyone knows it, just like “London Calling” was a good song until everyone used it when the characters — even the freaking “Friends” crew — went to London because no one has any imagination or creativity (though what other song could be used for London? “Solsbury Hill”? And everyone agrees the Paris equivalent is “Ça Plane Pour Moi” by Plastic Bertrand, yes? What would you use instead? “Do You Hear the People Sing?”)

There are many other “toms” besides tom yum, an entire family tree of “toms” that precede and follow it. There’s its close sibling, the night market standard “tom leng”, made up cleverly of the cheapest butcher’s cut there is, the pork or beef spine, boiled with a boatload of chilies that pile up on the bone so that it looks like the diner is the world’s bravest caveman when you take a picture (because that’s the whole point of this dish, the picture). Then there’s arguably the one more famous than “tom yum”, the “tom kha”, named after galangal but based on a coconut milk broth and usually featuring chicken. It’s the Taylor Swift of Thai soups, perfectly fine, one supposes. And finally there’s what some believe is the “big daddy” of “toms”, “tom kloang”, a true Central Thai creature sweetened with tamarind juice and fresh tamarind leaves, which might be analogous to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, if a soup could sing gospel and play electric guitar at the same time.

Among all of those “toms” (and there are many others), one is “tom khem”, which roughly translates to “salty soup”. Unlike some of the others, this one is Chinese-inspired, with lots of soy sauce and palm sugar but without the star anise and cloves used in a Chinese-style “pullo”, spices that some Thais find to be smelly. Just like its cousins, it is frequently served as a soup, but there are times when it’s allowed to reduce down to almost nothing, making whatever’s in the pot the main player all on its lonesome. That’s the idea behind the dish “pla tu tom khem”, or “Thai mackerel in salty soup”: sometimes served as a soup, but just as often served as a fish dish after all the broth has been lost to the ether, probably because the cook was off listening to the entirety of “Rubberband Man”.

Samut Sakhon (and neighbor Samut Songkhram, really) are all about Thai seafood; after all, they are home to most of the seafood markets that supply Bangkok eateries. That’s why, when you go to these provinces, you want to try a truly Thai seafood — pla tu, Thai mackerel, a sea fish that, like Thais themselves, likes to play with boundaries. In pla tu’s case, it’s in the brackish water at the mouth of the river where pla tu thrive, somewhere neither truly sea but not river either.

At Khun Toom Restaurant in Samut Sakhon near Mahachai Market, the pla tu is served in a “sathia”, the local word for “tom khem”, piled over an inky pool of soy sauce and confit garlic and garlanded with a fresh tangle of coriander leaves. It’s not cooked for so long that the bones melt into the flesh; unlike aristocratic Thai families, the cooks here don’t have time for that (maybe if they listened to Jethro Tull? But who would wish this fate on anyone?). But if you are willing to spend the time and enjoy a bit of a challenge, the pla tu pile makes for a nice early dinner with a plate of rice, especially these days when it’s constantly raining and it feels like the world is about to end.

Khun Tum isn’t just known for its Thai mackerel. Their most famous dish is, of course, crab: either simply steamed, with an abundance of orange roe obscenely spilling out onto the plate, or already picked and stir-fried with green peppercorns, torn makrut lime leaves and sneaky smashed green bird’s eye chilies.

There are a ton of restaurants just like Khun Tum in Samut Sakhon (and Samut Songkhram), all variations on a delicious theme. Like “Rubberband Man”, there are different (again, delicious) variations that set them apart from the others; the sweet-and-sour “tom som” with deep-sea pomfret at Jay Meaw in Samut Songkhram comes to mind, as does the “pla tu tom madan” (Thai mackerel soup with sour cucumber) at Khun Ja Restaurant. Of course, if you don’t like the theme (that would be seafood), the variations would be very tedious indeed. But if you are a fan, why not clear some time out from your schedule and give it a whirl?