Bangkok Glutton

I can relate to George R. R. Martin right now. Not because of the insane wealth or the fact that people actually read his books, but because sometimes, like right now, I don’t feel like writing either. If I were to wait until “inspiration struck”, as I usually do (lol), then I would not be writing for a very long time.

That is, I don’t feel like writing what I’m supposed to be writing about. I could easily write 2,000 words on how the real precursor to Fall Out Boy is not punk or even goth but Sisters of Mercy, the Poppy Years, an unnatural development which ended up blurring the boundaries between all three genres to such an extent that even the makers of South Park felt it was their duty to explain.

But this is not what we are here for. We are here to discuss food. Specifically, street food in Bangkok. To be honest, I don’t feel like discussing street food in Bangkok. It’s depressing and boring. Capitalism rules, screw everyone else. The end.

So here are some photos of restaurants abroad who serve street food. Specifically, Kin Len (“eat-play”) in Seattle, a new-ish restaurant specializing in obscure (for the US) street food dishes like goong ob woonsen (steamed shrimp and glass vermicelli), khao ka moo (pig trotters on rice) and satew lin wua (beef tongue stew on rice).

Pig trotter on rice

Thai-style fresh oysters

Kin Len welcomes you

Have I exhausted my cache of photos yet? No.

Fried chicken with grilled young chili dip

In case you were confused about where you were

But wait, there’s more. I was in Chiang Mai with my parents recently, shopping for food in Warorot Market (deep-fried pork schnitzel and nam prik num at Damrong, naem (fermented pork sausage) at Anchan) and getting into arguments with tourists at Doi Suthep. Exhausted from our day, we retreated to the comforting embrace of Tubtim Grob Jae Uan (193 15 Sridonai Road, 085 041 9419, open daily 10am-9.30pm), a shophouse institution where it’s not just the tubtim grob (sticky rice flour and water chestnut mini-dumplings in coconut milk and ice) that’s popular, but just about everything else.

The namesake dish

There are other dishes you should definitely try, say my parents, including the pad Thai, a dish I would never order, and you shouldn’t either, unless the middle-aged lady with the banana clip is overseeing the kitchen, my mom says.

She always orders this with a side of Thai-style som tum (papaya salad) — but only if the guy with the dyed orange hair is making it. (If either of these people changes their hairstyle, you are screwed.)

One visit to this place and the world seems all right again. It will not bring back your yen for writing, but it will remind you why people are still willing to venture out into the open air to eat food, and sometimes that is all you need.

Nova salmon and whitefish platter with everything and pumpernickel bagels at Barney Greengrass

I have been traveling a bit these past few weeks, and so have not been able to update this blog, sorry mom who is my only reader. Jk. My mom never reads this blog.

I have learned a few things over the course of my travels, such as to always look where I am stepping on a San Francisco sidewalk, and that Washington’s oysters are the sweetest and most succulent. But the biggest takeaway from this entire trip was that there is nowhere — and I mean NOWHERE — that can compete with New York City when it comes to bagels, and all the stuff that comes with them.

I mean, people try. I remember ordering “bagel and lox” at a deli in Auckland and being rewarded with a shriveled, thin bagel-shaped piece of toast with a tiny hole in the middle. Cream cheese can be found anywhere, and lox can be fudged a bit. But the bagel always tells. It needs to be chewy and dense and filling, via a consistency that can only be achieved through boiling before baking. And that’s even before we get to the stuff that goes on top. I am salivating as I write this.

The stuff that goes on top are the “spreads”, the smoked or cured fish, and the salads. The spreads are cream cheese mixed with various ingredients, like scallions or lox. The smoked fish usually means lox, but it can also be sturgeon if you’re old-school, or the sweeter, less complicated Nova Scotia salmon if you’re new. And then the “salads”, which are not the salads you get at the Sizzler salad bar, but ideal for piling on top of chewy bread: egg salad, pickled herring, chopped liver, or my favorite, whitefish. Everyone has their usual order, and like a fingerprint, it is unique to them. My usual order is whitefish salad on a toasted everything bagel. Karen’s is pumpernickel, untoasted, with tofu veggie spread. My husband, on the other hand, proves he is Thai by ordering a toasted poppyseed bagel with sun-dried tomato spread. My daughter proves she is a Glutton by ordering a toasted everything bagel with both scallion cream cheese and whitefish salad. And my son proves he is 9 by ordering a toasted plain bagel with butter and jam. What can you do.

The shops that sell these things are called “appetizing” stores, where “appetizing” is a noun that refers to the cold starters that kick off Ashkenazi Jewish meals. When they settled in New York in the 1800s and early 1900s, they brought their culinary traditions with them. Kosher law dictates no mixing of meat and dairy (like cheeseburgers), so delicatessens focused on the meats like pastrami, while appetizing shops got the eggs, dairy and fish. Today, most people think of Russ & Daughter’s when they think of New York appetizing shops, but I have never gotten into the original branch, and I have another place where I’d rather be anyway. That place is Barney Greengrass.

Do you remember the theme song to the TV series “Cheers”, where everyone knows your name? Were you even born yet? I think of Cheers when I go to Barney Greengrass, even though absolutely no one knows my name. But the welcomes are always warm anyway, in a city with a notorious reputation for the opposite. To be honest, the only time I have had a negative, New York-style interaction was when the manager of an Italian restaurant told me the Pilates classes were paying off, but in a way that was not nice. What’s wrong with Pilates? (Note: I do not do Pilates).

It’s a strange relationship, the one between the waiter and the customer. The waiter holds all the power during the meal: will the food come or won’t it? Will it be what I want? Will it have been altered or unpleasantly tweaked in some way? So when your food arrives promptly, and it is delicious, and it appears to have been unmolested, a weird feeling of gratitude descends. That feeling could spread into warmth, its flames fanned from being nurtured and secure. It could even develop into … love.

Mom, I fell in love during this trip. I fantasized that the burly man bringing me platters of cured fish festooned with half-sours and unimaginably juicy slices of tomato and onion — always promptly, never forgetting — would also fall in love, and that we would run off together after my husband left me for his secretary even though he doesn’t have a secretary. His rugged beardiness would prove useful in cold weather, walking down the street, his size shielding me from the icy New York wind, his burly arms able to carry as many bags of bagels and tubs of cream cheese as his employer would allow back home, where I would be waiting, since for all its attractions, Barney Greengrass has yet to have a television.

Mom, it would be a romance for the ages. Until then, I will have to bide my time, and refrain from the temptation to order a bagel anywhere else. It wouldn’t be the same.

The popular scrambled eggs with lox and onions, when I remembered to take a photo

Homemade gang jued

It’s hard to believe, but despite (occasionally) some of my best efforts, this blog will soon be a decade old. Since then, I have published two street food guides and occasionally been on TV — though efforts to make that a regular thing have been met this way:

Me greeting television executives

(via GIPHY)

All the same, it’s not bad for a blog that was originally meant to last for a year. I sometimes enjoy going back and reading the posts that I wrote when I was 5 kg lighter. They seem hopeful, funny even, unmarred by middle age. However, my favorite post ever remains this one.

So, even though I had stopped doing Thanksgiving posts, I’m doing one today, to not only recap nearly a decade of this blog but to force myself to give thanks for nearly a decade of the friends and experiences that Bangkok Glutton made possible. I still meet interesting people because of it every year, and I am still surprised by it.

Also, I have a lot of unused photos on my phone:

Amuse-bouches at Pru in Phuket

Also this one:

Squid that dissolves into noodle strands in broth at the Front Room

Thinking about this post on one of my interminable walks in Auckland (yes, I am still here), I could think of something food-related that I could be genuinely thankful for. And that is the food in Thailand. Not just the food that we’ve always had — like the gang jued that your parents who have been driving you crazy during their two-week visit make for you to make you forget that they drove you crazy — but exciting new food made by chefs who clearly love their Thai cuisine and Thai ingredients and want to champion Thai growers and Thai knowledge. That this comes at a time when a wave of extreme right views seems to be taking root in other parts of the world, and when people who have been in power for centuries can act the aggrieved party when the historically disenfranchised and dismissed ask for their voices to be heard … well, this is moving to me.

There was a time, in a climate like this, that chefs in Thailand would want to dress up their food in Western trappings and Western techniques in a bid to “improve” that food. Chefs are still using those techniques, but not for the colonialist fantasy of fusion cuisine, meant to address a local cuisine’s deficiencies from a Western point of view. Chefs are now using cooking techniques that are now accepted in every part of the fine dining world, but in the service of old cooking traditions, like incorporating scent or smoking or using charcoal. The focus is now on the Thai-ness of it, the farmers and breeders, the local “wisdom”, the soil that nurtures the animals and produce that we eat — even in restaurants where the food or the chefs are not necessarily Thai, it (and they) are still Thai-informed. Even with the influence of Michelin on the dining scene, and how that influence inevitably shapes the dining experience in ambitious restaurants seeking accolades, the instinct, now, is still to be proud of this Thai-ness (or in the case of restaurants like Haoma, in triumphant expressions of their own identities).

This, to me, is liberating in a very personal way that many will probably not understand. We are taking refuge in things that we could never have changed in the first place. There is no denial or wishing that everything was different. There is also no retreat into the faux superiority gained by culinary orthodoxy. We are what we are, hovering in that in-between place that is still being built with every dish we make. What a relief that feels like.

TL;DR. Here are some more photos:

Delicious fish curry and pork belly with stink bean at Taan

Crab with housemate Sriracha and beets at Blackitch Artisan Kitchen

Asian-style steak tartare at Thaan Charcoal Cooking