Bangkok Glutton

Monday, March 26

8:00 – At Don Muang airport. It is entirely too early and we have been here an hour already. But it’s worth it: for some reason, the Asia’s 50 Best people have invited us to Macau to attend the big ceremony on Tuesday at Wynn Palace Cotai. I am not being unnecessarily humble. Literally no one we have dealt with has heard of “Bangkok Glutton” before. But they already sent me the invite and can’t take it back. Sucks for them!

9:00 – We start our big foodie weekend with a double sausage McMuffin set (Karen) and double Filet-O-Fish (me). Karen gets McDonald’s coffee and instantly regrets it.

14.00 – We have arrived at the Wynn Palace, having taken a taxi for the entire 5 minutes it takes to get there from the airport. Already, people are extremely nice and efficient. Check-in service congratulates me on being ready with my registration number. I feel smart and special. They take us to our room, and it has a great big view of the airport that we just left, as well as a ginormous bathroom. Karen and I are both thrilled.

14.20 – We register at the media center, while a nice man named Bruno opens three bottles of water that Karen keeps rejecting because she thinks they were already opened before Bruno opened them. I (yet again) request an interview with Chef Bee Satongun of Paste (Asia’s Top 50 Female Chef of the Year), because I earlier received an email from Asia’s 50 Best PR rejecting my interview request, telling me that I can just reach out to her at the event (where 840 people will be). Why include her on the list of people to request interviews from then? This is just a way to tell me to fuck off, right? (“Haha,” says Karen. “The next time someone pisses me off, I can tell them to reach out to me at the event.”)

15.00 – Work worries aside, our stomachs beckon, because it’s been ages since we ate our McDonald’s breakfast.  With “Everybody Wang Chung Tonight” blaring in the background, we take a taxi to Fernando’s, which I love as a great example of the Portuguese-Chinese fusion they call “Macau cuisine”. We get almost everything that we’re supposed to, like the suckling pig, bacalao fritters, and clams, but forego the fried rice and the gorgeous-looking salad with thick, huge slices of tomato.

17.00 – We get back in time to get ready for dinner in two hours. We are absolutely zero percent hungry. But before we retire to our room, we take the free gondola that passes in front of the hotel complex and which offers a bird’s eye view of the property, including the preparations for tomorrow’s Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants party by the pool. Amped up by our gondola trip, I buy a pair of kitten heels from Gucci.

19.00 – Totally on time at SW Steakhouse, but we forgot our press passes, so the front desk is unsure of whether we are legitimate freeloaders or not. Once we get through (I am in the system as “Mr. Chawadee Nualkhair”), we get a nice table that for some reason seats us directly next to each other, with a view of the Chinese-panelled wall in front of us. We find out why exactly 30 minutes later, when the lights dim, the panels part, and we are treated to a mini-show featuring a giant gorilla figure and a banana. Karen thinks it has a very Disney feel. Every 30 minutes, a new mini-show comes on. My mom would love this.

SW (the initials of Wynn Resort founder Steve Wynn, who has since stepped down from the company) has smartly taken the decision of what to order out of our hands, and is providing us with a four-course menu complete with wine pairings. It’s great and smart, and the wines are fabulous — not a stretch considering the huge walk-in wine fridge, outfitted with 2000 bottles bearing 500 labels and maintained at the optimal temperature of 16 degrees Celsius (7-8 degrees for the champagne, stocked in mini-fridges within the fridge). Unfortunately, Karen and I are not hungry. Like, at all.

All the same, William, the restaurant’s general manager, comes up and gamely attempts to guide us through the menu, which includes a Tuscan kale salad (a product of Steve Wynn’s stint as a vegan, William tells us), a Maryland-style crab cake generously spiked with Old Bay Seasoning, and an American Wagyu-Angus sirloin from Idaho, cooked perfectly medium-rare and bearing the sort of char one would find on Texas-style barbecue. Both William and L.A.-born chef Burton Li tell us that they are spreading the gospel of American-style steak to the Chinese, and that the Chinese are gradually responding. With us, they are preaching to the choir.

Tuesday, March 27

7.34 – I wake up late, having expected to run first thing in the morning, but being thwarted by the very effective blackout drapes, which make you think it is perpetually 3 in the morning. I am supposed to do the Wynn Palace Property Tour at 10 in the morning, but Karen decides to do it on her own so that I can finally run — something I am desperate to do after the copious amounts of food and wine at Fernando’s and SW Steakhouse. Overeating is no walk in the park, yo.

8.30 – Before we leave, though, we have breakfast in our room: healthy egg white omelet with fruit (Karen) and hard-boiled eggs with bacon, sausage and croissants (moi). Not surprisingly, we are rapidly feeling stuffed again.

10.00 – I run, finally. A note on music at the gym: Alan Parsons Project and Air Supply are probably nice when it’s late at night and you are six years old and your dad is driving you home from a Chinese restaurant in Cleveland, but it does not get you very pumped up. Instead, I entertain myself with video that Karen has taken of a phoenix bursting out of a flower-decked egg. During the tour she learns that every single blossom on the premises is real, sprayed with a material that lets it last up to a year and a half (!)

11.30 – I am showered and sitting in front of my laptop in an empty room. Where TF is Karen?

11.45 – Karen arrives, having made friends with absolutely every single person on her property tour, including Aron, the tour guide and Karen’s new boyfriend.

12.15 – We go downstairs to what we think is our reservation at Mizumi, the Japanese outlet at the hotel. We learn — gradually, after much prompting, because the lovely receptionist is afraid to tell us we are wrong — that we are at the wrong Mizumi, and are supposed to take a 15-minute shuttle to Wynn Macau, where our reservation at the two Michelin-starred Mizumi awaits. Aron walks us to the shuttle to make sure we find it.

13.00 – We are really glad to have been ushered off the premises of our hotel and brought here. We are being treated to a very long and rambling sushi omakase course that includes fresh hairy crab, ungodly amounts of uni and fatty tuna belly, plus as much Blanc de Blancs and sake as we want. “Is that OK with you?” the waiter actually asks us. We laugh.

People use the word “decadent” frequently, but this is truly it, with all that that means: copious lashings of tuna, and uni on everything, even on fatty tuna, rolled in a buttery slice of hamachi, and in a hot clear soup with slices of abalone. We eat everything, obviously. Karen announces to our surprised sushi chef that she loves it here and will never leave.

15.00 – I have nothing to do, since my request for an interview with Chef Bee — including a last-ditch Instagram DM before bed last night — was rejected. Laden with alcohol and with an entire school of fish in my belly, I succumb to sleep.

17.45 – Crap. It’s time to get ready for the cocktail ceremony, which starts in 15 minutes.

18.00 – The cocktail party (and the post-ceremony party) is held poolside, which makes me wonder if they expect people to get sloshed enough to jump into the water. But with the Cotai skyline, such as it is, spread out in front of us, and the gondolas that whizz over our heads, the smiling waiters offering glasses of wine and canapés and the odd, pulsing club music, it really does feel … very nice. It’s a nice party. And of course, William is here, like the genie in “Aladdin”, showing Karen the sake bar and offering to fetch me a glass of wine despite the fact there are about 8,000 other people here. This man is really good at his job.

My dream of interviewing Chef Bee shattered, I do manage to buttonhole Chef Ton of Le Du at the bar, pestering him to answer my email by Friday. “Thank you,” he says, which I think is a classy way of saying “You can leave me alone now.” Later, Karen bumps into Chef Ian Kittichai and congratulates him on his excellent Instagram feed. He takes the compliment graciously, especially for a man in a crowded elevator. And that is the extent of our pleb-chef interaction for the evening. Hey, at least I got a pair of shoes out of this trip.

20.00 – We are gently encouraged to attend the ceremony by a young man bearing a mini-xylophone and innumerable food and drink waiters, who tell us they cannot serve us anymore. I manage to cajole someone into giving me a glass of red wine, which I suspect was taken off of a clean-up tray. I later regret it when someone makes me down the entire glass on the red carpet before being allowed into the ceremony room.

10.00 – Congratulations everyone! I am told that the ceremony was finished in record time. The merits of the restaurants themselves and the fairness of their rankings versus Michelin’s (and personally, the striking dearth of female chefs), well, that’s debating material for somewhere else. Ultimately, what these lists and stars do is spur chefs to work harder and customers to explore more places, and in the end, doesn’t everyone end up winning?

 

I am supposed to be working right now, so of course I am Googling Kanye West albums and figuring out my own ranking of his top three. I am doing this because I have just read of the Kanye West-based matchmaking service, Yeezy Dating, launched by a kid named Harry Dry who (allegedly) believes that “Life of Pablo” is Kanye West’s best album. This is clearly, horribly, terribly wrong. Obviously the ranking goes: 3. “Graduation”, 2. “808s and Heartbreak”, and 1. “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”. OBVIOUSLY. What is wrong with kids today?

The thing that I have discovered about my bewilderment when confronted with modern music tastes is that I am offended by my own bewilderment. I am offended because this bewilderment makes me feel old. Like, okay, I am repeating myself like an old lady who tells the same story over and over again, but Drake sings like he’s got a clay mask on and it’s rapidly drying but he keeps trying to sing his way through it. And I cannot emphasize the confusion I felt when, while watching a rerun of the “Ellen Degeneres Show” (I know I’m old), I caught a Travis Scott performance and then spent all day listening to his music to confirm 100 percent that I absolutely hated all of it. I don’t understand this stuff, like how cavemen feel about lightning and fire.

Other things that make me feel old:

• People who are fans of Harry Styles
• People who know who Lil Yachty and Lil Uzi Vert are and can tell the difference between them
• People who can tell the difference between BTS and EXO
• Having to take digestive enzymes if I’m having dinner after 9pm
• People who can fit into jeans for sale on the sidewalk in Bangkok
• Eating at university outdoor markets

Almost all Thai universities benefit from outdoor markets, and Srinakharinwirot University (referred to as “Saw Nor Wor”) is no exception. Its market is open on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so if you amble up on a Friday, like I did last week, you are shit out of luck. My friend Vincent told me about it when we were arguing about the state of Thai street food on camera one day, and although we agree to disagree re. all Bangkokians’ access to street food, we do agree that the SNW market is pretty awesome.

This place has everything, including an elusive yum naem sod (fermented pork salad) vendor who also serves khao chae (summertime rice) in season, a woman whom Vincent assures me is real and absolutely not made up like a unicorn or a mermaid.  Although I have yet to try this woman’s food, I did have some lovely khao yum (Southern Thai-style rice herbal salad) and some salad rolls that I immediately regretted purchasing. There was Thai-Vietnamese-style kai kata (egg in a pan) with corresponding kanom pang yad sai (bun stuffed with Chinese sausage and steamed pork loaf), as well as some harder-to-find offerings like mee kati (noodles in coconut milk) and something called Hong Kong noodle, which is reminiscent of the “complicated noodle” at Greyhound Cafe.

There are also old-fashioned Thai desserts and sweet snacks like tako (pudding with coconut milk topping) topped with flecks of steamed taro or mango.

There were also fresh fruits and vegetables, drinks and even fancy items like organic melon, grown via university project, Vincent says. The only drawbacks, I’d say, are the dozens of fried items on sticks sent to torment me into abandoning my diet and the blaring, intense summer heat, which might be the worst it’s ever been. Of course, the university students continue to munch outside unruffled by the weather, unconcerned about the coming apocalypse — another great thing about not being old, when you start sweating profusely and embarrassing your dining companions.

I’m so gifted at finding what I don’t like the most. So I think it’s time for us to have a toast.  Here’s to the Travis Scott generation.

Something was going on in my life, and it was becoming a problem. So much of a problem, in fact, that my husband and friend would have intervened, if not for the fact that there are only two seasons of it. I am referring, of course, to the South Korean drama (?) “Let’s Eat”, which is ostensibly about a sad pathetic young divorcee named Soo-kyung (season 1), but is really about Korean food. You see, she loves food (specifically Korean food, this is important), but she is so sad and pathetic that she has few friends to eat with. In her quest for finding food partners, she ends up meeting friends and even eventually getting a love life. Oh, and busting an evil serial killer and helping to fix up a troubled young man’s life and … you get the picture, maybe. Season 2 is about a different young woman in a different Korean city, but the same ingredients are there: the woman is sad and pathetic and loves food (specifically Korean), a sinister subplot, a seemingly perfect guy who is good on paper, a cute dog, an extremely cute young woman, a catty female co-worker, a convenience store, a dry cleaner, a food blogging mansplaining male protagonist who is inexplicably irresistible to all women, and truly incredible shots of Korean food.

“Let’s Eat” is valuable in that it shows you what the definition of sad and pathetic is in South Korean life, and that definition definitely fits me. Haha, jk. What is truly love about “Let’s Eat” is that it is food porn in its purest form. You know how you are watching a porno and the plots are the most useless, flimsiest contrivances possible, useful only in connecting the various sex scenes together? Pizza delivery guy when the husband is away, pool cleaning guy when the husband is away, cowboys going camping, blah blah you get the picture? That is “Let’s Eat”, where the scenes are just excuses for making the characters sit and discuss food, with a particular focus on the eating. I mean the actual eating, the slurping and exclaiming and chewing (mansplainer is an especially loud chewer), with close-ups for the food that are so detailed that I swear they use a special filter for them. It is here, not in Seoul, where I learned about black bean noodles slick with soy glaze, gelatinous cartilage coated in red chili sauce, octopus shabu. When I watch these scenes, I have to put my hand over my mouth, to catch the drool.

Like all great art, “Let’s Eat” can be interpreted in different ways. Trude, whom I’ve forced to watch every single excruciating/drool-worthy episode, sees “Let’s Eat” as an ode to female pleasure. I see it as a nationalistic celebration of things that are unabashedly Korean.* The food is perfectly tailored, George R R Martin-style, to each specific situation and character: sad-ass onigiri from a convenience store when the main character is stressed and alone; overcooked slices of liver at a dingy Korean BBQ spot when the mansplainer is sad; boiled chicken stuffed in glutinous rice, floating in broth on a rooftop with garden-fresh veggies when characters are just starting to get to know each other. Western-style steak at a stilted and pleasure-less meal with the losing suitor for the female protagonist’s affections. A molecular gastronomy dinner with a different, ill-fated Prince Charming. A “Thai” meal (which includes that most iconic of Thai dishes, PHO), where mansplainer gets to show off his Thai language skills. And in one of my favorite scenes, a bizarre Korean-Italian feast consumed almost entirely by a woman who has decided to give up on her diet because WHAT IS THE POINT (me every other day). Foreign food is invariably expensive and the settings uncomfortable, putting the characters in situations where they are ill at ease. It’s the Korean food — specifically the sort of down-to-earth food featured in bars and shophouse restaurants — that make the characters their happiest.

*(There are also more unsavory interpretations, like how it’s a cautionary tale about what happens when you’re female and single).

I have just spent 630 words blathering on about “Let’s Eat”. That is how much I love this show. I haven’t even gotten into how its examination of Korean food has given me an appreciation for the variety and freshness of Thai food.  It’s also given me the strength of character to open the boxes of kimchi we carted back from the Kim Chi Museum in Seoul LAST JULY.

In fact, I love this show so much that I’ve run out of steam writing about what I originally intended to write about, and which I’ll save for next week. If you desire a taste of something more Thai food-related, why not check out a Thai cooking masterclass run by Spice Vagrant? I initially turned on the first season of “Let’s Eat” to help jog my memory for this post, but now I find myself yet again sucked in, and will have to sign off in order to re-re-watch it in earnest. Send help, someone, please.