Bangkok Glutton

The uni roll at Kanesaka in Ginza

I just saw “Black Panther”, and plan on seeing it again this weekend with my son. Part of the thing I love about “Black Panther” are all the great think pieces that it’s inspired. But don’t you worry. I am not going to write a think piece about “Black Panther”. There are plenty of far more qualified people writing things about it.

One of those think pieces that really struck me — Jelani Cobb’s in the “New Yorker” — basically says that, yeah, Wakanda is a fictional place, but the “Africa” depicted for the rest of the world for hundreds of years was also fictional. As with most things, that got me thinking about food. Because food is also a cultural construct, and people actively choose how to showcase it to others. How many times have you seen images of Bangkok, streets heaving with locals in coolie hats and live animals (“Bridget Jones Edge of Reason”), or sidewalks choking with street food carts selling God-knows-what (every Bangkok food documentary), or intrepid, good-looking adventurers gamely chomping on crispy grasshoppers or freshly grilled intestines (everything else). I’m not criticizing it, because that’s what people want to see if they haven’t been somewhere; they want to see something that’s different from what they know. I do this too. In Harbin, China, where I spent four days freezing my ass off in -40-degree Celsius temperatures, I wasn’t really all that interested in taking photos of the deep-fried fish and steamed dumplings that everyone eats over there. It was stuff like this:

Cocoons, fresh enough to jiggle from time to time

Chicken fetuses

This is why you get the Africa you see in “Tarzan” and all those colonial safari movies and Taylor Swift videos. Who wants to see some dude grabbing groceries at Big C before trudging to his condo in On Nut after a long day of work? I don’t even want to see that, unless it’s to pass judgment on the quality of his food haul (probably instant noodles and beer, amirite?) It’s why I don’t watch reality TV shows like “Dance Moms” or “Real Housewives”: if I want to hear some lady yelling at me, I can just call my mom.

What I do want to criticize, because hello, this is me, nice to meet you, is Bangkok’s reaction to it. When Bangkok does crazy shit like build a “tasting robot” to judge food authenticity (a losing proposition if there ever was one) or try to “declutter” streets by taking away people’s food choices, they are reacting to this construct, this culinary jungle Tarzan idea, that is completely out of their control. This seems about as useful as complaining about anyone who is still Facebook friends with your ex-boyfriend (didn’t they hear what a dick he was? Omigod Taylor.)

There’s a flip side to this Tarzan, though, and that’s Wakanda: something that is awesome because it is different, something that you want to seek out, and not as a foil to show off the superiority of the mundane. When you go to a different country, you want to find that sense of wonder, Wakanda even, in your food. In Japan, that usually means stuff like sushi or — since sushi is ubiquitous all over the world now — delicious chicken bits on sticks like this:

It usually doesn’t mean stuff like pasta, even though a form of it is what Japanese people (and Asians everywhere) eat all the time, either with the tomato sauce, cream sauce or pesto that you recognize and love, or with fish eggs, seaweed, shiso leaves and a crapload of freshly ground black pepper, like at my favorite restaurant in Tokyo (no joke), Spajiro:

In Thailand, the food that gets fetishized as “exotic” varies, of course, depending on who you are. There are insects, sure, and pad Thai and soup noodles, but if you ask me (no one asked me), nothing screams “Thailand” and “exotic” and “Other” like Isaan food: grilled meat, chilies, spicy dips and relishes, baskets brimming with lush local fauna, and the holy food trinity of pounded papaya salads, grilled chicken and sticky rice. For the truly die-hard, the bona fide Thai chili head, it’s Isaan food that moves the emotional needle, the thing that screams “Thailand” whether that’s what a majority of Thais are eating (quite a few suggest that might be the case) or not.

Right now, there is nothing more “Instagram-ready” than what you would find on the menu at the extremely buzzy 100 Mahaseth, an Isaan specialist that I can unabashedly say I am a big fan of (hence the write-up of a place that is not even close to being street food. (Also, Instagram is destroying food, but that’s fodder for another day’s thoughts. Also, microherbs=millennial parsley)).  Yes, there are descriptors like “nose-to-tail” and ya dong (moonshine) on tap and its Thai hipster clientele and its very buzzy location on the very buzzy Charoen Krung Road, but it’s more than those parts. It’s well-made food that still surprises even the most jaded Thai palate and gives umami up the wazoo:

The pounded Thai eggplant salad, which looks a lot better than my own version

The cassia leaf and braised oxtail curry (tom ki lek), the fish sauce-marinated pork chop with young green chili dip, the curried pig’s brain with rice noodles, the grilled bone marrow dressed in perilla seeds, even the house-made ya dong: there is so much to try, so little time. Like the next showing of “Black Panther”, I am already planning my next visit.

The filet mignon at Today Steak

(All photos by Dwight Turner)

There is something that happens when you’re seated at a table and a plate of food is set in front of you. There is no longer any need to think; there is only the basic, animal act of getting that food into your mouth in a way that will settle the stomach that’s telling you it’s been ignored. After a few bites in, after your brain truly gives you the green light to dig in and you really start hitting your stride, the euphoria of finally getting what you want starts to settle in. All is suddenly right with the world, your mind instead focused on this element with that sauce, or maybe that vegetable with this protein, the task of cleaning the plate the only one looming in your immediate horizon. When that world, your plate, is gone, so is your high. And that’s when you ask your dining companion, “What should we have next?”

This is something that happens, even if, as I was, you are somewhere patronized mainly by university students. Let me tell you, I typically avoid places that host a lot of university students as a rule. The reason is simple: they are young and their main motivation is value for money. They are young enough to think they have a lifetime of meals ahead of them, calories and grease and deep-fried breading be damned. So when Dwight (@bkkfatty) told me about a specific niche of restaurant that championed “steak” for student budgets, I was intrigued and made him take me to the Sam Yarn market, where Today Steak (or Steak Today, we can never be sure) resides on the second floor.

Thais have always been good at taking foreign influences and twisting them into something that is unique and probably unrecognizable to their creators. These budget steakhouses — and they are a specific niche, perhaps most famously represented by Chokchai Steakhouse — fall roughly into a similar category to the mid-century “luxury Western” restaurants like Silom Pattakarn and Agave that serve Chinese-Thai takes on Western dishes such as beef stew and Anglicized chicken curry. These steakhouses are, if not exactly parodies, then idealized versions of their American counterparts, serving food that is actually affordable and tailor-made to young Thai tastes.

My “pork godfather”, even though I asked twice for beef

At Today Steak, we took seats in an air-conditioned room dominated by what was clearly a Chulalongkorn University student meeting of some sort. A bridge actually connects the second floor of the market to the campus, making it basically another canteen of the university. I envied these students with their lives ahead of them, thinking that there were good things to come. Because you see, I had already seen the menu.

The basic philosophy of these types of restaurants are that there is nothing that a slab of processed cheese, bacon or red sauce cannot fix. There is no dish in which one of these elements is not present, unless you give up completely and order the Thai food (and then, why are you here?) The prices never veer over 200 baht, even if you order a T-bone steak (160 baht). But again, why chicken out and order the T-bone steak, if you are here? You came here to play, did you not?

And, even if you do try to order beef, there is a very good chance you will not get it. I twice tried to order the “beef godfather” for 150 baht (OK, I liked the name), only to receive a breaded pork cutlet garlanded with a salad tossed in mayonnaise and peas, cold white bread touched with margarine and the kind of ketchup-y Thai spaghetti that makes you realize why Pan Pan became such a culinary sensation in the 1980s.

Me, thrilled to be so close to a big bottle of mayonnaise

Dwight ordered the “filet mignon” (120 baht), which we assumed would be a beef ribeye. Smothered in a red sauce and slices of flabby bacon, it looked a lot more like well-seasoned pork. Does this explain the price tag? In any case, the fries were as good as Dwight promised they would be.

But authenticity is not the point. It’s never the point here, unless it’s Thai food. The point is that this food is the stuff of someone’s childhood. This is the Thai equivalent of that alarming “salad” of lime jello, pineapple and nuts that your grandma keeps busting out on Thanksgiving. Tuna casserole with lots of canned cream of mushroom soup and potato chips crumbled on top. Sweet potatoes crowned with cherry pie topping and mini-marshmallows. Let’s not pretend this is grosser than anything else we’ve seen.

At the end of the evening, though, we showed our age. We finished our meal at Nai Peng Kua Gai and finally considered ourselves fed. As I write this now, I am planning on chasing my next high with a big plate of pad se ew.

Lunch at Feel in Yangon

There is something wrong with being on a diet while on holiday. Not only is it perverse — you are supposed to be on holiday — but it could quite possibly be immoral. Yes, immoral, or maybe just narrow-minded, or, at the very least, criminally incurious. You are in a new country, not your home, shutting yourself off from sampling the very best that country has to offer. Yes, there are sights to be seen and money to be spent buying souvenirs for people who will throw these souvenirs away after you have left. But closing off the very best part of you, making it subject to rules that curtail the full enjoyment of a country’s cuisine — making that stomach, in effect, work while on holiday — that’s just wrong. That is no way to travel.

This is what I’m telling myself, anyway. That diets are immoral while on holiday in Yangon. Because it would be criminally unfair to Myanmar. And I want to give Myanmar’s cuisine every chance, as many chances as a good-looking white guy in the entertainment industry could possibly hope for. Taylor Kitsch- and Justin Bieber-level chances. That’s how generous I want to be to Myanmar. Because I suspect that food may be getting a bad rap.

Patrick, who lives in Yangon, had been telling me I should try out the food in Myanmar for a while, and I agreed that I should, in the way that one agrees they should go to the dentist, or finally get around to listening to that new Eminem album. Which is to mean, it would probably never happen. But one night (in Bangkok), Patrick told me something that was so simple that it blew my mind: Myanmar food is delicious to the Myanmar people. Just as Thai food is delicious to the Thais — something that Thai people don’t really consider, because they think whatever Thai people like must be liked everywhere else too. In Thailand: balanced flavors, different textures, good aroma=good. In the US: rich, creamy, salty, sweet. What is good in one country is not necessarily good in the other. What are the culinary values in Myanmar?

Denigrated as oily and salty by Thai people, Myanmar’s food operates along a wholly different set of values: heavy even when it’s light; highly flavored; filling. It’s food that asks to be remembered, well after the meal. All dishes — even the salads — adhere to this rule. The one time I went to Yangon in 2006, the only meal I honestly remember was Chinese-style hotpot. Who would I be if I didn’t want to try real Myanmar cuisine?

Streetside sweets in Yangon, reminiscent of Thai kanom tua pap

Perhaps the most famous purveyor of Burmese cooking is Feel, an unassuming cafe on a nondescript street in what I’m told is the expatty part of the city. Once inside, customers are expected to grab the first seat that comes available and then somehow navigate their way through a vast curry buffet amidst a crowd of equally-hungry Burmese customers. Happily, Patrick takes charge, ordering a delicious beef curry, a sweet-and-sour fish, a chili dip strongly resembling Northern Thai nam prik ong, and a tart, crunchy pennywort salad that still coats the tongue even after it’s gone (“Heavy even when it’s light,” Patrick says). There’s even a clear refreshing soup that tastes of pickled bitter gourd. Even after all that, Patrick eventually gives in and orders the tea leaf salad — arguably Myanmar’s most famous dish and a mishmash of textures and pungent, bottom-heavy flavors that never skew acid. “Real tea leaf salads are never sour,” Patrick says. Everything is delicious, even if it’s different from what Thais would say is good.

Feel’s tea leaf salad, with the necessary garnishes

Later, in Bagan, we get a different view of Myanmar food at an outdoor vendor set up in the shadow of one of the temple’s parking lots. When we ask one of the guards if he knew of a good place to eat lunch, we are totally unprepared for him to ask his friend to take over his post, and wait with us(!) while my notoriously snail-like daughter slowly makes her way through the temple. He takes us through the parking lot to the far side of the bric-a-brac vendors, and we entertain thoughts of him killing us only once. Finally, he leads us to a vendor set up behind a makeshift stove and set under a blue tarp, orders for us, and sits with us while we take our first bites. What they served: a clear, oily (but not unpleasantly so) spicy soup with pork; a salty-spicy salad of acacia leaves and minced meat; stir-fried snake gourd with eggs, and honking big fluffy omelets piled on top of rice bulked up with beans. This type of hospitality was not uncommon during our trip to Myanmar. It got to the point where we hesitated to ask for the bathroom, for fear someone would end up driving us to their home.

A streetside lunchtime feast

It was an important lesson about Myanmar, its people and its culture, and one that may not have been learned, had I been on a diet.

Starchy streetside snack at the market in Yangon