Bangkok Glutton

Beef shin khao soy, my favorite kind

Guess what? There’s a lot of bad mojo in the news today. Maybe you haven’t heard, because you are off being happy and hanging out with Diana Ross. Maybe you have been traveling and are spending your days with a good book. Or maybe you are medicated to the gills, like me. In any case, even I am aware that bad stuff has been happening, including bad inappropriate behavior guy stuff (I’m not talking about Donald Trump, although, wait, maybe I am).

Women grow up knowing to look out for those guys, the handsy ones who treat your personal space like a salad bar at Sizzler. They do this because they can. It’s always our fault, and we’re always the ones left feeling ashamed. But I’m not here to tell the same old story about the perv on the crowded Tokyo subway car, or the totally inappropriate weirdo at your friend’s wedding. I feel like the tide may be turning, and that people are learning to appreciate — or at least fear — what women have to contribute and say. Fingers crossed.

This extends to food. Still, even here in Thailand where the myth of the magical mortar-and-pestle-wielding grandma reigns supreme (the culinary Asian version of Will Smith in “The Legend of Bagger Vance”), woman food remains mom food, stuff that you eat in a pinch or that you miss when you’ve moved on to bigger and better things.

At the same time, much of the Thai food landscape is populated by strong women cooks, people like Jay Fai and Bo Songvisava and Bee Satongun and Krua Apsorn. Women make up nearly half of the Thai workforce. Thailand ranks first in the number of women CEOs at private companies. Yet every time you step outside there are still commercials about the need for women to slim down, bleach their skin, beware how they smell. My mother still complains about how her friends tell her I look like I was pulled out of a dumpster (“pulled from the dumpster” is my look right now a la Alison Mosshart OK mom?!). These parallel existences shouldn’t be, but they are.

No wonder, then, that a discerning woman would choose to eat their feelings, the security blanket of choice for the bon vivant. That is how I found myself at Kruajiangmai (Thonglor Rd., 099-196-2464) instead of the street food noodle place I initially intended to visit, wearing my most comfy elastic waist pants and a pristine white shirt just begging to be splattered with lunch. Kruajiangmai, which started out as a pure delivery service, just happens to be helmed by another cooking woman, Chinnanan Sethachanan, who cooks good Northern Thai food even though she’s from Chiang Mai (my dad says Chiang Mai food is the blandest in the north OK reader?!)

Nam ngiew in the pot, with actual dok ngiew

If you’ve read this blog for a while, you will probably know that I am extra picky about Northern Thai food, because my dad has cooked it for us all our lives. You might have also noticed I was super judgy about places with laminated menus promising pad Thai and mango sticky rice but I’ve matured since then (OK mom?!) and realize that people have to do what they can to survive. Kruajiangmai not only has the temerity to be from Chiang Mai, but also does this laminated menu thing, and yet I still did not run away. Maybe I was super hungry (I ordered both beef shin khao soy and kanom jeen nam ngiew). But the food itself was promising: the nam ngiew, spicy and cartilaginous and uncluttered with the desiccated corpses of cherry tomatoes that tend to dilute the stew.

Most importantly? There were actual dried ngiew blossoms in the broth, as well as the correct garnishes like deep-fried garlic, bean sprouts and pickled greens, because when you see stuff like green beans and carrots you (I) want to jump out a window. The same could be said for the khao soy with beef shank, which was not only tender and rich but also included the deep-fried egg noodles for texture and plenty of raw onions, because it’s not a good lunch until everyone within a 3-foot radius wishes they were dead.

I ended up leaving with a bag of khao ganjin (Shan-style rice cooked in pork blood) and gaeng ped hed prao (exploding mushroom curry) on my arm, splattered Jackson Pollock-style with enough khao soy curry and nam ngiew juice that I looked pulled from a dumpster next to the Ping River. I didn’t see any of my mom’s friends on the way home. Comfort food indeed.

Typical NZ: Free protection from the rays

I’ve been away from home for a while, and so have been busy the last few days gorging myself on all the stuff I didn’t expect to miss in Thailand but did: grilled chicken smothered in a mountain of fried garlic, searingly hot shredded bamboo shoot salad, steamed seafood custard, perfectly stir-fried pumpkin shoots, even proper sticky rice. But now, of course, I find myself thinking more about what I left behind over there, like gorgeously juicy oysters, breezy beachside walks and appropriately-priced booze. Them’s the breaks I guess.

I learn more about New Zealand every time I visit. Stuff I didn’t notice before, like how meat pies are to Kiwis what hamburgers are to Americans. They are the staple food, ruefully described as junk but irresistible all the same.

Steak and cheese pie breakfast by the highway. I somehow survived this.

I knew about the penchant for bare feet everywhere you go, but not the obsession with fries on a menu, even at Chinese takeaway and American barbecue spots. We all knew about the sheep, but not the inexplicably overwhelming popularity of Jason Derulo. And then there is the — what I see as new — interest in local produce, presented in novel, thought-provoking ways using ingredients like surf clam, seaweed, manuka honey and mutton bird. Of course, I’m talking about Pasture.

Pasture’s wild onion chawanmushi

Imagine a place where — yes — they make their own bread and butter and the menu changes regularly (standard Brooklyn hipster moves), but also features pairings of “juices” like fermented white asparagus alongside wine and declares its fondness for acidity over sweetness on the menu like a mission statement, or a warning. That is not to say that everything works, because, like in any place that tries something new, there are hits and misses. But it comes across as sincere, instead of as a cynical exercise in justifying an inflated price tag by providing an “experience” that makes the flavor of the food a secondary concern.

The cocktail menu

The Asian food scene is still something I am unpacking. Malaysian restaurants are abundant, packed, and good, and a whole range of Chinese food from Sichuan to Shanghainese to Cantonese is available. Thai food is different, somehow, and can either be characterized as a casualty of its own global successes (pad thai, sweet green curry) or as an entity that has moved beyond “thing” into the realm of “concept” — big enough to be subject to interpretation like the Mona Lisa, or what George really meant by “Song of Ice and Fire” (I don’t think it’s Jon marries Daenerys and they live happily ever after OK?).

Like any true and patriotic Thai, I was annoyed by terrible Thai food that curdled the spirit of the culture and turned the generosity of cooking into flat-out scams (see: my trip to a NY Thai restaurant). I understood the impulse to create a neutral arbiter, a superhero who could prosecute every culinary crime, like an official food robot. But what the Chinese, and Japanese, and Italians (and everyone else who has achieved worldwide food stardom) understands is that making things the way you think they should be is a pipe dream. Actually, that is probably a hard lesson to learn for everybody, not just food people.

Potstickers at Barilla Dumpling, where I fell down the stairs

When I worked at a news agency that I will hereby refer to as “Root Canal”, management frequently talked about how “fresh eyes” were needed to see things in our culture that we had grown used to, people like Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan (we can discuss how often “fresh eyes” ended up being white guys later). Through them, we could see new things about ourselves, even if they didn’t know as much as we did about the local nuances.

So why does that go out the window when it comes to food? This is the question I’m still asking after visiting Kiss Kiss , a Northern Thai-leaning restaurant that only just recently opened in Auckland.

Pork ribs and jaew

The first thing you notice is that it’s super cute. There’s no BS about trying to make this place look “authentic”, or that Thai people have ever really set food inside. The colors are bright-bright, like a Wachowski movie. The cocktail menu is viewed via Viewmaster. The soundtrack veers between cool Western obscure stuff and cool Thai obscure stuff.

The next thing you’ll notice is that it’s packed. New Zealanders love this place. It is full of the sort of young New Zealander you would expect to find in magazines like i-D and Paper. When you talk about it with other people, they will invariably say it is delicious.

I only point these things out because it wasn’t to my taste. I found it sweet and bland, and some dishes were full-on bad ideas, like the “naem” rice salad topped with shredded sai oua and fried sticky rice balls that looked like a way to utilize pesky leftovers. I admit I did not have the guts to order som tum. It wasn’t Thai food that Thai people would eat.

But is that the point? Is it bad if it’s an homage, done by people who loved something enough to be inspired by it, who then tweaked it to their own tastes? Like David McCallum’s “The Edge” versus Dre and Snoop’s “The Next Episode”? And what if people like the new thing better? What about it if I like the remade “Evil Dead” versus the Sam Raimi original, where Bruce Campbell makes too many stupid faces and is useless? (I realize this is horror fan heresy). There is a world different from us, a world where people might actually prefer a cappella versions of songs to the clearly superior originals. Shall we blame them? Or just accept that people have different tastes? And see their “remakes” as tributes to the original? (I realize this is Thai food lover heresy).

Goat at Wattanapanich

Maybe you move in different sorts of circles, but I have been told a couple times to eat a bag of dicks. Not to my face, but I read it a lot. It is very evocative and memorable. I have never partaken of this bag, however.

I have eaten cod sperm sacs several times, either doused in ponzu and grated daikon radish, improbably battered in tempura coating and dipped in salt, or grilled gently on a slab of pink Himalayan salt. These were all good ways to eat fish sperm. I have also had poached rooster testicles, simmered in a hot pot seasoned with scads of Szechuan pepper. These were also good.

But I had never actually consumed animal dong (don’t worry, I will try to use as many slang words for wiener as possible). That is, until Matt — who was the first person to tell me about the Talad Rot Fai years ago, despite being from New York — mentioned a particularly memorable meal at Wattana Panich where he had both beef and goat wang for lunch.

I haven’t been to Wattana Panich (336-338 Ekamai Soi 18, 02-391-7264) since I first moved to Bangkok in 1995. A mangled cockroach in the chili pepper-studded vinegar made me not want to return ever again. But Matt made me want to go back, as did many, many publications such as BK Magazine, which exhorted readers to revel in the “lumpy and gooey” beef broth (said to be 40 years old, simmering in a vat that is topped up with more broth daily but never washed out). They also recommended customers try “their famous goat meat in Chinese soup, too” which may or may not be a nasty trick to play on unsuspecting readers.

In any case, diners eyeing the goat meat may opt for the “thua un thua diew” (literally translatable to “one per body”, 200 baht) and risk the shady side-eye of the servers, who will act like you have just ordered a porn video on the corner of Nana Road. After pointing you out to the other servers, they will eventually come back bearing the “thua un” in a “lumpy and gooey” broth, just like its beef counterpart, which is a tad cheaper at 180 baht.

The beef version

Both meats are tender, as soft as anything I’ve ever been served in a bowl which isn’t sperm. That doesn’t sound great but it actually is, because sperm sacs are very soft indeed. I suspect it’s more about the texture than the broth itself, which looks goopy enough for Gwyneth Paltrow and bears the mild flavor and faintly medicinal aroma of many of my least favorite Chinese dishes. Beef tasted better to me than goat, which was both gamey and gloopy, a double-handled chore. Surprisingly, my husband — who loves both Cantonese food and beef noodles — did not care for it, either. Maybe because there’s no hiding what it is, a bowl of doinkers.

And finally: in the pickled chilies, another bug. A little one this time.

Goat on rice

Despite all of this, it is packed to the rafters, one of the few street food shophouses left that still draws everyone, from all corners of society, to its tables. This is genuinely the case of a place that is just not for me. We finished our lunch next door, at Nomjit.