Bangkok Glutton

Beef khao soy at Lamduan Faham

It is commonly believed that men think about sex every 7 seconds — which amounts to about 8,000 times a day. This is actually not true. According to an Ohio State University study published in the Journal of Sex Research (?), men “only” think about sex about 19 times a day … just a little more than food (18) and sleep (11). Women, meanwhile, think about sex half as often as men, but apparently also think about food and sleep less as well, which begs the question: what are all these women thinking about? Actual work?!

Food takes up a lot of my own brainpower (sleep comes in second). It took me a long time to realize that people aren’t thinking of their next meal as they are eating their current one. I don’t think the preoccupation with food is out of some misplaced sense of duty. Food keeps me from focusing on all the other stuff, like whether I’m a bad mother, or why does the world seem like it’s imploding, or what am I doing with my life. It’s the filter through which I’d prefer to interact with the world. Eating my feelings is my happy place.

Friday

Chiang Mai is one of my favorite places in the world to eat my feelings. So when I arrive late on a Friday, the first thing I do is head into town for something delicious, easy, not too filling, and, most importantly, quick. This usually means khao tom, or rice porridge. One of the more popular fish porridge places in Chiang Mai is S. Sriracha (186/2-3 Kampangdin, 053-449-149), just a few doors down from perennial favorite Midnight Fried Chicken (or Sticky Rice, or Fried Pork) on a road once known as Chiang Mai’s red light district. As is the case with most Thai-style fish porridge, the fermented brown bean dipping sauce is the most important component, and here it doesn’t disappoint: bags of salty flavor, but with a  chili kick.

Saturday

The next day, I am desperate to have some bona fide Northern Thai food, so we trek to Huen Jai Yong (64 Moo 4, San Kamphaeng Road, 086-671-8710), which I’ve eaten at and written about many times before, but why experiment when you know what you want? I get almost giddy when the food comes to the table: deep-fried bits of pork belly accompanied by grilled green chili dip, homemade fermented sour pork sausage, a pickled mustard greens stew flavored with tamarind juice, sort of like the Northern Thai version of collard greens (pak gad jaw), a minced, pounded salad of fresh Northern vegetables (saa pak), succulent stuffed Northern Thai sausages (sai oua) thick with turmeric, and of course mounds of sticky rice.

There was also a special of the day, a chili dip of freshwater fish, cooked and then shredded:

Sunday

We finished off the trip the day after with the requisite stop for khao soy — probably Chiang Mai’s most famous dish, and the dish with the most muddied history. Some people will say it is adapted from a Burmese dish, while others say it’s a Chinese-Muslim specialty, and still others (mostly Malaysians and Singaporeans, I suspect) who believe it is derived from laksa. If you ask the people at Lamduan Faham (the original, at 352/22 Charoen Rat Road, 053-243-519), they will say their ancestor (the restaurant’s namesake) invented it by simply tipping fresh coconut milk into a bowl of noodles before serving it to her coconut-loving customers from Bangkok. Whatever its origin, the dish at Lamduan is still my very favorite, thanks to its flavorful, rich broth, stewed for hours from pork bones.

Grilled river prawns Ruanthai Goong Pao

For whatever reason, I’ve been going through all my old things, combing through high school and college mementoes for no reason other than to delay doing real work. Aside from the occasional wince-inducing photo with Ill-Chosen Boyfriends 1-5, I stumbled on a treasure trove of music — or, at least it would be a treasure trove if I still had a cassette player, because I don’t have one, and haven’t seen one since about 1999.

Tapes. Lots and lots of tapes, in a blue zip-up Case Logic container, remember those? Mix tapes, too, because that was how people showed their love back then. It was the music I listened to from roughly 13-17 — the best music of our lives, at a time when it mattered most to us, before we got really busy or our tastes corrupted by boyfriends who preferred classic rock. I would argue that the music of 13-17 is the music we love most. Even if it is New Kids on the Block, or Spice Girls, or whatever else you are too cool to admit to now. You will always secretly love this music most.

Finding those tapes was a blessing and a curse, because it inevitably led to … where the hell are the rest of my tapes?! Where is my Kate Bush “Hounds of Love,” or my XTC “Skylarking”, or even my China Crisis — stuff I listened to nonstop along with the Replacements and my “Pretty in Pink” soundtrack. What happened to REM’s “Murmurs”? Who took my Bauhaus? And how the f#$k did I get four copies of Pearl Jam’s “Ten”?!

River prawns are the mix tapes of Thai cuisine. Bear with me here. They are like foie gras to French food, caviar to the Russians, hamburgers to the USA. They are, inevitably, the favorite food of Thais, secretly or not: big, juicy, flavorful, adaptable to nearly every Thai treatment and ubiquitous if you aren’t too picky.

That’s the bad thing about them, too. Because, while you can get them anywhere, even Chiang Rai, even down the road from your house at the corner next to the gas station, it’s not the best. No, the best you can get is in Ayutthaya. Really. Every Thai knows this. The best grilled river prawns in the country are in Ayutthaya, the old capital of Siam before Bangkok, and still the unofficial capital of all that is prawn-related. And, in Ayutthaya, the best grilled prawn restaurant is arguably Ruan Thai Goong Pao (1/2 Moo 4, Wat Cherng Lane, Tambon Ratchakram, 035-367-730). So when my friends Nat and Cha invite me for a lunch a mere 18 songs’ ride away, of course I will say yes.

Stir-fried morning glory with garlic and chilies

It’s easy to say that anything tastes good as long as the dipping sauce is decent, and that saves a lot of Thai seafood restaurants all over the country. But when the prawns (and I use the word “prawns” because “shrimp” doesn’t really convey the size of these things) don’t really need the dipping sauce, that is something special. They come to the table hot, halved, and barely opaque, meant to be pried — with difficulty — from their shells in a way that makes it impossible for you not to splatter your neighbor. The orange goo in the head, meanwhile, is supposed to be mixed, painstakingly, with each grain of rice on your plate, so that everything is coated in shrimp head. Nat and Cha look askance at my attempts to dab the top of my rice with the goop like butter on a cobbler, but I can’t help it: shrimp goo is just not my thing. But if you are Thai, or truly know Thai food, that is the way you are supposed to eat all your river prawns.

It’s not just about river prawns: there is the obvious tom yum, or spicy lemongrass soup with seafood, and shrimp baked, Chinese-style, in a pot with glass noodles

along with thick, juicy lotus stems stir-fried with surprisingly plump prawn legs.

But if you go without having a single grilled river prawn, just go ahead and buy the ticket out of Thailand right now. Because that is ridiculous, the equivalent of owning four copies of Pearl Jam’s “Ten”.

Uni don, topped with 5 kinds of Japanese sea urchin

My first concert was the Ramones in Cleveland. I was 16 years old and I went with my friends Tanya, Jen, and Jen’s dad, who was not a Ramones fan. Tanya wore an old prom dress ironically. I, having never been asked to a dance, wore a black miniskirt and a camo t-shirt from Kmart. Since this was our first concert, Tanya and I tried to fight our way to the front of the stage in a vain attempt to catch Joey Ramone’s eye, only to be thwarted by a mosh pit that formed an impenetrable barrier to our groupie aspirations. I mention this because the Cleveland mosh pit was nothing in comparison to the throng awaiting us at Tsukiji market on the day before New Year’s Eve.

Tsukiji market was supposed to have left us by now, but hasn’t, because its new home is not quite ready. I also imagine the original architects of the scheme have, in a Brexit-like fit of remorse, lost enthusiasm for the move. In any case, Tsukiji is with us for a little while longer, a fact that both Japanese and tourist gourmets sought to take advantage of in the last gasp of 2016.

Have you ever been propelled forward without any help from your arms or legs? This was the feeling that day, like a salmon rushing inexorably upstream. Have you ever been hit on the back by an old lady wielding an umbrella? I can now say I have, twice. Old Japanese ladies, freed from the societal constraints of having to make nice for 60+ years, like nothing better than to aggressively tap on the small of your back with their umbrella handle when they feel you aren’t moving as briskly as you should. So why put yourself through this? The answer is obvious.

Sea urchin buffet, walkway-side

If you have the fortitude and patience to stick out the career mosh-pitters and Japanese grannies, a feast awaits you anywhere you choose to walk. We started our breakfast with a couple of rice bowls at a spot tucked into the second floor off the walkway — a spot just like many others peppering Tsukiji that offer a choice between three types of bluefin tuna or five kinds of domestic uni.

Indeed, uni has become kind of a big thing: next to the kanimiso (crab innards) stand, another vendor grilling fist-sized meaty scallops topped with dollops of the stuff, rendering the chewiness of the scallops almost negligible. Yet another, making up for its dearth of sea urchin by serving up freshly shucked Japanese oysters the length of one’s hand, with nothing to season them but hope and greed. More uni, simply sliced open and served on ice with a spoon. Somewhat improbably, soft wah-wah mochi (cloud-like rice cakes) dusted with powdered sugar, stuffed with cream and topped with a single giant white strawberry. And always a place set aside to eat all these things, because walking while eating in Japan is so gauche.

But if you hate the state fair-ness of it all, there is also the actual, bona fide sushi bar. Like Bangkok and its wok cooks, every neighborhood in Japan has one: the eatery that considers itself a step above the rest, with a chef that rivals Kyubey’s. You seat yourself in front of the chef and your banana leaf, take what they offer to give you, dampen any expectations of American-style spicy tuna rolls, and for God’s sake, don’t ask for salmon (unless they are these gorgeous almost-eggs):

A morsel of almost-ikura, on a bed of sushi rice

Sushi is supposed to be the main event here, but a lot of times, it feels almost like an afterthought, like the rice at the end of a meal in Shanghai. The real soldiers that fight your battle against hunger for you are the appetizers: usually sashimi and then a parade of grilled or fried whatsits and whatnots, whatever is in season, whatever will impress. This is how I manage to encounter something new on every trip: one year, live baby fish, in season for only two weeks out of the year as the snows from the Japanese Alps thaw. Two years ago, I had cod sperm sacs grilled on a slab of Himalayan sea salt, an experience I repeated this time with my daughter:

There were more oysters, fresh, and a steamed kinki (orange roughy) in a Chinese-style sauce, but the most memorable thing for me was the sea cucumber — the meat of which was sliced and served in a ponzu sauce (anything in ponzu is delicious), the guts of which were dropped into very hot sake and drunken like Jagermeister shots at a frat party. This was a personal first.

Sea cucumber in ponzu

This is all heavenly, of course, unless you don’t like sushi. If you are my 6-year-old son, you don’t like it very much at all.

NO SUSHI