Bangkok Glutton

Kanom jeen and green curry at P’Pom

Some dishes are inextricably linked with places, like croissants and Paris or pizza and Naples. For Phuket, the dish that most likely springs to mind is the Mon-style rice noodle known as kanom jeen, served at curry stalls throughout the island from the early hours of the morning. Just as mainland Thais expect to start their days with something like a bowl of eggy congee and a deep-fried cruller or two, anyone in Phuket unlucky to find themselves up at 7 in the morning will typically go for a plate of these noodles instead of rice, slathered in a crab or nam ya (minced fish) curry, a gaeng tai pla (spicy soup of fermented fish entrails) or, at the very least, a green curry studded with cubes of congealed chicken blood and tart little Thai eggplants.

It would make sense to love this dish for its rich bright curries or even the bounce of the rice noodles. But I love this dish for the treasure trove of stuff that I can adorn my plate of curry noodles with, both pickled and fresh:

So many options! And it’s not even counting the hard-boiled eggs that one, if one were not to tragically discover they were allergic to eggs, should happily chop into little pieces and sprinkle over their plates like Parmesan cheese (which one might also be allergic to). There are the pickled garlic bulbs, and pickled bean sprouts, pickled mustard greens and even, if you are lucky, Chinese-style pickled turnips that you normally find on your egg noodles or rice porridge. And because it’s the South, there are fresh mango and cashew tree leaves, long beans, chunks of cucumber and pineapple, basil and mint, pennywort, stink beans still in their pods to distract your tastebuds and fresh Thai eggplants to cut the spiciness of your curry. Dried tiny fish, just because. Fresh bean sprouts if you’re greedy. It is hard to practice restraint, when everything is already there.

I like to try out a different kanom jeen place every time I come to Phuket, given that it’s a local thing and all. On my last trip to the island, I went to P’Pom, where the rice noodles are not the only popular thing on the menu — there is also a highly-praised hor mok (steamed seafood curry), including one with fish eggs, like a Thai-style (and very fishy) chawanmushi.

So how to get to this place? It’s hard to explain, plus I am directionally challenged, so I’ll just leave it to Google:

https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!1m18!1m12!1m3!1d3952.0784717208385!2d98.3719103147787!3d7.886858994318043!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!3m3!1m2!1s0x0%3A0x0!2zN8KwNTMnMTIuNyJOIDk4wrAyMicyNi44IkU!5e0!3m2!1sen!2suk!4v1472806058361” target=”_blank”>

Jay Fai’s famous tom yum soup, cooling on the countertop

Let me tell you what bothers me the most about Adam Sandler’s movies. No, it’s not the ingrained misogyny. It’s not the fact that this dude is transparently enjoying a holiday while pretending to “work” at the same time, all on someone else’s dime. Hey, it’s not even Rob Schneider. It’s the music.

I believe “Adam Sandler” is a musical fraud. He is not the real-life Adam Sandler. The guy in the “Wedding Singer” who claims to have been “listening to the Cure a lot lately”? I don’t believe him — unless it’s “Sunday I’m in Love” played over and over again 1,000 times a day, because real-life Adam Sandler seems exactly that cheesy and annoying. That guy, who loves Van Halen and Billy Idol, but not, like, White Lion or Ratt like people who actually lived during the 1980s, because his taste is so superior to everyone else’s, even when everyone’s taste at the time was notoriously terrible. Real-life Adam Sandler looks exactly like that guy in junior high school who would make fun of you in your Damned t-shirt, confuse the Clash with the Cult, and question your sexuality for listening to Depeche Mode. He would have worn a mullet and listened to Bad Company and had an AC/DC poster in his bedroom, just like everyone else. Only after the fact, in the safety of his college dorm room, can he begin wearing white K-Swiss sneakers with little ankle socks and boxer shorts and proclaim his affinity for the Smiths. All of a sudden he’s deep and cool, and not the trash-talking metalhead who tormented you on the bus ride home because “SKID ROW RULES!” You know who I’m talking about. The guy on the side of strength, until he didn’t have to be. The guy who never had to pay his dues. That guy is Adam Sandler.

I feel the same skepticism when I see something like Netflix’s “Stranger Things”. Don’t get me wrong, because I loved “Stranger Things” and thought almost every single detail, from Barb’s glasses to Steve’s BMW, was great. But give me a break with the older brother’s music. So he’s so cool that he indoctrinates his brother with the wonders of the Clash and the glories of their second-most-overplayed song, eventually turning it into a major musical focal point of the story? Is everyone in this po-dunk town really that cool? Does everyone remember the 1980s differently from me? Where is the Def Leppard? Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam? TAYLOR DAYNE? Because if I had to suffer through “Love Will Lead You Back” 800,000 times every day, someone else must have, too. Or are we just denying this ever happened to us? Sweeping this under the rug? Who, in 1985, would have said that people would remember Echo & the Funnymen 30 years later, that nostalgia would make it cool to play a snorefest like “Nocturnal Me” on a television show and enshrine it as a classic?

“Best Restaurants” lists are also attempts to pick out classics, but for food and in real time. That makes it doubly hard. So it didn’t surprise me when the Michelin Guide awarded two Singapore hawker stalls their very own stars, or that there is even a Singapore Bib Gourmand Guide at all, because $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. Also, you know, street food is currently having a “moment”, I hear. Did you guys know that? That’s what all the kids are saying these days. Street food is “in” right now. What’s that? You think it smells like a ploy, like pandering to millennials, like Hillary Clinton claiming to carry hot sauce in her purse at all times a la Beyonce? Well, I say, how cynical of you! Oh, and did I mention $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$?

Why, I’m hearing through the grapevine that Michelin might even come to Thailand! E-GAD. Finally, an outsider can validate/nullify our own food choices. How have we ever eaten before now? And what should we do until then? THE SUSPENSE IS UNBEARABLE (she says, hitting herself in the head with a broken chopstick slathered in artisanal Sriracha sauce). What do you think should be considered for a star? What do I think? Oh, I am all a-flutter, like Tom Brady in a restaurant when his chef has the day off.

Honestly, I can only think of two (street food) places I would think about. One of them is this:

Bamee Sawang, biotches

because, even though I can’t eat them anymore, the egg noodles here are probably the best anywhere in the country. But maybe Chinese-style noodles are covered? Maybe we should be thinking of a tom yum noodle place, even though most tom yum broth is too sweet and adulterated with condensed milk? (she says, brandishing her AARP card)

The second one is my favorite, even though we have a complicated relationship, she and I. Some days she likes me and some days she doesn’t. That uncertainty makes my trips to her shophouse very exciting.

Jay Fai at work

It’s not easy to stir-fry noodles. It’s not easy to be a “made-to-order” (aharn tham sung) cook. It’s often thankless and always draining. But Jay Fai (who is either 70 or 77, depending on what day you ask her) has managed to stay one of the best in the country — if not THE best — through sheer will, ego and a dedication to top quality ingredients that is reflected in her sky-high prices. If you come here, you must pay obeisance, if not outright acknowledge that she is the best, because she is absolutely willing to dismiss your sorry ass. After all, she used to serve abalone gravy noodles to then-Prime Minister Thaksin at 10,000 baht a plate. What is she doing wasting time with us jokers?

So, who would you propose? Quite frankly, I’ll be happy with any Thai place that ends up in the guide, because any acknowledgement of great Thai food is a plus in my book. I’m totally serious. Even if it ends up being something like S&P, I will be behind it 100 percent. Now, I am the bully on the bus telling you what to like. Because Thai food rules.

Chicken rice at Nai Thong

It started with the insomnia. Sleeping two, maybe three hours a night, only to wake up to a still-dark room and a dispiriting “2:00” or even “12:30” on the clock. I started binging on sleep products. I did acupuncture, reiki, kinesiology, any treatment that could possibly help. My days went on like before. But I began dreading the sunset and the sinking feeling of disappointment that awaited me every time I opened my eyes. It wasn’t until I had a panic attack at my friend’s Thanksgiving party when I started thinking that there could be something really wrong.

It was, of course, psychological. I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression and put on Prozac. But my parents always suspected it could be something else — something hormonal. Something like menopause. I mean, once you head down that avenue, why not go all the way? So I met with a doctor in Bangkok Hospital Chinatown who took vials of my blood, sent away to Germany to be analyzed for whatever it was that could be making me batshit crazy.

I went away to the States to stuff myself with spinach-artichoke dip, tub-sized salads doused in blue cheese dressing, hamburgers capable of feeding a family of four and enough Buffalo wings to sink a miniature Titanic. This turned out to be a good decision. Because when I came back, Dr. Tanupol — spry, slim, blessed with the skin of a 10-year-old — told me that not only did I have an overactive adrenal gland and a creaky thyroid working at 50 percent capacity … but that I was also cursed with a host of food allergies that even Gwyneth Paltrow could be jealous of.

The list, helpfully alphabetized for my convenience, is long and even more insane than I am. Gluten, wheat, rye, barley, oats, spelt, wild rice. Cow’s milk, goat’s milk, sheep’s milk, and mare’s milk. Almond, asparagus, cashew nut, plaice. Eggs. Coconut and cherry. Heartbreakingly, mustard seed. I was to try to stay away from these items for six full months, until my body readjusted to the new battery of supplements he would prescribe me, to be taken daily and nightly, the hero to my wack wimmin’s issues because wimmin always be going cray. Only after six months could I be retested to see if I could really eat again. “You are Asian. You should just eat Asian food,” he said, forgetting that there is egg or coconut milk in almost everything worth eating.

Let’s be real: there is no way I can stay on this diet. Because PIZZA. PASTA. PIE. OTHER FOODS THAT DON’T BEGIN WITH P. Watching other people eat the food I want to eat is an interesting exercise in vicarious experience, aspirational living, and envy tempering. Like meditation, it’s a good mental exercise. At least that is what I tell myself.

So what to I do until then? Of all the street food that I could be eating, chicken rice falls squarely onto the top tier of things that I love (yes I know that soy sauce has gluten, but in the words of Donald Trump, give me a break). It’s a  Chinese-inspired street food dish found all over Asia, but no one quite does it like Thailand: the gingery, chili-spiked sauce, the fatty sheen on the rice, the tender hunks of poached chicken, the gleaming cube of blood. And the soup — it’s the soup, nowadays, that seems to set Thai chicken rice apart. Making a soup that will blow your socks off is the new black, and far easier than inventing yet another sauce to serve atop your chicken rice.

At Nai Thong (982/30 Soi Sathupradit 58, 02-682-4253, branch on Soi Soonvijai, 02-716-5664) the soup is a bracing, aromatic splash of lemon, grounded with a simmered slice of winter melon. It’s a soup eager to claim all the attention for itself, not content to play second fiddle to some tranches of boiled poultry. This would normally be annoying to me, because I delight in being annoyed by things. But not today. Not right now.