Bangkok Glutton

Today’s text from my friend James:

I lol’ed in a taxi because it is true. There is a certain type of expat in Bangkok, who works hard and is good at his job, but is also unrelentingly miserable, eyes fixed on a future that will inevitably not involve Bangkok. This makes them turn to different outlets into which they can funnel all that energy and desire, and, since many of these expats are also terribly wholesome, those outlets are usually Type A competitive things that involve sports. Like Crossfit.

I know about this, because I was a Lonely Expat in Tokyo. I didn’t want to do the Lonely Tokyo Man ritual, which usually involved pondering life over a cup of coffee and a cigarette at a Jonathan’s on a Friday night. This was also pre-Crossfit, and I could not afford to join a Tokyo gym. So my weekends were spent walking from my place into Shibuya, which would burn up most of my Saturday. It made me feel like part of the city, as disconnected and alone as I was. For those few hours, I was just like everybody else. It was an outlet. It was my Crossfit.

There are different ways to Crossfit. What I mean is, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Just because George RR Martin takes 10 years to finish a book and “Game of Thrones” is nearing the home stretch of its television run doesn’t mean I will soon have to do without Jon Snow and Jaime Lannister — there are umpteen fan theory sites, sites dedicated to comparing “Game of Thrones” with real historical events, sites on which wonderful people create alternate universes in which my second boyfriend Rhaegar Targaryen comes back to rule the Iron Throne. If there is a need for something, that need will eventually be met. Sometimes, all one has to do is to simply be patient.

Much was made of the demise of Sukhumvit Soi 38 (by me?) but in reality, it hasn’t really gone anywhere at all. No, really, even though a few buildings have been leveled and Daniel Thaiger has decamped to greener pastures. There is, and will always be, a need for affordable street food in Bangkok, even on Sukhumvit. Many of the usual suspects are still there, like this mango sticky rice vendor — only in slightly different locations:

You can still have this at Sukhumvit Soi 38

(Photo by Karen Blumberg)

Soi 38 has become less of a collection of street food vendors loosely congregated around the mouth of a soi and more like a Singapore-style hawker center, mostly located in the basement of Sutti Mansion (plus a few holdouts — mainly the OG Soi 38 vendors — who are now clumped further along into the soi). The “food court” looks like this:

Here, located in the sub-soi off of 38 which still hosts the fruit shake, mango sticky rice and pad Thai vendors, you can get: khao soy, Isaan food, Japanese favorites like ramen and curry rice, Chinese specialties, pork noodles, fish porridge, Chinese pork noodles (guay jab), chicken rice and egg noodles. Across from the pad Thai guy, Isaan-style salt-encrusted fish still grill on rotating skewers, pork satay still smoke over an open flame, and a new roti stall has set up shop. The seating is easy to get and it’s relatively cooler than out in the street. It’s also an altogether more manufactured, touristy experience. Beggars can’t be choosers, though, can they, especially when it comes to that mango sticky rice? (Longtime customers advise getting the mangos here and buying the sticky rice across the street at Khun Mae Varee.)

Old guard holdouts still cling to the main road, mostly along the left side of Soi 38. Beyond the other mango sticky rice vendor, there are still the yum (spicy salad), chicken rice, egg noodle, and Thai shaved ice dessert stands, plus pork trotter on rice (khao kha moo), more guay jab, more fish porridge (khao thom pla), fish noodles, and what are still my parents’ favorite Chinese-style egg noodles (bamee) in town. The only glaring omission is the Chinese-style congee (jok) place, which has moved to a sub-soi between sois 38 and 36. My advice: get to Soi 38 before stuff somehow reconfigures again and you are left searching for another Crossfit with which to sate your Sukhumvit street food needs.

Springy fishcakes at Krua Apsorn

Thai people are the ultimate food hipsters. If a place has gotten too much press, has become too popular, or is too convenient, it is automatically devalued in the eyes of the food hipster. That gets you less “food cred” (i.e. the mental points you give yourself for posting a photo of a hard-to-get culinary trophy on social media), therefore rendering it a waste of time. Nothing is more excruciating to the food hipster than posting a photo of an out-of-style dish (say, tuna tartare) from a passe, all-too-accessible eatery (think hotel restaurant). It would be the hipster equivalent of killing yourself, or professing your love for Imagine Dragons or Taylor Swift (unless you are being ironic, like wearing a sweatshirt with a picture of your cat on the front, or actually marrying your cat). (That said, I enjoyed Ryan Adams’ version of “Bad Blood”. I AM NOT ENDORSING TAYLOR SWIFT, signed, hipster).

I am too old and fat to be a hipster, yet — like every other Thai — I otherwise fit into the basic definitions of the “food hipster”. To the Thai food hipster, if more than 10 people have heard of the food place you are raving about, then “everyone already knows about it”. The breath you have used in talking about it has already been wasted, stealing oxygen that would have otherwise been successfully utilized by someone else. What you have just done is useless, and, by extension, immoral. OMG PLEASE STOP TALKING ABOUT POLO FRIED CHICKEN, a thousand food hipster voices cry out in anguish. MY GRANDMA LIKES THAT PLACE. You don’t even have to be Thai to be a Thai food hipster. After I emailed someone a suggestion to try Jay Fai, the reply was “Isn’t that in the Lonely Planet guide?” (FEEL THE BERN).

I’ll admit it: I regularly eat at Krua Apsorn. The food is reliable, the service is fast, and some of their most popular dishes are my favorite renditions of that dish, anywhere. A case in point is the crabmeat and long bean stir-fry, a dish you will probably find on every table in the restaurant (alongside the cowslip creeper stir-fry, the green curry with homemade fish meatballs, and/or the pillbox-shaped crabmeat omelet):

You’ve probably had this before

Many, many legit Thai food lovers eat at one of the Krua Apsorn branches (on Dinsor Road, or preferably in Dusit) every day. But it’s not cool to say so. It’s like saying to a room of Williamsburg 25-year-olds that “hey, this Missy Elliot person is pretty good.” OK MOM.

It’s like being reliably good, easy to find, and comfortable to sit in (aka air-conditioning) are actually bad things that should be actively avoided. Food hipsters like to flirt with danger. Oh, the fried chicken is hand-foraged from a dumpster out in back? The oil in the wok hasn’t been changed since the vendor’s mother opened her doors in 1956? The restaurant is located on top of a tree in the Kanchanaburi jungle? These are all risks that true food-lovers are willing to take. Take the Ruenton Coffee Shop in the Montien Hotel in Bangkok, which appears to have been last renovated in the spasm of economic hedonism that accompanied 1980s Thailand. The food here is not only excellent, the service is efficient and the portions are BIG. Also, it is deserted.

Not just chicken rice: Ruenton’s yen ta fo

Perhaps the most naff place you could think of as a food hipster is the one that everyone in the world already knows about. Someplace like Blue Elephant, which even has a branch in London, that’s how well-known it is. Does this mean the food is something to turn your nose up at? I was so confident of having a decent meal there that I allowed my friend Susie to comp my lunch, so I can risk looking like I sold my soul for a deluxe multi-course meal of butterfly pea dumplings, warm duck salad, stir-fried stinkbeans in shrimp paste, a green curry, and a side of mango with sticky rice (it’s mango season after all).

Butterfly pea dumplings at Blue Elephant

This is probably the least food hipster-y thing I’ve done in a while (aside from lunch today, which was at Greyhound Cafe, come at me haterz) so I wanted to make sure I got my stomach’s worth.  Maybe next week I’ll be back to slurping beef blood noodles in an alley and risking malaria riverside as I down raw prawns plucked from the Mekong. Or maybe I’ll be eating hotpot for dinner at 5:30 at MK (it’s so healthy, you guys). There’s a whole city of food out there.

Crab egg nam prik at Jay Dum

One of my earliest memories was of the restaurant Aloha, located in the balmy paradise otherwise known as Youngstown, Ohio. It was the sort of place that served flaming pu-pu platters and just the thing to stand in as “Asian” food in an area starved for ethnic cuisine.  They would also give you a cocktail umbrella in your drink, even if it was something like a Shirley Temple. To my mind, that was the best thing about it. I saved my cocktail umbrella, a pink one, for weeks, keeping it in a drawer in a my desk to bring out at the most opportune moment.

Maybe a couple of months later, the opportune moment finally came. It had started raining heavily, and I was at home. I took out my umbrella and rushed out onto my apartment balcony, brandishing my pink umbrella over my head. Of course, the rain destroyed my umbrella in about 10 seconds flat. It was, up to that point, one of the most disappointing things to ever happen to me (SPOILER ALERT: I had yet to discover that Santa Claus didn’t exist). But what can you expect? I was, after all, only 23 years old.

I have since been hardened by the resentments and misunderstandings of my life into a miserable, cynical person. So when people suggest an old-style, locally foodie-famous restaurant for lunch, my first instinct is to shore myself up for the inevitable disappointment. Because that is what usually happens. There is the longstanding Thai-Chinese favorite on Rama IV Road that serves soggy fried chicken and salads slathered in mayonnaise in the name of nostalgia. The internationally-lauded open-air standby that purports to cook old-fashioned recipes even as they serve tom yum thickened with condensed milk. And all the places, born from the first flush of post-WWII prosperity, that have fallen by the wayside. Often, the eateries with grand reputations appear to be trafficking on their names, happy to slide into brand-stamped mediocrity. It’s not a great time for real retro either, at a moment when newer, shinier, splashier spots are opening every week.

Jay Dum, which is all the way in Patum Thani (Rangsit-Nakhon Nayok Rd Klong 10, 33/19 Moo 4, 02-546-1477, no reservations), is one such place with a grand reputation, but what sets it apart is that it is all the way in the middle of nowhere. So if you come here, you are really coming here, just to this restaurant, unless you are lost. My parents have been here enough times that they can say with authority that this day was better than that other day which was better than that other month, let’s not talk about that. I have only been here once. The specialty of the house is what the specialty of the house always seems to be, the grilled river prawn. It is central Thailand, after all.

Grilled prawns, of course

But it’s all that other stuff that really gets me, because it’s special in the way a really good destination restaurant is special. There are the thin slices of bitter melon half-buried in egg omelet and the stir-fried morning glory peppered liberally with green bird’s eye chilies. The springy fried fishcakes (tod mun pla) with a cucumber relish. Those same fish turned into green curry with meatballs — made by loads of meticulous beating, because using a blender would turn these balls crumbly when they’re supposed to fight you a bit in your mouth.

Fish meatballs in green curry

And then, there are the sautéed lotus stems, crispy and juicy and garnished with prawn legs (!) which is a first for me because, really, who wants to waste their time shelling those suckers? But my favorite of all, I have to say, is the crab egg chili dip, so thick with orange crab roe it would make you weep, and all tarted up with pickled baby onions.

If you ever find yourself in the neighborhood (why?) then by all means stop by without calling them first, because they don’t take reservations. But if you’re not in the neighborhood but have a hankering for fish in patty or ball form, and grilled river prawns in a place outside of Bangkok but not at the beach, you could do far, far worse than Jay Dum. You won’t be disappointed.