Bangkok Glutton

What I’m always thankful for: nam ngiew in Chiang Rai

I’d been keeping a list for days. It detailed all the symptoms I’d been experiencing, but read like a litany of generalized misery. “Tingling spread from hands and feet to legs, arms and face (since Nov 4).” “Muscle twitching in legs and left arm (at night).” “Difficulty sleeping (since Sunday).” “Lightheadedness when standing (2 weeks).” “Frequent thirst (since Thursday).””Soreness in left index finger (Friday).” “Stiffness in right thumb (Sat).”

Like a third grader giving a book report, I would dutifully read my symptoms to my doctor, who would dutifully jot them down. Other doctors got involved. They got the same report. Such was their delicacy that it took me a full week to figure out that they all thought I was crazy.

Brains are tricky. They tick along with the occasional twinge, but usually pretend to be under our control. Until they stop. They coax twitches and pains out of nooks and crannies and bend your reality to the shapes of their own whims. Unable to pretend we are our own any longer, the things we once care about start to turn remote and fade away. I struggled to find things to read and listen to. I started to eat for convenience.

Perhaps this is unusual for a self-professed “food writer”, but I actually don’t read most food writing. A lot of it is clubby, insular, self-satisfied. It is so frequently smug. It is the writing equivalent of listening to Justin Bieber: pretending to some genuine feeling beyond supreme complacency, confident in the knowledge that our approbation, our acceptance, is inevitable. If you charge me with writing this out of envy, it is very true. I — who must now remind herself to be in the moment at all times, who must remember that she is surrounded by the people she loves — I envy these people and their ability to rest easily within themselves.

Jeffrey Steingarten was the reason why I wanted to write about food. His writing first introduced me to Japanese beef so tender it could be cut with a fork, what it would feel like to butcher your own pig, who Alain Ducasse was, many-coursed French meals that tested the boundaries of what could be accomplished in a kitchen. Sure, he could be pleased with himself once in a while. He wrote for Vogue, after all. But what set him apart was his charm, his restlessness, and the overarching curiosity that informed nearly everything he wrote. He had to know how everything worked, and the best way to do it, no matter what the cost. And he was rarely truly satisfied. I loved that about him. If you are a food writer, I don’t care if you are BFF with David Chang or the best cook in your apartment building. But the endless questing, the need to consume the knowledge as much as the food, that is different.

None of us asked to be here; burdened with this knowledge, we navigate our lives with varying degrees of ease. All of the people I admire are aware of this, and have the generosity of spirit to allow for how difficult it can be. We all have our strategies for how to make our way through the world, like living our lives for others, or immersing ourselves in our faith or our work, or, like Jeffrey Steingarten, searching for the perfect Everything. When we forget how to live our lives, we can only live by example.

So this year, I am thankful for Jeffrey Steingarten. I am thankful for my friends and family. I am thankful for the people I listen to and read. I am thankful for freshly baked biscuits slathered in homemade apple butter, and pie crust straight out of the oven, and bolting down a Northern Thai breakfast of thinly sliced eggplant flavored with the juice from pulverized black field crabs and many, many handfuls of sticky rice eaten so quickly that your throat hurts with the pain of it. Thank you, everyone, for being here. Thank you for whatever the future may bring.

Chicken on the grill at Chicken Guy on Thonglor Road

Five years ago, I wrote about trying to shed by post-baby fat on this very blog. It’s now 2015, my son is in kindergarten, and I am still in the same place I was in when I started Bangkok Glutton, except now I’m older. Struggling with your weight and all the stuff that goes with it (knee problems, health issues, nagging from your mom) while staying an avid fan of all things edible is a chore even at the best of times. When you’re stressed out from all sorts of other stuff, it’s nearly impossible — unless you go all-out and become one of those people who detail to you every single thing they’ve ingested that day in lieu of actual conversation. I am now one of those people. You can make like my friends and family and stop paying attention now.

My new trainers-for-a-month, Dan and Dave, look after my nutrition and my physical fitness, respectively. Not surprisingly, nutrition is the very thing I have been struggling with for the past five years. Dan tells me that, in order to succeed in my goals, I need to cut out a few things from my diet. Those things are: caffeine. Alcohol. Sugar, including fructose and honey. Grains, including rice, noodles and bread. Legumes. Grain-fed beef. Pork. Duck. Any oil not coconut or olive. And anything made by anyone else. Half of my plate should be vegetables, and half should be protein. I can eat nuts and seeds but lay off the tofu. I should become BFF with lemon water. This is all so my body will begin burning my vast stores of fat, instead of the sugar that I have been living off of for the past 43 years. Before every meal, I envision the face of my trainer Dan, who thinks eating canned tuna mixed with wasabi is a treat: “Do I need this [insert bread-related item here]? Will it help me reach my goal?”

I end up documenting everything obsessively in a food diary. I become unbearable company, which is okay, since all my meals are at home anyway. I read cookbooks at night before bed, fantasizing about food. In the mornings when I wake up and take a sip of my hot lemon water, I literally want to die. I tell Paleo Robbie, whom I’m interviewing for a “clean eating” story, all about my problems within the first five minutes of meeting him. He gives me a strange look. “Some people don’t do well on ketosis,” he says. I decide that I will use that excuse for the rest of my life. Sorry for barreling into you on the Skytrain. Excuse me for cutting in line at the bank. I don’t do well on ketosis.

However, there comes a time when one must do as one does, because that is what they are pretending to do for a living. Like eat street food. It’s a shame that street food is LITERALLY THE DEVIL for this diet. It is full of delicious things, like noodles and rice and fried stuff. It probably has MSG. It most definitely has soy sauce and/or fish sauce. But life must go on. I try to compromise where I can, and that means a vastly reduced set of dishes: namely, gowlow (noodle soups without the noodles) and beef meatballs on a stick without the sauce, baby.

Bamee asawin “gow low” at Bamee Gua on Langsuan

But the very best thing for diet street food is Isaan. It’s all the meat of course, and the plate of fresh veggies that usually accompanies your meal. The fact that everything is grilled helps too.

Marinating meat ready for the grill at Jay Dang on Petchburi

Salt-encrusted, lemongrass-and-lime leaf-stuffed fish at Jay Dang

But if you must maintain tunnel vision in order to keep focus, like me, it’s best if the vendor serves only meat and nothing else to tempt you back into sugar-burning mode. That’s where the Chicken Guy on Thonglor Road (between Thonglor sois 17 and 19) comes into play. His stand is literally a grill set into the sidewalk, spattered liberally with grease from the chicken thighs he cooks daily. The thighs are juicy and lightly flavored, perfect for days when you need something from the streets in order to maintain the illusion that you haven’t tipped over entirely into insufferable gitface land.

Chicken guy is open in the mornings until he sells out.

Sour curry with deep-sea pomfret and young coconut

One of the things I love about Thailand is that great food recommendations can come from anywhere. I found out about Luk Than (Sirinat National Park, http://portal.dnp.go.th) from my husband’s lawyer, who, while not a Phuket local, seems at least as well-versed on the island’s culinary scene as he is on the ins and outs of Thai property law. When we went together the first time, sharing a fire-breathing gang som (sour curry), pad sator (stink beans stir-fried in shrimp paste with fresh shrimp) and nam prik goong sod (fresh shrimp chili dip), I stubbornly neglected to document the meal, leaving my phone at home because I had not discovered this restaurant myself. I made sure not to make this mistake a second time.

Luk Than is meant to form part of a “food court” located around 100 m down the road after you enter Sirinat National Park (just turn right and drive along the beach for about 3 minutes). And it is still part of a food court, if “food court” can also mean a bunch of closed and shuttered places that nobody goes to, plus Luk Than. Helping things along, park authorities have added a carved-wood sign for Luk Than in Thai along the main road, in case you need extra help.

The menu is all in Thai, but there might not be any need for it anyway: it’s all Phuket cuisine’s greatest hits. There’s a gang som you can have with your choice of protein and vegetable (this time we chose pomfret and young coconut), a collection of chili dips, and a whole bunch of stir-fried greens. Not wanting to miss out on anything, we ordered everything that caught our eye, and did not find ourselves regretting anything save the size of our pitifully inadequate stomachs.

The sour curry — strong, pungent, devoid of coconut milk — is known as gang som in the south, but is referred to as gang lueng (yellow coconut milk-free curry) in Bangkok, due to its inclusion of turmeric (gang som in Bangkok is actually a central Thai dish, milder and sweeter than the feral southern version and made sour from the inclusion of tamarind juice). Amid the vicious, chili-flecked dregs of the soup lurked two thick tranches of soft pomfret, buried beneath jagged shards of young coconut meat, cut big enough to show off the tenderness of the fruit. One slurp of the sour broth made metallic from the chilies and you knew you were in for it — not a “Nightmare on Elm Street”-type pain, where a malicious Freddy Kruger chases you down the road with chili fingers. No, this level of spice was inexorable and unforgiving, the “Terminator” of Thai food, not stopping until you are weeping and wiping the sweat from your brow. Of course, it was delicious.

There were other things too. There was a nam prik goong sieb (dried shrimp chili dip), the inevitable Phuket favorite, and a creamy lon (coconut milk-rich chili dip) of salted fish and fresh crab, both accompanied by a raft of fresh vegetables like raw stink bean still in the pod, bulbous Thai eggplant, and fresh white turmeric.

Salted fish and crabmeat lon with veggies

There were also tiny deep-fried fish (pla sai) that had to be plucked like harpstrings from their bones, eaten with the hands to save one’s brow from furrowing. Stir-fried mieng leaves glossy with oil and scrambled egg. Shrimp sauteed in garlic and black pepper. Squid, cooked quickly with salted egg yolk, onion, scallions and big, mild chi-fa chilies. It was, dare I say it, far more tender than the versions I’d had in Malaysia.

Stir-fried squid in salted egg

Of course, no meal is complete without kua kling, the Southern Thai stir-fry of meat cooked in a paste of spices that skirt the line between fiery goodness and abject pain. Here, the meat is sliced instead of minced, coated in a marinade that seems to include hefty doses of turmeric and lime leaves and rendered even more dangerous with an added shot of young galangal, which only serves to amplify the chilies — turning it up to “11”, so to speak.

Pork kua kling

Making our way to the parking lot as our ears rang from the food, my husband said it was lucky we had discovered a place that truly seemed to be a “hidden gem” — a term you hear often but, like “icon” or “legendary”, has since lost most of its meaning. It was agreed that mild success, enough to keep you going in a deserted food court, was a good thing, while too much success (the kind that forces you to cater to a legion of nameless faces) could end up being as bad as no success at all. Luk Than managed to toe that line. “Let’s not tell anybody about this place,” his friend agreed.