by | 12/29/2014 · 12:48 pm

Glutton Abroad: Weathering the holiday season in Germany

Deep-fried pork knuckle atop a mound of cooked cabbage at Augustiner brau Munchen in Berlin

Deep-fried pork knuckle atop a mound of cooked cabbage at Augustiner brau Munchen in Berlin

The only reason I go anywhere is for the food. I don’t think this should come as a surprise to anyone. It really is my only requirement. I mean, everyone has their “thing”: some people need bathrooms in their hotel rooms, or to see the most popular sights, or to get a proper grounding in the local history. I do not require even that. My only desire is to be properly fed, and by proper I don’t even mean for the food to be served on nice plates, in pleasant surroundings with decent servers. I mean the food must be proper. It must be cooked with some semblance of sincerity and even pride. It must say, I did this for you to enjoy, I did this just for you because I think it is good. Treat it accordingly. It’s one of the biggest acts of generosity, to do this for someone you don’t know and might not even like if you did.

Food that is meant for tourists doesn’t always say that. Sometimes it says, I just need to get through this shift. Four more covers and I’m done. Get out of my face as quickly as you can. Please. It seems to be the attitude that underlies a lot of the street food still in parts of the West, as something made with haste for people who don’t know any better and are in a hurry themselves. Food as fuel, eaten to live. That kind of food, I would rather not eat. To some, it makes me a difficult traveling companion.

Take the German Christmas market as an example. Full of people, food, drink and games, it would seem like the ideal place to take anyone with even an inkling of some joie de vivre.  For my part, I thought the Christmas market would be like Aor Tor Kor, but cold and with Christians. It turned out to be more like the Suan Lum Night Bazaar. And while that pleases most, normal people — tourists and Germans alike — there are only so many cups of gluhwein and eggnog to slog through, so many sausages in hot dog buns to consume, so many bites of flammkuchen and langos slathered in ham, cheese and sour cream to take before it all becomes an indiscriminate blur of sameness, all folded neatly under an all-encompassing cloak of German-ness. The culinary boundaries to Brandenburg, Thuringia, Bavaria all become blurred. This is what all Germans are, it says. Don’t look any further. It’s the same thing that Thais do: hiding behind the gilt-edged screen of culture, religion, green curry and smiles. You don’t have to work any harder, it all says. This is as far as you go.

A globally-beloved favorite: Nuremberg sausages at the Bratwurst House in Nuremberg

A globally-beloved favorite: Nuremberg sausages at the Bratwurst House in Nuremberg

It got me thinking about the tourist restaurant experience. To my mind, Bavaria is the German equivalent of Cantonese cuisine: the region from which the country’s most popular culinary exports hail. Everyone with even a passing knowledge of German food knows the sausages, the sauerkraut, the deep-fried pork knuckle, the potato soup and the light-as-a-feather dumplings that adorn every platter on every table ever set in the shadow of an Oktoberfest sign. It’s also the food that appears on nearly every “traditional German” restaurant on the road, from Berlin to Munich. One would think that this food is what all Germans eat, everywhere, regardless of whether they live in Stuttgart or Dresden.

Thai restaurant menus are the same — even in Thailand. While regional specialists shilling Isaan or Northern Thai do exist, it’s the rare Thai restaurant that is brave enough to leave off central Thai favorites like green curry, because that is what most people definitely like. It’s like presenting your best face to strangers at a party. Everyone sees your best face — your pad thai, your tom yum soup. It’s only the people who really want to who get to go further. Some day, I am hoping to return to Germany to get a peek at what’s underneath that mixed sausage platter.

Both veal and pork knuckles at Haxnbauer in Munich

Both veal and pork knuckles at Haxnbauer in Munich

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by | 12/12/2014 · 2:59 pm

Super chicken

The famous "gai super" at New Tiem Song

The famous “gai super” at New Tiem Song

There are a few things that I absolutely will not do, not even while in the pursuit of the culinarily fabulous. One of those things is eating with my hands. I absolutely loathe it. This is particularly strange for me, since a lot of Northern Thai and Isaan food involves sticky rice, which typically includes eating with one’s hands. The rice is rolled up into a little ball with the fingers and used to mop up whatever chili dip, soup or protein there is on your plate in a swift, neat little action called pun khao. The unfortunate thing about this is that all the crap that is on your hands — imaginary or real — ends up in your mouth. And that is really gross.

I know you are thinking, why don’t you wash your hands first then? which is something I do already. Or you could be thinking, but you stuff your face with potato chips and hot wings all day long, and aren’t bitching and moaning about getting your icky hand grossness all up in those tortilla chips heaving with guacamole. And this is true, mom! But it’s not the same as getting soft, soppy stuff all over your fingers. So, sorry Ethiopian restaurants and banana leaf curry stands.  I will never eat you the way you are meant to be eaten. I will always be asking for a spoon and fork. Because that is the way people should eat everything, always (except for potato chips, hot wings and tortilla chips with guacamole).

I like offal meats. You could even say I seek them out. I love kidneys, and sweetbreads, and liver, and grilled chicken gizzards sprinkled with sea salt. I don’t even mind brains, if they are battered and deep-fried, or grilled in a banana leaf. I enjoy shirako with ponzu sauce and a scattering of sliced chive, and I think a cube or two of congealed pig or chicken blood is the perfect touch for a great Thai noodle dish. That kind of thing doesn’t bother me at all.

Except when it comes to feet. Or anything with bones, pits or seeds in them, really. Because if I loathe eating with my hands, I absolutely HATE spitting anything out of my mouth. This is why I don’t eat mangosteens, and why I stay away from grapes, unless they’re seedless. The thought of regurgitating some little something that has to sit there as a reminder of all your salivary grossness is just unbearably vile to me. I would just rather swallow these things, if I can. This is probably why fishbones are so infuriating.

So chicken feet is a no-fly zone for me. It’s a shame, because the most important men in my life — Antonio Brown and Troy Polamalu (haha, jk) — really love them. It’s a street food dish called gai super (“super chicken”) which, when I first heard it, made me really excited because I thought it referred to either chicken wings or some sort of crispy, boneless chicken part, like deep-fried cartilage. Alas, it is a stewed mass of splayed, spidery chicken legs, plonked into a broth simmered from their cooking and accompanied by a mash of bird’s eye chilies.

Just another look at the same dish

Just another look at the same dish

The meat is supposed to be coaxed gently from the bones via the gentle suction usually meant for a milkshake through a straw, but HELL NAW. I’m sorry. I couldn’t do it. You can sue me now, or make me watch a Mark Wahlberg film. Instead, there was the broth, which was deeply chicken-y even without those gross-ass feet all over them, a slight twinge of coriander, and the metallic fire of a dozen pulverized chilies. All in all, it was MEH, unless you are really into the sort of masochistic task of getting those skimpy bits of flesh off of all those little bones. And some of you are like that, if the gigantic pile of toothpick-sized bones on my dad’s and husband’s plates are anything to go by.

So, no judgment. If you are headed to Dinsor Road close to the Chinese Swing, go over to New Tiem Song, which is the open-air shophouse across the street from Bangkok’s City Hall and only a couple of doors down from Mont Nom Sod — the wildly popular toast restaurant credited with being the first eatery to bring fresh milk to the Thai masses. Or, well, you could just go to Mont Nom Sod, and wait in a big long line with Thai teenagers for … toast. Either way, there is something awesome for you waiting on Dinsor Road, whichever way you choose to go.

 

 

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Filed under Asia, Bangkok, chicken, food, food stalls, Thailand

by | 11/28/2014 · 4:45 pm

Yen ta fo for h8ers

Yen ta fo with rice vermicelli at Thi Yen Ta fo Rot Ded

Yen ta fo with rice vermicelli at Thi Yen Ta Fo Rot Ded

I write a lot about yen ta fo. It is my absolute favorite Thai noodle dish. What’s not to love? An unlikely but irresistible melange of textures and flavors, from squidgy blanched morning glory stems, rubbery squid, soft fish balls, crackly bitter deep-fried garlic and the crunch of a deep-fried wonton — and that’s before you even get to the sauce. Because it’s the sauce that makes or breaks it all: tart with distilled vinegar and pickled garlic, resonating from the heady boom of fish sauce, underneath which the slightest whiff of sweet fermented red tofu emerges like the flash of a red sole on an expensive shoe … that is what yen ta fo is to me. A very delicate balance that, at its best, is the stereotypical juggling act illustrative of the best of Thai cuisine.

At its worst, yen ta fo is something different. It’s all sweet, all pink, all sickly and flat, like Hello Kitty. So it gives people the wrong idea, that these noodles are something for people with a sweet tooth, that there is no complexity to it at all, that it’s Britney Spears when you want to be rocking the egg noodle-PJ Harvey special. I always put this down to people going to the wrong places for yen ta fo. There is such a thing as the wrong place for a certain dish. In fact, that is the whole point of this blog.

I’ve been to Thi Yen Ta Fo (084-550-2880, open 11-22 except Mondays) more times than I can count. I mean, it was always closed those other times, but it feels like second nature to me now to just head automatically to that street corner on Mahachai Road, just down the street from Thipsamai and next to Jay Fai. Usually, I just find a shuttered cart with a sign bearing the vendor’s name. But just a few days ago, it was all systems go: an entire corner and then some, littered with packed tables and the sort of flustered, harried waiters you would see at your nearest Fuji or Crystal Jade restaurant.

For a soup noodle dish that is so often dismissed as “those terrible pink noodles”, yen ta fo sure seems popular here. But there is a very good reason for this. When our bowls come to the table, it’s less about the pink sauce and fermented tofu and more about the veritable blanket of chopped chilies that coats our food like a suit of armor. If there was ever any doubt in my mind that a typical Thai fix-it involves just throwing a bunch of chilies on something to make it taste better, that doubt has long since been blasted from my head by the smoke coming out of my ears after a bite of these noodles. This stuff is SPICY. It changes the whole flavor profile of the dish. Here, it’s all tart and fiery, even slightly metallic. It’s yen ta fo for people who don’t like yen ta fo very much.

There’s other stuff too. The immense popularity of this place has necessitated the incorporation of a second cart, this one offering fried noodle dishes like guaythiew kua gai (pan-fried rice noodles with chicken and egg). That’s not to mention the pork satay place that also serves the customers here, and the other soup noodles offered by Thi, like the just-as-spicy tom yum egg noodles with fresh basil and minced pork:

Bring your tissues

Bring your tissues

I can’t say I don’t like these noodles, because that wouldn’t be true. Would they be my favorite yen ta fo? No, because they are barely yen ta fo at all. Would I go back? Absolutely. With a pack of tissues. And some Tums.

 

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Filed under Asia, bamee, Bangkok, food, food stalls, noodles, Thailand, yen ta fo

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