Actually, I don't know what "Thai food" is...

I am feeling really guilty.

In my last post I wrote that I don't really like Thai food. Which is stupid for a bunch of reasons...

First, it's stupid because it makes it sound like I didn't eat anything yummy on our trip to Bangkok. In fact, I tasted many, many scrumptious things, on top of the phenomenal mango with sticky rice at Ban Khun Mae.

One of the things I loved about Thailand was that Thais eat all of the time! Everywhere you go at any time of day there is a little cart on the corner with a delicious treat. Things like...



Fresh-squeezed tangerine juice. It doesn't taste like orange juice. It tastes like nectar. Pretend you're a humming bird when you drink this stuff. It's pure, gorgeous natural fruit sugar.



Sour Isaan sausage. Filled with fermented pork and soft sticky rice, with the kind of tang you get in a good salami. It's fat and roasty and tantalizingly two feet away from one's sniffer walking down the street. Irresistible.



Rice custards. Delicate, salty-sweet, molten-hot mellowness, cooked to order on a big cast-iron griddle -- with just a smidge of savory green onion. Great day-dreaming food.



Plantains with fresh shredded coconut and sugar. Slippery, slightly meaty plantains. Light, fluffy julienned coconut. A coating of coarse, crunchy sugar. An incredible texture experience for only10 bht ($0.30).

Besides yummy street snacks, we also we ate a super-luxurious lunch at Sra Bua by Kiin Kiin in the new Siam Kempinski Hotel, which someone recommended to us as "the best restaurant in Thailand."

My snout was so deep in my plate (or plates), I don't remember what E was eating, but the highlight of my meal was this frozen red curry with lobster.



Cold, smooth ice cream, crunchy roasted cashews, delicate flesh, and airy foam. Oh, and shallots! I kept tasting the curry ice cream, which was unequivocally sweet, and expecting my palate to reject it -- like garlic ice cream or something -- but the flavor was exactly right and the ice cream format seemed perfectly natural.

That was after this surprising, delicate beet foam and fish dish...



...and followed by this banana cake and caramel sauce served on a large piece of bark.



It was a fascinating and strange meal (ice cream twice at lunch?). I kept thinking "What am I eating?"

This kind of goes to the heart of the matter about liking or not liking "Thai food."

If you ask Chef McDang, who was born into the Thai Royal Family and just published a very beautiful book called The Principles of Thai Cookery, I wasn't eating actually eating Thai food at Sra Bua.



Why? Well, to start with, the chef wasn't even Thai! Sra Bua is a sister restaurant to Kiin Kiin, run by chef Henrik Yde-Andersen, who also has a restaurant in Copenhagen. Painfully, Kiin Kiin is one of only two Michelin-starred Thai restaurants in the world. The other -- Nahm in London -- is headed by an Australian (David Thompson). Ay yi yi.

McDang points out in his blog that, in his meal at Sra Bua, he was served a mayonnaise emulsion (no emulsions in Thai food) and a fresh baby carrot (sorry, no carrots in Thai cuisine) stuck in a planter pot of dirt. Much more important than that, McDang says, is that these farang chefs don't seem to recognize the importance of rice to the Thai way of eating:

"Our words for rice and food (khao) are the same."

"When dining, Thais always eat 'family-style' -- many dishes are shared by all at the table, communally. The only individual thing about our eating is our personal plates of rice."

"The fork and spoon are well-suited to Thai food: the fork shepherds the food onto the spoon, which is then used to lift the food to the mouth."

"To get a real snapshot of what Thai food is about, you have to understand the concept of 'kluk': mixing your different dishes into your rice with your fork and spoon, getting your own personal measures of each dish..."

(The Principles of Thai Cookery, p. 24)

This was really interesting to me because when I sat down and tried to identify why I didn't like Thai cuisine, my gut-level feeling (literally) was that it's too harsh. It's so sweet, spicy, raw, and rich, sometimes all in one dish! My body just viscerally recoils even when my taste buds rejoice. Well, duh. You're not supposed to eat it straight. According to McDang, in Central Thai cuisine (what's best known throughout the world), "regular rice (khao suay), eaten with a fork and spoon, forms the basis for each meal." (p. 81)

Like so many Westerners whose minds were infected by Atkins, I avoid white rice like it's rat poison. So when E and I hoof it off to a Thai restaurant in the States or here in HK, we order a bunch of robustly-flavored dishes -- like green chicken curry with rich coconut milk and bitter eggplants and spicy, fishy, raw, sweet green papaya salad, etc. -- barely cutting our entire meal with a forkful of rice. This is not the way to do it, apparently. You need some rice to digest, and enjoy, the food.

Do you think the folks at Michelin know this?

Last night E and I read John Colapinto's 2009 article "Lunch with M: Undercover with a Michelin inspector" in The New Yorker.

In the article, the anonymous inspector repeatedly underscores the technical nature of her work. Inspectors rate every dish and ingredient on quality of products, mastery in the cooking, technical accuracy, balance of flavors, and creativity of the chef. She says,

"It’s just technical. I mean, cooking is a science, and either it’s right or it’s wrong. And that’s something that’s very objective. Either a sauce is prepared accurately—or it’s not."

I wonder if Michelin inspectors tasting Thai food know whether the pastes underlying each dish they try are prepared accurately. I wonder if they know the concept of 'kluk' and are mixing flavors in each spoonful when they judge whether sauces are balanced. Hmm.

According to McDang, eating Thai food in a Western way isn't eating Thai food.

A dangerous dream

Thailand has never been on my list of places to visit. I usually gravitate toward countries with fabulous art museums that are easy (for me at least) to get around: France, Austria, Germany, Spain... And many years ago I read Alex Garland's book The Beach which made Thailand sound like a backpacker-infested spring break destination.

Also, I don't really like Thai food. (Gasps of horror!) That's right. I don't really like Thai food.

BUT...

Last week in Thailand I ate some of the best food I've ever tasted in my life: mango with sticky rice at Ban Khun Mae in Bangkok.

BKM is one of those restaurants that has worked out classic recipes to a science. They have little stations right at the door where you can see them preparing signature dishes. A bit like the street vendor carts you see nestled on every available square of sidewalk all over Bangkok. It's a touristy setup, but it's also very effective at selling the dishes.

Whoever is running the mango and sticky rice station is worth their weight in gold. There was a large pile of mangoes in the window, and it was as if someone was perfectly psychically attuned to their ripening. As if at the instant I ordered it, they plucked the fruit that was about to reach its zenith of sweetness and quickly dispatched it with a machete. Then, with a judicious eye they put the perfect amount of warm (not hot), sticky, slightly sweet, slightly salty, coconut-creamy friggin heaven next to it.

The mango tasted like nectar of the gods. I am not exagerrating. It had that perfect bell-like sweetness. Bing...ing...ing. Wow. With just a hint of tartness to keep things interesting. Meanwhile the texture was exactly at the cusp of firm and custardy. Oh my God. One bite of this heaven combined with the warm, salty-sweet, chewy goodness of the rice.

I was in rapture. Really. It was kind of embarrassing.

It undoubtedly helped that I was in a good mood after napping on an enormous rattan couch in the 77 degrees F weather and gentle breeze by the black infinity pool on the ninth floor of our hotel.

And it undoubtedly helped that we were chilled out about the $150/night including tax and breakfast that we were paying for our five-star one bedroom suite in the heart of Bangkok during high season.



Oh, wait, wait, wait...maybe it was because I was so delighted by all of the beautiful fresh flowers I had seen all over the city. Especially the gorgeous tribute crafted entirely from flowers that I saw at the Wat Arun temple.

I am certain that it was also because I was moved every time someone "wai-ed" me. It never seemed like an off-hand gesture. It always felt like a sincere show of respect and goodwill. It was like balm after months of..ahem...abruptness from people in Hong Kong.

Oh, and did you know that top quality health care in Thailand costs less than half (sometimes a quarter) what it does in the U.S.?



Obviously, I could go on and on about Thailand's charms.

So why not pick up and move there...like right now?

The traffic. Actually, "traffic" doesn't cover it at all. I won't go into it, but suffice it to say that getting anywhere takes much, much longer than you ever imagined and arriving at your intended destination is not always guaranteed or worth the effort.

Then there are the *other* expats who flock to Thailand for the incredibly cheap vacations, food, and uh...ladies? I think that this guy is representative of some of the best of the West that you'll find in Thailand.

There is an interesting, and apparently common, problem with moving to Thailand. Expats of the right persuasion think they're going to drop out and spend a few years living in paradise on $4,000 (as two English kids E met traveling had done). But once you're in Thailand, blissing out, doing nothing, spending all your money...if you ever want to come back...well, you haven't done anything professionally and you don't have any money.

A very astute blog, Stickman Bangkok, says:

You really do need to try and keep busy while in Bangkok. With the Thai's relaxed attitudes towards most things, the cheap costs and especially the heat, it's just so easy to fall into a very relaxed lifestyle where you are actually doing very little. It is very easy to fall into the trap of spending your days in a relaxing, stress free manner but really, you are both doing and achieving nothing. I know some people who have gone to Thailand with plenty of money, have fallen into a sedentary lifestyle, have hit the bottle, put on weight and blown a lot of money. Most of them have gone on to regret the experience. All over Asia, but especially in Thailand, Westerners end up here because, if you have a bit of money, life is easy here. Be careful!

Wow, that's way too much wisdom to take in one bite.