It’s been a few weeks since I’ve been in
Thailand. And as I’m writing this- I’m thinking about how many additional
weeks it’ll be from the time I start writing this to when I actually post this.
The day after I landed from Thailand, I started a new job in Chicago that
demands more of my time, energy, and concentration than any job most people
have ever fathomed. I literally think of ways to put one foot in front of
the other that will be more efficient than the last step I took just to shave a
few seconds off the time it takes to blow through my hefty prep list.
Besides laying down for the 5 hours of sleep I’ve been getting, I haven’t
actually stood still since landing from Bangkok- until now. It’ll take me
awhile to write about everything- at the same time I’m trying to document the
amazing time I’m having at my challenging new outpost. Wish me luck and
happy reads.
I ate at Benu on the layover through San Francisco
and if I hadn’t eaten in Thailand right after, I would have said it was the
best meal I’ve had in years. But after devouring the expanse of food I
discovered in Thailand, I can’t claim that statement anymore. I'd put the
duck laab I had down some alley in Bangkok up against any single dish on the
planet. At Benu, it’s not that it was the absolute tastiest food I’ve ever had
it was meticulously prepared, and everything was cooked perfectly too- but it
was eating something different. In both places I was coming
across uncommon flavors- and over the past few years of being immersed in the
food world, even the oddest offals have become all too familiar. But at
Benu, and then Thailand, all I ate was the unfamiliar. This way, even if
it wasn’t the best, it was the only. In my tear through the fine
dining scene in New York- nothing quite stirred the desire to cook like eating
the flesh of young coconut just pulled down from the tree. Now I know it’s not
just great food that excites me- it’s the unknown.
I landed at midnight and after being the air for
somewhere around 24 hours, I had no idea if it was morning night, if it was
time to drink beer, or drink coffee- but Emma met me at the gate with some
strange Thailand brew, so beer was the chosen elixer for my first 8 hours in
Thailand.
Armed with only a few phrases she thought useful
for survivial such as- “Chicken,” “Go Faster,” and “Handsome,” we sped into the
city.
As it turns out, I rarely resorted to Emma’s
survival phrases. I made it through the entire trip to Thailand by pointing at
food and just three phrases: Hello, Thank you, and Very Delicious. I never
found the need for other words.
Once we got into Abac, the area of the city Emma
lived in, I pit stopped us into the first noodle stand with steam rising form
it. I watched him dunk a basket of noodles into a cauldron of
unidentifiable boiling liquid…and went to sit down.
I was immediately struck by how little I could
understand about what was going on in front of me. I’ve always thought of food
and cooking as math: a common language spoken everywhere in the world. No
matter what kitchen I’ve landed myself in; Italy, Greece, or a new kitchen in
the states- however unfamiliar I was with my surroundings- I still knew how to
do the math of food. At least we still had that language in common. And while
I didn’t speak a lick of Thai, I thought I could stay afloat with that
commonality- but quickly I realized our math was different.
I didn’t really understand the adding and
subtracting I was watching in front of me. I didn’t understand the tools I was
looking at, the cooking processes, and I definitely did not understand
what I was smelling. As for the tastes…I couldn’t even begin to
comprehend them. The next 10 days were spent trying to wade my way through the
new galaxy of food I entered.
We were sitting on picnic tables outside of a
7-11. Not to eat there, but because in Bangkok it’s almost a sure fire
guess that where there’s a 7-11, there’s a food stand out front hawking
anything from duck noodles to fried frog skins, it all depends which corner you
round.
This one had rice noodles and I'm guessing a pork
broth. It was was outrageously good- piled with egg, chilis, lipstick red
pork. Oh…and intestines. Perfect. Just what I love stumbling across at 2
am in my soup.
I literred it with Nahm Prik and some fish sauce-
part of the cluster of items that lent themselves to every single table in
Thailand- street food or not. If this is what I could get my hands on at
2 am on- the potential for finding the best food in this hemisphere was great.
But I started off on the wrong foot. We went out
late…really late. My hangover was one for the record books. I’d seen the
sunrise in Bangkok before I’d seen the sunset. And when I woke up- I was
desperate to find recognizable food- either by smell or taste. I grabbed
a sandwich in hopes to keep something in my stomach, anything, but even the
sandwich didn’t pass the test.
I didn’t actually plan on ever eating something
that resembled American food even once this trip, but later in the journey, I
found myself following a group of expat friends on their quest for “western”
cuisine- They were all teachers having been here as long as two years, and all
constantly on the quest for a decent burger. Tonight, they’d read about a
place that had steak- real steak. As Matt said, “Not that sinuey stuff
that usually disguised itself as a piece of meat.” This was by far the
worst food I’d eaten in Thailand- or really, the worst food I'd ever eaten
anywhere. I’d regretted every bite I took, seeing it as an assault on
what I flew across the world to do in the first place- but the Americans loved
it. It was like seeing people starved and desiccated at sea step onto land to
take their first drink of water- everyone was rejoicing over the salad-
tasteless bowls of lettuce with paired with a gnarly white sauce supposing to
be ranch and dark pieces of meat that looked more like spray painted chicken
cutlets than steak…and I’ve never seen people so happy about shitty food. That
was my final encounter with this so called “western food” while I was in
Thailand- not only am I walking away with an appreciation for new food- but an
appreciation for what I already know- a good cheeseburger.
When I finally gathered the bravado to step into
the streets and endure the intense smells that flood the walkways in Bangkok,
my co-pilot in endless food journeys through Thailand, Matt, walked me through
my first experience in street food. I don’t really know how to explain
the feeling of turning off their quiet street and onto the Sunset Strip of food.
It can be best described as standing outside an empty building, completely dark
and silent and swinging open the doors to find a full blown rave going on. It
was a rush.
If you looked left: hundreds of people pushed down
a sidewalk lined with food stands, smoke rolling out over the heads of passer
bys. To the right: what used to be a parking lot was a sea of blue
plastic chairs, and spit fires of rotating salt crusted fish. The smells
were thick and tangible in the air.
Straight ahead- traffic, lots of it. Our
destination- a nameless outdoor restaurant that popped it's structure up on
this corner right before dusk, and collapsed itself into the back of a truck
when the crowds cleared to come back the next night.
It felt like if I took a step forward, I’d
immediately be swept up by a hurricane…so I did, and entered the stream of Thai
people fishing their way through the stalls.
Coconuts! Young, green, brown, ice cream, juice…
Fried chicken; chicken legs, feet, and livers- all
hot out of the palm oil baths.
Pork of all kinds- literally stands selling pork
deep fried 5 different ways and from 5 different parts of the body.
Balls of heaven were being cooked up in what looked
like the cast iron togoyaki molds- corn, coconut milk, and rice flour.
Every single stand was slinging something
different, some specialty, some snack- none of which were resistible. That
being said, every stand was also filled with constant arrivals and departures
of flies, and other various bugs. Massive piles of food lay out in what I could
only identify as upside down metal shields, presumably at raging temperatures
of 80 plus…needless to say, the sanitary standards we’ve become accustomed to
in the States didn’t apply here. I was at odds with all sorts of malignant
bacteria waiting to use my stomach as a breeding ground. So, I made the
intelligent choice- I threw caution to the wind and I consumed my weight in
food within one block.
You can’t help but wonder about the health risks
when you’re eating off of plates being washed in water you shouldn’t very well
be drinking. It’s not that Thailand doesn’t have food safety standards,
because I know they do. I went to school with a woman named ChaCha back
in New York, who is originally from Bangkok. She lives there and runs the
culinary school at Dusit. She teaches food safety, so on our ride out to
the old city Ayuthia we talked extensively about the cleanliness and safety of
the irresistible food clogging the streets of Bangkok. Rules are in
place- enforcement is not. She said Thai people are resistant to most of
the things Americans come here and fall prey to. This food was designed to keep
people like me away- but I wouldn’t let a little food poisoning frighten me.
I’ve stumbled across modern day’s most dangerous food borne illnesses right at
home in New York City. Bring on your best Thai strain.
After humoring me and stopping at every stall that
smelled halfway decent, we sat down to dinner due left of a grill the size of a
hummer, turning chicken and fish over the spit.
I remember thinking- I can’t name one other place
in the world that looks anything like this…this is the coolest thing I’ve ever
seen.
Matt did all the ordering- Tom Yum Goong, one of
the chickens crisping away over the flames, sticky rice... and something
refreshing- Som Tam, papaya salad. Holy shit was I in for a rude
awakening. I unknowingly just shoveled the spiciest salad in all of
Thailand into my mouth like a bulldozer. Everything else was similarly
hell-firery spicy. I couldn’t wrap my mind around how strong everything
was. Strong might not be the right word- but how would you describe
tasting what it would be like if your mouth just switched from black-and-white
to full blown color HDTV? Everything just tasted like what I’d known
these flavors to taste like previously…but on steroids.
Matt and I wandered around until we found someone
peddling coconut ice cream topped with peanuts, jelly, shredded coconut, and my
rekindled long lost love- condensed milk. Whenever my Dad made key lime
pie when I was a kid, he’d find me sneaking swigs of condensed milk from the
can. I think I’d forgotten about that as an ingredient- until Thailand
where it was stirred into coffee and poured over mounds of ice cream.
I found a way to eat mango sticky
rice. Every. Single. Night.
Things got sketchier than just
street food- I ate just about everything I could find at the Ampawa Floating
Market, where the streets are made of water. A murky combination of gray
and green liquid carried these vendors in the shells of their long tail boats
to the steps of Ampawa where people dotted the steps down to the water, calling
out their orders to cooks.
Luckily, I had my friend Pai from Lop Buri palling
around with me that day. Any questions I had about the concoctions were
quickly translated back and forth all day long. He fielded questions such
as, “Are you feeding the prawns steroids?,” “Can I have one of each,?” “Um…what
is this,”? and “How did they get the fragrance of Jasmine so beautifully into
these ginko nuts?”
But, the best food wasn’t the snacks on sidewalks
or bridges, it was the food I sat down for.
Every place I ate told a different story through
food. The kind of rice they serve explains which region of food you were
sampling- North eastern parts of Thailand exclusively grow, and therefore eat
sticky rice. Other parts of the country only cook jasmine rice.
Poorer parts of the country tend to have spicier food where, lacking funds for
pricier proteins and relied on the heat of chili to lend flavor to the meal. Where
coconuts typically don’t grow, coconuts don’t show up in the food.
The two absolute best food experiences I had in
Thailand both happened on Ko Mak- one technically over the Gulf of Thailand on
the way to Ko Mak..."Same same but different," As the Thai would say.
Getting to the island was an adventure in itself. My journey started at 5 in the morning, catching a taxi down to the Ekkamai bus station for the first bus down to the port. According to everyone I talked to, the bus would take 4 hours. A dragging 6 hours later, the land stewardess told me in broken English I had to get off the bus- they decided not to go all the way to the port. Sooo..I got off the bus 6 hours from Bangkok, with zero guesses on distance between the port and where I was standing. I started hunting for a cab. When I did find him- I tried to enter his car via our passenger side door…his driver’s side door- earning roaring laughs from the pool of drivers on the curb. Embarrassment and confusion- my two favorite travel partners. When I did make it to the port, I was pretty sure I was boarding a boat to nowhere. I asked which one went to Ko Mak and when not a single person understood my pronunciation of Ko Mak, they finally just pointed me to a boat and said, “You get on! Twenty Minutes.” I couldn’t tell if that meant it’ll take 20 minutes to get to Ko Mak, or get on the boat in 20 minutes, but I wasn’t taking any chances on missing my boat to nowhere. So I got on the boat and was immiediately kicked off. Apparently she meant get on the boat in 20 minutes. Got it.
I puttered around until I smelled something heady,
burning my nose as I breathed it in. I sniffed out the source. The same
woman directing me to my boat was cooking something bewitching. She
called it Stir Fry Beef with Chili, Egg and Peppers. I call it: Miracle on the
Dock. I think she thought it was funny to send over a mound of chilis
hidden between slices of beef- and even though my mouth felt like it was going
to burst into flames, jump off my body and quit the eating game- I went back
for seconds thinking I may never get to eat something this deliscious again- I
might as well do it twice.
Little did I know even better food was waiting on
the island. Matt told me to check out Wong’s Noodle Shop- he said he'd
eaten almost nearly every meal at the same place while on Ko Mak. "How
incredibly unadventurous," I thought. Well, go ahead and label me
"Incredibly Unadventurous" because I followed him down the same road.
When I got to the island, I rented a bike and
peddled my way around the circumferance, then through the diameter of the
island. The island only has 2 piers and a small cluster of beach hotels
near them- not more than 15 different hotels and somewhere around 10 eateries
on the island.
My room- the one with the hammock looking out onto
the waves- was the equivalent of $12 a night.
I parked my bike at the top of the
driveway to Ko Mak Seafood and walked down the gravel path until a restaurant hovering on stilts above the water appeared. When I came upon an empty dining room, I was afraid I'd shown up too late for lunch. After making some laps around the edge of the dining room, watching the fish swim around the slits holding the restaurant afloat, a woman came around the corner of the kitchen and grabbed a menu. My handful of Thai words rendered me helpless with the menu, so when she came over to get my order, I said, “You choose.” This waitress was also my chef, and my chef was also my fish
purveyor. She has chosen crab and
motioned me to come with her. After a few yards she looked back to see me, confused, still sitting at the table. She came back, took my arm and walked me over to the pier where a man untangling a wad of nets tangled into a ball on the back of his crab boat.
They chatted for a second and then she pointed to the cage
holding hundreds of scrambling blue crabs. A roar of Thai chatter later and she and I were walking
back over the plank connecting the retaurant to the pier to go cook and eat
the fresh crab. Good choice I
thought. Moments later I had crab stir
fried with chilies, and lemongrass.
I think it may be redundant at this point to tell you how amazing any of
the food is- but for one final time- this was absolutely mind blowingly
amazing.
After lunch, I started another bike adventure. I aimlessly ducked in and out of
different huts, inquiring about this infamous noodle shop I’d heard about but
received little direction. Since no one spoke a lick of English and I only new
derivaties of “deliscious” in Thai, I wasn't getting any closer. When a diving truck with obvious ex-pats pulled up next to me, I asked
them for directions and the Australians told me me to take a left at the Starbucks and a right at
McDonalds. Ex-tourists
insulting tourists. That’s a bold
move. The island is only so big- with a little perseverance I
finally found Moung's Noodle Shop- and like Matt, every following meal was at Moung's. 
Over the course of a
few days, I’d developed a relationship with the sole cook at Moung's-
Moung. On my last night, I stood
at the counter next to where she cooked, perusing the menu until she
said, “I don’t like anything there” and took it from me. She said, “I’ll make for you what I
like.”
It took me three days of thumbing through David
Thompson’s Thai Food book before figuring out what the green shoot was
comprising the stir fry she made...actually, in all honesty, I haven't ruled
out either Water Mimosa (Pahkacet) or Siamese Watercress (Pak Bung). It
could easily be either one. Everything I ate everywhere in Thailand did
actually have a given Thai name...but the more I wrote them down, the less I
found them relevant. Similar items changed nomenclature between stalls, renaming
them for the region they came from and the extremely slight difference in
preparation.
The only departure I took from her food was the one night
I’d rented a kayak with some german guy I met on the boat over, and kayaked to
an island that looked a lot more nearby than it actually was. We spent an idyllic Thai island day, basking in the sun, snorkeling, drinking the case of Thai beer we brought over...but then as the sun began to set and lightning
started to light up the sky, we debated getting home. The debate didn’t last very long seeing as we were on
an island about 12 miles from Ko Mak with nothing but a kayak, the clothes on our back, what remained of the beer we brought over and some no longer necessary sunglasses. I’ve always has an unnatural fear of
sharks- or maybe it’s a fear of anything that swims in pitch black water underneath
me and the only light between where we were standing on the nameless shore and
the shore of Ko Mak was the twinkle we assumed to be our hotel. My german friend was obviously scared shitless- But I hoped he might be put at ease if I proceeded gung-ho with this life-threatening plan. Not so. We pushed the kayak down through the
sand and into the small waves hitting the coast. I was trying to appear collected- I needed him
not to be scared or I wasn’t making it across the gulf. I cracked a joke about tanning our
front side on this leg of the trip, and we were off. I paddled hard for the first 15 minutes, not wanting to
look up and see we’d made zero progress. Annnnd...when I finally gained courage to
look up, we’d made zero progress. The german guy and I were already lacking in common vocabularly, but his renditions of "shit" laced every other word of his sentences now. We were both cold, and I can assure you at least one of us were thinking about drowning at sea. But like looking at a wall
of tickets in front of you thinking- “now that’s just not possible,” you remind
yourself that it’s not like you’re just going to walk off the line and hide in
the locker room… just grab a pan, or a paddle, and dig in. That makes the rest of the kayak trip sound like it played out to be very epic and triumphant...It wasn't. About halfway through, the waves kept pushing the boat sideways, causing us to only need aggressive paddling on one side...we basically splashed around like newborn ducks in a pond until finally exhausted. We'd made it close enough to shore now to recognize we probably wouldn't die and coasted our way onto shore. We dragged out boat under some trees- looked around and recognized what really mattered next- our next meal.
A day spent eating in China Town-
The "Wet Markets" (Thai for- "Outdoor market with thousands of fish/meat parts you've never seen before, probably still living with generally 3-5 inches of unidentifiable waterstuffs around your feet so you probably shouldn't wear flip-flops to a knee-deep fish fest stupid American")
Ignorance is bliss...
If for even for a second you might not love what you’re
doing...you’re not sure why you got in it the first place- Go somewhere, see
things you don’t understand- and if it stirs the coals of that passion, you've probably found the right one, you just need to feed it's fire.
If you recall the first few lines- I had just taken a job in
Chicago at Next. And I write the ending to this, just over a month later from a
cabin in the woods of eastern Tennessee near Blackberry Farm. I’ve since concluded the short,
incredibly intense stint in Chicago. I learned priceless lessons that I'll carry with me through out my culinary career…and then some
less priceless lessons like how to vacuum like your in the Indy 500 making laps
around prep counters. I’ll write
more about the experience there, but first- I’ll catch my breath over something
more grounded…Pulling my prep straight out of the dirt.
