Light Snacks Will Be Served

On Bangkok.

I wasn't going to put this piece of writing on the blog. It's ponderous and dark. Probably too much so for this medium. But today I read this piece by Pankaj Mishra (my restaurant gets a shout-out, which is nice!) and I thought, what the hell. I'll give you a slice of my Bangkok pie. It's of a different flavor.

The prosaic sort of poem below was colored by two events that happened outside my house. And those things that happen within the confines of the restaurant. Bangkok has a sinister side, but most writers don't get it right. I'm not sure I do either, but this is, I guess, an attempt.

I read this piece at the Bangkok Literary Festival held at the Neilson Hays Library a few months back. The topic of the readings was the city in which I live. And so, here we go...  

 

After the wild-eyed tuk-tuk driver nearly ran me down,

In front of a festering canal beside my house,

He scowled, then spilled out of his machine.

He came at me with an amphetamine tick and a beer-perfumed hiss,

And I wondered what the hell I was doing here.

Then I began to run.

Once, when my best cook disappeared, I wandered to the bank through the back streets of Sukhumvit.

Morlam chirped from cheap speakers, as I made my way to the teller, and I thought about him.

I cared about him.

And looking down at the cracked pavement, trying not to trip, beside the bus stop,

I spotted my chef.

He was sitting on the sidewalk, on a straw mat, a block from the restaurant.

Beside him, an ancient-looking fortune teller, sipping an energy drink, whispered in his ear.

My eyes met the chef’s, and then they didn’t, as if guiltily we shared the same secret.

The chef came back to work the next day.

I had dreamt of a restaurant, and then I had one, and so I stopped writing stories about others and tried to make one about myself, under this backdrop of Bangkok.

And it was through the eyes of others, like the Burmese furniture maker who swam across a river to become a waiter, that I began to understand this place.

And the chef from Yasothorn, with a sharp stutter from a motorbike accident, who pages through catalogs of amulets, looking for one that might bring him something better.

Then there’s the dishwasher whom I once watched kill a rat with his hands. “I wouldn’t dream of cooking,” he said, when I tried to promote him. “There’s just too much noise in my head.”

We are guests, 13 of us, sitting at the same table, waiting for what comes. The one thing we know is that Bangkok does not belong to us.

After a long night at work, we sometimes go to Rama 9 Road, to eat Isaan food and drink beer.

The restaurants there bear the names of places and dishes from upcountry – Larb Phet Sisaket, for instance – which must make customers feel closer, or farther, from home.

The massage parlor girls spill in, with the bartenders and the taxi drivers, and in the fluorescent light, their hard lives seem less so.

And after many drinks we sometimes talk about our dreams, and often, my staff talk of going home.

This Thursday, after midnight, I returned home from work.

And on the same street where I was almost run down, beside the brown canal, there were piles of blood-stained cotton.

Pairs of surgical gloves were ripped inside-out and left to lie beside the empty wrappers of life-saving things, syringes and bandages and the shattered plastic from a broken bike.

I sat and stared at it in dim light from my own motorbike, as it idled, alive.

The next day, as I began to write this piece, I thought about dreams, and how they drift into our lives, changing our perception of a place.

This city we live in invites cliché, as we catalog the strange sensory experiences here that come to define Bangkok.

But they don’t, really. They’re just smells and sounds and sights that we cling to, for safety, on our way home.

They’re our handlebars. 

 

A Piece on Authenticity and Memory

Foreward: I read this tonight at a poetry reading at a friend's bar. I have admired from afar the bravery of others at this occasion, and enjoy how this night feels warm like stories do when told around a fire. My hands shook a lot. Don't think I've ever read my work in front of an audience. It was strangely scary for my limbs, nice for my brain. The topic was (science/fiction). And so it goes...

 

I struggled with the topic here tonight – because I usually write non-fiction, and more specifically about food. And two nights ago I sat up in bed, very late, reading an article by a writer named Todd Kliman. The piece was called The Problem of Authenticity. And somewhere in the article, as he picks apart the ideal of authentic food, he quoted another writer, Wright Morris, who wrote something more profound than I’m ever likely to. Morris wrote: “Anything processed by memory, is fiction.”

And my mind started to spin. There is no word in the English language, in the realm of food writing, that I despise so much as Authenticity. Because it says more and means less than any other word. And so, in the spirit of Morris, I begin.

“Anything Processed By Memory, is Fiction.”

I remember a meal I ate, once, on the coast of Spain, in Cadaques.

There was a light blue breeze rolling off a sweep of sea, and I sat on a stone wall and ate cheese that was runny and smelled like wet sheep.

The wine I drank from the bottle dripped down the side and on to my pants. And I marveled at how authentic this was; the sea, that special air, the church bells and the stinky cheese and the wine stain that slowly spread across my white pants like a memory.

I saved the label of the cheese, and weeks later, in my apartment in Shanghai, I unfurled it. It read, Made in France.

Once, in Chengdu, I stopped at a hotpot shop after many bottles of beer.

Food was one mao a stick, so cheap you could eat for hours and pay pocket change, I mean change that was really in your pocket, coins made of metal, and the meat was cut from strange parts of cows and pigs and ducks.

The meat looked like creatures from the deep sea that had somehow swum into a skewer. And as I chewed through boiled flesh I bathed in the authenticity of it all, like enlightened sunshine on a drunken night. Yet I never saw another hotpot shop in Chengdu quite like that one.

Across the street from my restaurant, two blocks away, a woman wakes up early each morning and cooks khao mok gai, a sort of Thai biryani, in her head scarf.

She adds turmeric, ginger, onions and chicken stock and slowly simmers the rice, then she makes a sweet sauce with little wisps of coriander and mint which you are supposed to drizzle over the rice and really you should.

At the very end, in between the rice and the spice and the sweet sauce and the salty soup there are raisins. They’re everywhere in there. And no one asks her why, because they know why when they taste it. Goddamnit, it’s the most authentic tasting Thai Malay Indian rice dish with raisins that I have ever tasted.  

Recently, I read about a woman in Bozeman Montana named Florence Dunkel. She makes chocolate chip cookies and studies bugs at a university.

In her free time, Florence creams butter and sugar together, adds some vanilla extract, eggs and flour and chocolate chips, and as she does that she roasts a tray of crickets in the oven.

The crickets emerge crisp and smelling of toasted walnuts and she folds the insects into her mix, forming little cookies on her baking tray where feet poke out. Because Florence is going for authenticity, isn’t she?

When did pizza become more than just bread?

When did soup become stew?

When did words become verse?

When did sandals become shoes?

When my grandmother’s mind began to slip and skip beats, as Alzheimers set in in her seventies, the dishes she cooked for me in my childhood began to change.

She forgot to soak the beans before she braised them with ham hocks, and so we ate hard, chewy bean soup and made faces at the table.

One night, as we sat beside each other on the sofa, she offered me a taste of her dessert.

“This is the most delicious ice cream, Jarrett” she said, handing me her bowl like a secret. “It’s the kind your grandfather and I used to eat, down the shore, in summertime.”

I took a spoonful of ice cream, and it stuck to my tongue like an oiled cloth.

My Nana was eating a bowl full of soft, salted butter.

But that’s not how she remembered it. 

 

La Cagouille

Before travelling, I ask people whom I trust where I should eat. Especially when going to a place like Paris, which is so dense with restaurants one might never know. And at the end of a friend's email on that subject, there were a few lines that went something like this: "Near Montparnasse there's a fish restaurant called La Cagouille. Unassuming. Very good seafood. And it's open on Sunday."

La Cagouille was then forgotten.

But two Sundays past, in Paris, my wife and I found ourselves wandering around hungrily. The cheese shop I had found the day before was shuttered, scrapping our plans for a picnic. And then I remembered the email, and the seafood restaurant that was open on Sunday. And so we jumped in a taxi and zoomed across town on a crisp, clear afternoon. 

La Cagouille is unassuming. There are understated nautical touches in the dining room, there's a simple patio, and it's located in a recently constructed apartment building on a quiet residential street. It does not magically transport you to the Paris of accordions, roses and cobblestones. In fact, it feels more like a chain restaurant somewhere in Boston. 

Then the first course comes. Cockels, swimming in Breton butter. You scoop the tiny shellfish up and slurp the sweet, tiny pieces of meat. If you're me, you then use the shell as a ladel to pour butter in your mouth. 

After that, the mussels arrived, which were thrown on a hot iron plate to ease open, then simply dusted with sea salt. They were tender and sweet and as we drank a bottle of white wine from the Rhone that was perfectly complimentary my eyes started to roll back into my head.

Then the Fines de Claires were thrust in front of us, freshly shucked, and as I squeezed a half lemon atop them their edges slowly curled up in the sunlight.  The oysters were so rich and briny, so expressive of a cold, clean sea, that I shivered as they slid down my throat. "That's the most intoxicating thing I've ever eaten," muttered my wife. I smiled at her, gulped more white wine, and grunted affirmatively.

The final thing we ate that afternoon -- an afternoon meal which neither of us will forget because of the perfect combination of summer sun and tastes -- was a plate of grilled sardines. Each table of middle-aged Parisians was picking at the little fish and so we followed suit.

The rich, oily fish slid of the bone and melted in your mouth. The fish were also, gleefully, slicked with butter. There was smoke and sea and salt that was about it, and it was about the best thing one could ever eat. And we did, hushed, scraping meat from the feathery bones. And as we finished the meal I felt a rush of sadness, because I knew that I wouldn't eat anything so elementally good in a very long time.

Then we left the restaurant and walked through a market where painters sold bright canvasses and odd sculpture and moody photographs. But my mind was still spinning from the beauty of the food. 

Plying With Fire

A few weeks ago a husband and wife team, who were writing a story about new Bangkok restaurants, were asking me questions. They were on the other side of the bar, sipping martinis, which I've found is a very agreeable way for journalists and I to conduct interviews. I stood there and tried to say something clever, while watching the drink tickets come in.

Then I got an order and lost my train of thought, just as they asked me “what is your favorite ingredient in Thai cooking?"  

Prawns? Lemongrass? Mint? Roasted sticky rice powder? Lime leaves? Fried shallots? Or maybe something more elemental, say, fish sauce or palm sugar or coconut cream? I don’t know. There are so many.

Then I started to mix the drink. Cucumber, smash. Passionfruit, just a bit. Gin, lots. Lime, ice, shake, pour. Where's the ginger ale? Shit. Seriously, where is the goddamn ginger ale? Is it down there, under the sink? There it is, behind the ice bucket. Top it, slice of cucumber, stir, wipe glass, table eight.

And I'm back. 

"Now what were we talking about?"

"Your favorite ingredient."

"Oh, right."

I looked at what the two were eating. Duck larb -- a clamorous salad that resonates with sour and spicy and smoky notes – smoky, because we add smoked duck breast to the mixture. They were also eating ribs, which I slow-braise in a sort of tamarind barbecue sauce with lemongrass and chili and finish on the grill, for another taste of smoke. And stir-fried flowers with egg, which I have my wok cook blast with heat at the beginning so that my cast iron woks breathe their smoky heat into the food.

And I had one of those empty-headed revelations that you get when you’re doing four things at once. “Smoke. I like to play around with smoke. Yeah. That’s my favorite ingredient.”

A country meal of beef and two jiim jeow dips, cooked in Nong Khai, Isaan.

Thing is, it’s true. I’ve seen smoke disappear, in its myriad forms, as kitchens modernize across Asia. Smoke is drifting away from Chinese cooking, as home cooks stir-fry over low-heat ranges, in non-stick woks. Many mainland restaurants would rather drown vegetables in peanut oil and garlic than try to execute a proper, smoky stir-fry (it’s easier to do so).

I remember the first time I tasted a stir-fry of mushrooms, in a grimy Chengdu alleyway at dusk, from a wok that was so hot it glowed. It was cold and damp outside and I wondered if the cook could poke his metal spatula right through the wok (I know now that you can’t). There was chili, and soup spoons of salt and msg, and soy and oil and cornstarch maybe even a dusting of spring onions in those mushrooms. But it was the smoke, which sprung out of a pressed disk of coal underneath and heated that wok a shade of tangerine, like a cow-brand, that made the mushrooms sing.

Smoke is disappearing from street food, as more cooks flash-fry meats in little saucepots over gas rings, rather than slow-grilling the way they should and always have. Smoke is disappearing from Thai food as more people eat in sterile mall food courts in between shopping for tee-shirts and outfits for their dogs to wear. Meatballs and sausages are cooked over middling electric coils, as fat collects in little detachable plastic trays. 

A charcoal grill is not difficult to install in a restaurant kitchen in unregulated Bangkok, but fewer restaurants do. Charcoal is dirty and it is tedious and it is absolutely essential if you are going to serve Northeastern Thai food.

Smoke is disappearing from the ripping-hot red dried chilies that people used to roast in their woks and grind in their kroks (that’s a mortar and pestle), but now buy pre-packaged in the super or wet market. These flat, lifeless chili flakes are not allowed in my kitchen. (It is also not hard to roast your own chilies. Cough.) It is disappearing, too, from northern curry pastes and nahm prik pao, where shallots and garlic and other things should be grilled and smashed into heady pastes. 

Pounding roasted chilies into powdered form, for cooking.

Sometimes, when I spy a guest nervously start to rock back and forth in their chair, as they wait for their chicken wings or their steak nahm tok or a fish grilled in a leaf to arrive, I smile inside. Because two floors up my grill man Pi Bun is carefully cooking their food over the slow, low coals that people from Lao and Isaan have cooked over for centuries. Pi Bun knows about smoke.  

He knows that it takes some time. But when the food arrives, suffused with the perfume of mangrove charcoal, it’s worth it.

It’s the best ingredient I’ve got.   

 

Dad and I...

At the expense of tiring you out with restaurant stories, I'm going to post this piece I wrote for The Atlantic Food Channel yesterday.  It's a personal piece about myself and my father. I'm so grateful for his help, and we really had a great time working together. Enjoy.

The ragtag Thai construction crew sat on the plastic cooler that holds their ice cubes, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. They were staring at the old man carefully fastening pieces of wood on the wall. Slowly, deliberately, he would measure a length of teak, saw it, and place it against the one that went before it. Then he would fit the piece, gently tapping it into place with a hammer. A level would appear out of his pocket, as he checked that the wood was straight.

The workers stared as the strips of wood stayed straight and true for twelve feet, and they smiled coyly as the old man whittled the final piece of wood with a knife. His determination baffled them. But after an hour of whittling and sawing the wood fit perfectly in a corner where a concrete pillar rose from floor to ceiling. That pillar was crooked by nearly two inches, and the old man grunted and cursed before he forced the final piece into place. “That wall runs like a goddamned snake,” he said, when he was finished. The crew didn’t understand his English, but they understood his frustration, and they laughed.

The old man is my dad, Jim Wrisley. He’s 63 now, and the last time we worked together I was fourteen years old. That summer, he caught me smoking behind a dump truck that I was driving on his construction site. He fired me on the spot, and for the rest of my adolescent life I scooped ice cream, waited tables, and worked in kitchens. My father and I didn’t like working with each other very much, back then.

He’s since sold his construction company and settled into his idea of semi-retirement (which means renovating houses, buying apartments, and installing kitchens for friends). Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to get my first business started here in Thailand.

And the obstacles were significant. The designers I chose to create my space deceived me, running off with my money in what I now understand is a simple but fairly clever scam. When I refused to use their grossly overpriced contractor, whose bid was double my budget, they refused to do any more work on my space, even though they were under contract. I later deduced that my designers – a pair of artists from Thailand and Japan – can’t actually design restaurants.

They use their cachet to find work, which they then pass on to a friend who has a building and design firm. When I refused to use their contractor I lost their direction and interest, but they kept my money. Rent was pouring out, work wasn’t progressing, and I had to completely redesign my restaurant in a matter of weeks. The prints they gave me were mostly unusable. So I picked up the phone and called my father.

My dad doesn’t accept many mistakes, and he’s a curmudgeon when he works. He speaks in parables, about jobs worth doing well and stitches in time and bees and vinegar and honey. He also fixes and builds beautiful things with enthusiasm and great care. “Son, this is a shit show,” he said, 12,000 miles away on the other end of the line. “I’m coming over.”

And so for three weeks I worked with him, building wood walls in my bar and restaurant, as he oversaw the final stages of the construction and worked closely with my Thai contractor. It was a well-managed mess at best – Southeast Asian construction is far from scientific – but my father grew close to the staff that helped him work. In between jobs, I planned a trip to Phnom Penh, because I needed to go there for business reasons. When we returned a day later, we both didn’t feel well.

As my dad’s fever climbed that night and the color drained from his face, I grew scared. He suddenly seemed fragile. We still had work to do, I had a full crew to manage, and I had to deliver pots of chicken soup to Bangkok’s Sukhamvit Hospital (rice porridge is not suitable sick food for a Pennsylvanian). For three days he slept there attached to an IV, with a bad case of food poisoning, and I shuttled back and forth from jobsite to hospital.

I got to spend an extra week with my father because of that unfortunate salad, and in the end everything worked out with perfect timing. On Dad’s final night in Thailand, the space was nearly finished, and my cooks toiled in the kitchen. The bartender stood behind the bar, shaking cocktails. The music was turned on for the first time. We listened to old soul music as light reflected off the wood walls he had built, and drank whiskey sours. The shop was filled with a warm glow, and when we sat down and ate our first meal in the restaurant, it felt surreal.

“This is the hardest I’ve worked in twenty years,” he said after dinner, chewing on his cigar with a smile.

“But it was worth it, son, and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”

 

 

Toul Sleng and The Stare

In the midst of all this business in Bangkok, I had to escape to Phnom Penh for 24 hours, so that I could change my visa status from an M (Media) visa to a B (Business) one. In between trips to the crowded, miserable consulate there, we strolled around Phnom Penh and admired its temples and beautifully rugged old French buildings.

We also visited Toul Sleng, the Cambodian Genocide Museum, which is a sombre but necessary thing to do when you're there. The mug-shot style portraits of inmates there, most of whom never made it out, are so deeply affecting.  This particular inmate's photo shook me to the core. The proud ferocity of that stare. I'll never forget it. 

  

Three Tabletops in Trang

 

About six months ago, I headed to Trang with photographer and friend Jason Michael Lang to troll through the southern Thai province, eat delicious food, and write about it. The trip began with a feature in mind, but instead we got lost on empty islands, almost sank at sea, and had a hell of a lot of fun. Some of Lang's photos from that trip will grace the walls of the restaurant I'll open here someday. That's why it's on my mind, and why I returned to my own photos of that place.

The province, south of Krabi, has much of its character intact. The islands might be full of Scandinavians browning themselves evenly depending when you visit, but the mainland is largely skirted by sand-chasing tourists. Which makes eating there a joy. 

  

Pictures of Nong Khai

 

I've been away for awhile, busying myself with the impending opening of a restaurant. And there won't be too much traveling for awhile for that same reason. I did recently file a story at The Atlantic about a trip I took up north to visit organic rice farmers.

I will be serving rice from the AAN (Alternative Agriculture Network) at my place, so in about two months time you can stop over and see what the fuss is about. Their sticky rice is particularly good; when you steam some its nutty fragrance fills the room. I could eat it with just about anything. 

On another note, I recently read a story that described Nong Khai - a sleepy town on the Mekong which I really enjoyed a few months back - in a pretty unflattering manner (I'm not going to link). But I loved the little town with its temples and Vietnamese restaurants and funky local noodle dishes and especially the psychedelic Buddhist sculpture park, Sala Kaew Koo.

So I thought I'd share a few photos with you of my time in Nong Khai, a wonderful place to spend a few days, eating, wandering around, wondering. Have a great weekend. 

After The Disaster

Outside my door in Bangkok rests this ash-stained broom. It has a smiley face burned into the part of the wooden brush that looks up at you while you scrub. I will keep it, because this brush is my own little reminder of what can happen when things fall apart. I bought it yesterday, a few blocks away from the smoking husk that was Central World, which was Bangkok's biggest mall. 

To get there, myself, my wife and our friend Patrick Winn walked up Ratchadamri, past Lumphini Park and Chulalongkorn Hospital - places where much of the fighting between the Red Shirts and the Army had erupted only days before. Some trees were burnt the color of toast, shrubbery was torched, and bullet-ridden vehicles were being towed away from the protest area. But the streets were full of lively, smiling people. People with garbage bags and gloves. And amidst all this destruction was suddenly the happiest scene I'd witnessed in weeks. But things started to get worse as we passed the Ratchadamri BTS stop, whose eastern entrance was destroyed.

The smells of this rotten area of Bangkok were pretty intense, and lazy flies - the sort one sees hanging about garbage dumps and grim slums in South Asia - were hovering everywhere. But that didn't dampen the spirit of the thousands of people who headed out to clean up. Soap suds washed down the Ratchadamri, and garbage disappeared into the bags of crowds of cleaners.

      

  

When we did reach the intersection where the UDD had built their stage, volunteers were handing out free water and food. Some people wandered about, staring at the gaping hole in Bangkok's biggest retail outlet. Others posed for pictures in front of it. The smell from the twisted pile was, to me, very much like scotch whisky. The air was filled with smells of peat and petrol and wet.  But despite all that, people simply needed to smile.

And then we set to work on a truly horrible pile of trash beside a klong (canal), scooping rubbish that had rotted in the weeks since it had started piling there. Insects wriggled out, and maggots shimmied in the sunlight. The women who lived beside the mountain of garbage, on the canal, were too old to move it. Young Thais helped us scoop and carry big bags of the stuff up to the curb. Then we scrubbed streets in the afternoon sun, as the last wisps of smoke rose from the nearby wreckage.  

After we finished cleaning that afternoon, we stopped for a beer, exhausted and also grateful to be living in Bangkok again. The spirit of the people on the streets - Thais and foreigners working together for the good of this city - was infectious. And as night fell and Candice and I returned home I thought about all that has happened, and how we will remember this disaster some day. I don't know how I'll feel so many years down the road, but I'll keep my mop to remind me. 

   

I do know how I'll feel about the day that Bangkok came out to clean -- that was the day that I remembered what makes this city great, once again. 

The Twilight of the Trishaw

There aren't that many trishaws left in Thailand, anymore. Motorbikes are simply too cheap and too convenient, and are widely used as taxis these days, forcing out the hard working pedicab drivers. But whenever I see one, if I'm not in a hurry, I flag it down. The slow ramble of a pedicab is probably the best way to see a small Southeast Asian city (not Bangkok... I wouldn't wish that on anyone). You have time to take in the scenery, make mental notes, take photos, and smell the flowers. Seriously. You can smell flowers when you ride in a trishaw. 

Some of my fondest memories of my time in Chengdu, Sichuan, were late nights spent wobbling across potholes with a Snow Beer and good friends, in the back of these three wheeled bikes (bet you don't remember, AGP).  They also remind me of Penang, and the south of India, and what is probably the most interesting trishaw town of all, Lhasa. High in the Himalaya, trishaw riders have their own language of whistles - one means 'I'm passing from behind', another 'turning left, or right.' In a trishaw, you have time to whistle where you're headed. 

Above is a photo of my latest trishaw driver, Pit, who pedaled us around Nakhorn Si Thammerat this week. He is 74-years-old. As we slowly rolled through the charming provincial city, dotted with temples and mosques, he waved and smiled to almost every person we passed. You also have time to make friends, when you drive a trishaw.