Light Snacks Will Be Served

A Detour to Amerigo

After eating a delicious lunch in Florence, Paolo told the chef that we were on our way to Modena. We were making a pilgrimage of sorts, off of our planned route, to visit the celebrated Osteria Francescana.  The chef nodded and winked, knowingly. “OK, that’s fine,” his expression seemed to suggest. But then he narrowed his eyes, and said “You must go to Amerigo. It’s a trattoria in Savigno. A special one. Near Bologna.”

Two days later, we hopped in our tiny Fiat and raced past the archways of old Bologna, then through the industrial outskirts of what might be Europe’s most beautiful city. The sun was setting, and soon we wound into the hills in darkness, passing shadows of grapevines that produce the sweet, bubbly Lambrusco. It was just a degree or two above freezing, and as we circled back down the hills into Savigno, a stag jumped across the road. It was huge, and muscular, and it stared right at us. We met the stag at the road’s next traverse, and the one after that. We lost sight of him as we entered the town – whose sign proudly proclaims “Savigno – Citta’ del Tartufo (City of Truffles)”

 Amerigo

Now, Savigno isn’t a city. It’s a village, in the hills of Emilia Romagna, where farmers with dirt-caked fingernails drink at a bar called Free Beach. When we parked at 7pm, the streets were eerily empty. The restaurant lights where we had booked were off. And so we drank Campari at Free Beach, where fizzy white and red wine are on tap, and where they serve potato chips and hot dogs for appertivo hour.

But Savigno’s pride – beside its wines and truffles – is a remarkable trattoria called Amerigo. In all my life, I can say it’s one of the best restaurants I’ve eaten in. Part of it might have been the chill in the air, and the wood smoke, the changing of the seasons, the silence – but the restaurant knows that, and it captures the essence of it all. You cannot separate Amerigo from Savigno – one thing is not possible without the other.

 The vines outside of town

Our meal began on the second floor, as radiators clunked and the waitress poured us glasses of local Sauvignon Blanc. Then came a string of dishes – earthy and deep, rich with what was outside – that had Paolo and I grunting with pleasure. There was a first course of polenta enriched with pecorino, topped with thin slices of headcheese whose fat and gelatin melted into the grains beneath. And Paolo’s white bean soup topped with fat, pan-seared porcini mushrooms.

Beans, Porcinis

We decided to stay in Savigno for the night, instead of driving back to Bologna, after the first course. We ordered more wine, and our waitress booked us a room in a local inn (the restaurant has rooms too, but they were full). I suggest, if you ever go to Amerigo, you do the same. Eat and drink deeply. Intoxicatingly. Then sleep.

In heaven, this is what macaroni and cheese looks like

What came next was a pile of feathery black truffles, completely obscuring the fresh pasta beneath, which had been simply tossed in butter and black pepper. And then another pasta course, hand-made ravioli filled with aged parmesan cream and sautéed with smoky ham. It was like macaroni and cheese from a sacred realm. Paolo ate a lasagna with layers of green sauce, venison, and wild mushrooms. “It’s the best lasagna I ever tasted,” he said, between shakes of his head. When I took a bite, my thoughts returned to the stag, walking through the forest, searching for somewhere to sleep.

Pasta with black truffle

By the time the mains came – a veal cheek in red wine, and a massive cut of black pork, simply grilled and served with chunks of fat – we had already eaten too much. Dizzy with food and wine, we worked our way through the meat, then stumbled across the street. I woke at dawn, in a room so cold I was unable to sleep. A crucifix hung above the bed, covered in purple glitter, sparkling like Lambrusco. The vines outside were starting to turn yellow. The mist was lifting.

We dressed, and left.

 

Why is the food in San Sebastian so good? (Part one in a series)

I can't remember the first time I heard about the Basque town of Donostia (usually referred to, in Spanish, as San Sebastian). It might have been in a food magazine, or on the tip of a chef's tongue in some impassioned, late-night discussion about where the best place in the world might be to eat. But there it was, buried in my psyche, a promise of delicious things. It remained there for years; an itch unscratched.

There are plenty of stories scattered across the internet that explain, mostly with wonderment, about how good the eating is in this part of Basque country. And the reason is simple, I think: People here really and truly care about cooking and product. Perhaps more then anything else. The parade of cooking celebrities and shower of Michelin stars didn’t happen by chance; the movement began to simmer a long time ago, in basement taverns, and aging seafood halls, in gastronomic societies. And you need to see that first, before it all comes into focus.

Donostia is a town built on the foundations of a food culture both sophisticated and primal – there is decorum and fine dining; dark taverns where drunks munch on tiny sandwiches and sip watery beer; there are the vineyards and butchers and fishmongers and wonderful chocolate and pastry shops; there are foreigners and Basque folk foraging side-by-side for the best pintxos through the tunneling restaurants of the old town; and there is the cold sea and the green mountains that supply what might be the second-best market in Spain. From the second we arrived, I was smitten.

For the past two weeks I’ve been turning this idea over in my mind – what makes the food here better than anywhere else? And instead of answering that, I’ll just tell you what I ate at a seafood restaurant.

About thirty minutes from San Sebastian, through the mountains and then around the foggy coast, is a town called Getaria. Vineyards that produce tart, Txakoli grapes hug the hillsides that look down over an old church and a wide elbow of sand. There is a harbor for fishing boats. And a restaurant called Elkano, and a fashion museum.

I was told that I must eat at Elkano by Eneko Axta, a prodigiously talented chef whose brilliant cooking I would later try at Azurmendi, in Bilbao. The Chef told me that this was “classic Basque seafood cooking – the best kind.”  

                                                      The grill at Elkano

When we entered the restaurant at 2pm it was empty – it started to fill at about 3, which apparently is fish time in Getaria. The menu is spare. There are several fish to choose from, all fresh from the local fleet docked outside, a few starters, and your meal begins with bread and good olive oil.

Owner/manager Pedro Aitor approached us and warmly explained the seafood available. Then, he asked if I minded bones, and when I shook my head, his eyes lit up. “The red mullet is here, now, only for a few weeks,” he said, smiling. “It is the one from under the rocks, the small, sweet red mullet. Everyone here orders turbot, but for me, the red mullet from the reef close to shore speaks of this season, of the spring. I would never serve one from the deep sea, these are the babies, the first of the year.” His eyes were distant, and I wondered if he was looking at the sea when he spoke, addressing it as much as us. 

So we order red mullet. And hake throats (kokotxas), which he says “are our favorite thing to eat, and only one per fish.” The throats are done three ways, lightly fried with an egg batter, grilled and grilled and served with a mild salsa verde. We also order squid, grilled with ink sauce “only one boat fishes for squid now, in Getaria, and we get the best catch.” Also, a bottle of Verdejo from Rueda, brisk and very bright, from pre-Phyloxera vines, crisp and cold like the afternoon outside.

The hake throats, gelatinous with a wisp of smoke from the grill, are wobbly, saline bites. Strangely, as I eat them, I’m reminded of China – of the sea cucumber and shark fin and fish maw that takes their place at the Chinese table because of texture rather than taste. Except that these hake throats, like the juicy, mild flesh of the fish, do taste pretty good.

The meal got better from there. The red squid was served beside a stripe of ink cooked with salt and onion; it was tender and only adorned with salt, cooked as perfectly as one is able to. Living in Thailand, I eat a lot of squid, which is often charred or chewy; none is as tender and simple as this. My wife and I smiled between bites and sips of wine, realizing this is one of those meals we’re never going to forget.

Then, although all the other tables are digging into large, flat turbot crisp around the fins, we are presented with two tiny, tender red mullet. The owner encourages me to suck the juice and brain from its skull and I do.

Have you ever sucked out the contents of a prawn’s head – one that’s fresh and fatty? It was like that, but better. Like the first breath you take after a long drive that ends at the edge of the ocean. Like sea urchin butter. Like red mullet brains, the first of the year, from under the rocks.

The flesh of the little fish was firm and sweet, tight like crabmeat, and again it wasn’t sauced or spiced, merely salted. The final flourish was a black piece of slate, with a slash of tart apple sauce, and on it sat the barely seared livers of the fish we were eating. It was delicate and rich, just a nibble, and it left me wanting more.

Which I do now, and always will, until I get back to Elkano.

(Part two, on mushrooms and pintxos, beef and spring lamb, coming sometime in the relatively near future)

 

                                                        The beach at Getaria

 

On Fancy Restaurants, and a Trip to Tickets

I have a lot to share with you.

I’d like to write about two weeks spent eating in Spain. About meals that I never thought I’d eat. About going to those places that people like me only dream about until we’re there, and Elena Arzak is smiling warmly and asking you if you like her pigeon while a waiter scrapes crumbs off the table with some polished pewter tool and a gruff sommelier splashes more ancient Rioja in your glass. Holy shit. Pinch me. This is real.

Now, I understand that but a month ago I wrote about lists, and fancy restaurants, and how preposterous these indexes of greatness are. And I meant it, sort of, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to eat at the world’s best restaurants, whatever that means. And in two weeks in Spain my lovely wife endured four very long and meaningful meals with me. Not everything was good, but it was, for me at least, a transformative sort of experience.

First, I’ll share with you my meal at Tickets, Albert Adria’s (brother of Ferran, of el bulli fame) tapas restaurant in Barcelona. Calling Tickets a tapas restaurant is sort of like calling a Ducati a motor scooter. Yes, the form is the same: small bites eaten in succession, often with bread, some things from the mountains, some from the sea. Yes, the ingredients are familiar, especially if you are Spanish. But the way they are delivered – the pops and crunches and clever twists – are just delightful. The tricks that were perfected at el bulli are employed sparingly here – a spherification of seawater here, a caviar of olive oil there – but the precision and care that defines this kitchen is evidenced throughout.

We ate tomato smeared on perfectly crisp slivers of country bread, with a translucent jelly of iberico that melted like luxurious, ethereal pig fat. Severely perfect segments of oranges swimming in a mild soup of olive oil, mint, and a suggestion of mustard. An oyster, with a bouquet of microscopic flowers and cubes of sour apple. There were crunchy cones of tomato that had a whisper of wasabi – a combination so subtle and simple that I thought about it that night before bed, rolling around, wondering about the possibilities of cooking so precisely that flavors might come to you after you had consumed the food.

Then there was a rabbit taco, laced with cumin and chili, like Mexico colored by the gentler spectrum of Catalan cooking. And soft, steamed buns stuffed with ribbons of lardo and bacon, that slid down like the best Chinese baozi.  We gulped a bottle of PSI – a great second label of Pingus from the Ribera. My friend Veronica wept after the rabbit taco, because she had a rabbit once, and never realized that it might taste so wonderful. 

And as we skipped off into the Barcelona night, bellies full, bursting with pleasure and a little shame, one thing was certain: we had just witnessed something really, truly special. A chef communicating with diners, executing his vision in a way that wasn’t pretentious or exhausting. Just really fucking good.   

 

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.