Light Snacks Will Be Served

First Impressions of Feasting in Rome

I could attempt to catalogue all that passed my lips in the past 11 days, everything that I saw, from cheesemakers to tiny wineries to villages clinging from chalky hillsides that spill onto green fields. Of cheeses I’d never tasted, some fantastic and others toeing the foul line, and wines that did as much to confound my palate as to dazzle. But that would take a great deal of space. After a 2,000 km journey around Italy, Paolo and managed to eat maybe 40 meals. As I write, we’re on our way back to Bangkok, up in the air. Inspired. Ready to rip.

First, we ate our way around the great trattorias in Testaccio, where Guido Vitaletti, my partner Paolo’s father, worked as a butcher in the local slaughterhouse (it’s now an art gallery). When they closed the abbatoir in Testaccio, Guido opened a butcher shop on Rome’s fringes. He sold fresh meats, cheese and cold cuts his whole life, and, like many Italians, his children followed in his footsteps. The love of food here transcends.  

Today, the neighborhood restaurants in Testaccio remain: gutsy places like Felice, Agusterello and Da Enzo that traffic in classics like pasta amatriciana but really shine when the sweetbreads, meatloaf, liver, heart, intestines and baby lamb hit the table. (And hit the table they do – service is gruff, brusque, and unforgiving if you’re full).

A secondi of sweetbreads, pajata (veal intestines with milk), and lamb ribs at Agustarello.

A meal to the uninitiated can often feel like three – a battle against waves of salumi, then starches with cheese, and then protein – but shots of coffee and grappa arrive to reinforce, and after a long walk through Rome in autumn, past the Tiber and scattered ruins, we would do it all again.

Italy is a nearly impenetrable world of product. Cheese, sausages, hams, dried meats, mushrooms, pickles, marinated things, breads and all manners of pasta. Often, restaurants do not so much cook as unwrap, slice, plate, and serve. And that’s the glory of food here – a celebration of artisan producers that make things out of pork fat and sheep’s milk and semolina flour that really, seriously, should not be fucked with.

(To see this orgy of product up close, in Rome, go to Volpetti, and ask for Claudio. I like it much better than the modern Eataly monolith that's sprung up next door.)

Coming from a rootless cooking background like mine, the cooking seems a little too simplistic at first. Caccio e pepe? A fresh pasta made with only pecorino, starchy water, and black pepper? But then you see it, how the starch and the cheese coaslesce into a velvety sauce, how that sauce sticks to the thick strands of rough, soft pasta like glue. There are three tastes: the sheep’s cheese, rich and savory with a whiff of pasture; the wheat, which tastes faintly of hay and earth; and the spicy brightness of black pepper.

Cacio e Pepe, at da Enzo, at two o'clock.

And as I ate my first, and then second, and then third helping of this dish, I started to understand. Some things are supposed to be simple. To complicate their purity would be unthinkable to a Roman chef. And as I’m working with one, this was something I needed to see. Needless to say, I’m very glad I did.

 

To Rome, For Research...

 

It’s just few days after my last post, and I’m aloft again, headed towards Istanbul, and  Rome.

The reason is this: To eat, to study the small details of the best trattorias there, to source food ingredients, alcohol and wines, and just to immerse myself in the eating and drinking culture of Italy for two weeks. I’m travelling with Paolo Vitaletti, a native son, talented chef and (bias alert) my business partner. You see, in October, right before my trip to Singapore, we signed a lease for a space on Sukhumvit Soi 31. A Roman-style trattoria, with an Italian and an American at the helm, is coming soon to Bangkok. But first, we must eat.

Before you wonder why I’d do something like that – I’ll explain. This restaurant was a long time in the making. Paolo and I have known each other for years, and about three years ago we sped around Bangkok on his purple scooter (he drives like a bald bat out of hell, weaving between busses and food carts, and one can only close their eyes and hope…) looking for a restaurant space. I never found one with Paolo, and he later moved to Beijing, to helm the kitchens at the Aman. The space I later found became Soul Food Mahanakorn. But finally, gracefully, the pieces fit.

The last two-and-a-half years of my life have been rewarding, and often miserable, for the same reason. It is hard to run a restaurant alone, without a partner. The closest thing I’ve had to that was Chai, my manager, who last month returned to Myanmmar. I miss Chai. And I’m incredibly excited to work with Paolo.

We want to create a bastard-child of a trattoria – (should we call it Bastardo? Nah) with the rustic, simple cooking that one might find in Rome, or Puglia, in small restaurants along the Appian Way that winds south towards the heel of the boot. But with the sensibility of something other – something a little younger, fresher, and less constrained by the order that seems to define the Italian Restaurant In Asia. Paolo will bring his spirit onto the floor, and mine will occasionally drift into the kitchen. The wines will be from wherever we feel like. The drinks will be strong. The room warm. And if we get it right, the customers happy.

But first we must eat, and I’ll share some of that with you here. Cheers.

 

On Looking Back, And Forward

The other night my wife told me that I don’t write enough, anymore.

This is an uncharacteristic thing for her to say, as she spent many years with a man who stared for hours at his computer screen, polishing sentences, forcing her to read pieces, or raging at clumsy revisions from an editor who obviously didn’t understand what the fuck he was talking about. Obviously she’s right: I haven’t written much at all, and I do miss it. Perhaps she also misses the silence my writing allows.

Well,  

This past week I decided to celebrate Christmas with my staff, as an excuse to have fun, and to bring us all closer together. I like to think we're like a family at the restaurant (albeit a dysfunctional one where a member occasionally disappears or needs to get bailed out of jail.)

I sat with my head chef Pi Bun at my side, the same man who helped my father hang the wood boards on the walls that, sixteen months later, are beginning to buckle from the humidity in Bangkok. Pi Bun doesn’t talk much, but communicates with me in much simpler, humane ways. A hug sometimes, a pat on the back others. Sometimes, after a crazy service, he'll hold my hand and quietly laugh. We don’t really need words.

Across from me was Eak, my sous-chef. Eak has been the focus of much of my ire and pride over the past year-and-a-half. He is my strongest cook and was the weakest link in my kitchen – a headstrong, reckless kid who once disappeared for nearly a week before crawling back, with bloodshot eyes, to ask for his job back. That day marked a turning point in my relationship with Eak. I was impressed – moved – by the fact that he could face me after behaving so carelessly. He looked me right in the eye and asked for forgiveness, and though I told myself a hundred times that I would never let him back into my kitchen again, I did. He has rewarded me with hard work, insight, and an attention to detail that is rare. Eak is very proud of his cooking, and I am proud of him.

It’s not all winsome tales of triumph over adversity. Staff come and go and every time I lose someone I care about I try to tell myself it’s just business. It’s just a job. Putting plates on a table, then taking them away. Making a dish the same way, again and again. But it feels like more than a job when you pour all of yourself into it, and expect everyone else to, too. And so each time I lose someone who is good, I take it personally. I wonder what I did wrong. I wonder if they’re happier working wherever else they might be. I’m not sure if other chefs or owners feel this way, or if they’d even admit it. But I suspect the ones that care, do.

The other night, as I sat next to Pi Bun and across from Eak, and beside my manager Chai – a Burmese man who went from delivering shoes to managing a restaurant in under a year – I felt a certain swelling of pride. We drank Black Label and beer and ate oysters with chili jam and talked about how we wanted to change things for the better. We made menus for Christmas and talked about service issues and smoking meat. And then I left them, to use the bathroom.

The rented toilet was located some distance from the beer garden, inside the husk of a forgotten restaurant. A few decorations still hung on the walls, and I sat there, tipsily staring at them, swimming in the lost possibilities of that place. In every failed restaurant or bar, there is a lingering whiff of the pain and frustration people must have felt. It hangs in the dead air, forever.

But as I walked back my cooks were clinking glasses, and they saw me and smiled. We finished the bottle and staggered home. The next day Eak was in the kitchen before me.  

 

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.   

 

A View From Behind the Bar (and a recipe)

I don't write much about drinks. 

I think this silence stems from a stint, in 2003/04, as a reviewer of bars in Shanghai. Even in my mid-twenties, with an ambitious liver and a thirst for discovering new places, this was not a great gig. Most bars are not very interesting, when one is forced to write about them. Even less so with a research headache. The cocktail scene in Shanghai, circa 2003, wasn't terribly interesting either (it is more so, now).

But over the last few months at Soul Food the bar and I have become bedfellows, so I thought I'd write a bit about it. The reason we're so well acquainted is because it's difficult to find a decent bartender in Bangkok. The kind that cares more about making good drinks than juggling shit or unsnapping beer bottles with an unnecessary whip of the wrist.

The tender of the bar has more responsibility that that of floor staff. You must trust -- or at least think that you might be able to trust -- your barman. And I have gone through several, including one who called himself Beer, both for lack of trust and an abundance of flourishes. Beer also drank a lot of beer, I presume, because he arrived at work late in the afternoon with eyes like maraschino cherries. Beer didn't last long. 

Nor did Ken, who quit after I pinched him in secret, below where the customers could see, for sneezing on his hand as he cut fruit. His feelings were hurt, he explained later that night, because I had gotten upset and asked him to wash his hands. A pinch and a whisper can be dangerous. Because Ken never returned.

I bartended full time here for about ten weeks before training Chai, a server who was trustworthy and intelligent enough to take the slippery reins of the bar. But Chai had to return to his village last week, in the moutains of Burma between Thailand and China. He's getting married, and is gone for almost a month. Chai hadn't been home in seven years, and I let him go so that I can have him back.

And so here I write, again behind the bar, on a quiet Sunday night.

A lot of people come to Soul Food to drink our cocktails, which are made strong and (usually) sour. The drinks are designed to complement the food -- which is strongly flavored too, and sweet and sour and spicy. 

  That's not the cocktail below. It's one made with chili, lime and tequila.

But as complicated or fussy as that may sound, the philosophy at work behind this bar is to push simplicity and quality. A subtle tweak or two on a classic that is unique and familiar at once. That's what I'm aiming for, though sometimes guests see lemongrass or chili or kaffir lime leaves and don't realize they're really drinking an Old Fashioned with ginger, or a Tom Collins with a Thai herb or two.

And so I thought I'd share with you a drink made on this simple premise. One that I really like, and one that you can easily recreate at home. It's called The Lemongrass Daiquiri. Use good rum, a double shake, and a strainer for best results. The egg white is optional, but I like the body it adds and how it tempers the acidity a bit. See my recipe below: 

The Lemongrass Daiquiri

6cl Havana Club Silver (or any good, white rum)

1 stalk lemongrass, peeled of outer layer and sliced thinly

4cl fresh lime juice

3cl sugar syrup

Dash egg white

Directions:

First, take a martini or daiquiri glass, and chill it by filling with water and ice.

Slice one stalk of lemongrass, place it in a cocktail shaker, and muddle it until the fibrous herb is smashed up. You can't muddle too hard. Beat it up.

Add the rum and lime juice and sugar syrup to the shaker, and the dash of egg white.

Shake the mixture -- WITHOUT ICE -- 4 or 5 times. Then add ice, and shake vigorously again, for about 15-20 seconds.

Strain into the cold glass, making sure you get all the foam out of the shaker by shuffling it side-to-side over the glass. 

 Serve (or better yet, drink it). 

The Customer is Occasionally Wrong

I’ve been waiting to write this post for a long time. It is not intended to nip at the heels of diners, or to generate sympathy, or even to encourage other restaurateurs to stand up to their clients. It might make some people angry, or indignant, but my intent is not to provoke.

I’ll begin by saying this: I really like people. All kinds. I’m comfortable on the floor, talking to strangers. I enjoy spending time with my customers, and over the past year many patrons have become friends. Without them, my restaurant is a sad, empty husk.

But let’s consider an altruism  altrustic aphorism that is rammed down our throats from the first time most of us take a job in the service industry: The Customer is Always Right.

Ah, the limitless possibilities of infallibility.

I used to preach this very line to my staff, and I danced around the subject once here, in the story of the lady in pink who only ate pink things. While it’s best to bend over (backwards, mind you) for customers in most situations, there are times when one is asked to bend a stretch too far. There are some customers that are, in fact, wrong. I assume they know this, because entering a place that serves food does not exempt one from societal norms. I’ll give you a few examples:

If you throw a birthday party for 23, order water and a few salads, and sneak in 3 bottles of rotgut rum in your pants to drink under the table with your friends that is wrong. You know it is. And you should expect to be thrown out when we catch you, but we won’t. Because we are masochists.

I bet he doesn't play the violin

If you do not eat any animal products, and you waltz into a restaurant and dourly demand a meal without any animal products, when the cuisine cooked in that restaurant’s kitchen is built on a foundation of seasoning that comes from animals, this is not right. It’s like going into a guitar shop and demanding that they sell you a flute. Really, I have nothing against vegans. But my restaurant does not sell what you seek. And it is not your right to demand for us to do so. (Still, we probably will, and especially if you call ahead, because we are masochists).

If you storm into a restaurant to demand a table, at 830pm on a Friday night, with two escorts in tow and a rented luxury car parked in plain sight outside, thinking that this will aid your chances of getting a table without a reservation, it won’t. And if you force the owner to ‘call your butler’ at your 5-star hotel while he is busy serving perfectly nice people their dinners, well, that is not right. If you then throw coins in anger at my staff, and spit on the floor, and threaten to burn down the building, well, that really isn’t right either. And you can fuck off, because we’re not that masochistic.

Right now, as you read this, you might think – oh, this is just bitterness. Venting. Catharsis. Whinging. Well, perhaps, but I’m trying to get somewhere. I’m trying to make a point.

The Customer is Always Right is Occasionally Wrong. It encourages people to act in bizarre and uncouth ways. Ways that they would never behave in someone’s home, or grocery store, or library. 

What the wrong customer does is affect the dining experience of respectful guests in a negative manner. Whether it’s backing up the kitchen with a ridiculous order; shouting and cursing in midst of dinner; berating staff so that they’re afraid to do their job; or taking up all the tables so that they can surreptitiously sip booze that they snuck in, in their pants. It fucks up a machine we spend a lot of time tuning. It gives bad people an unfair advantage – they get all the attention while perfectly civil people are ignored. And that is selfish.

Last Friday I had probably the weirdest night in terms of service since we opened at Soul Food. But the thing was, after all the problems had subsided, I looked up at the bar and in the dining room and felt a surge of contentment. Like a glance of warm sun in winter. A regular offered to buy me a beer. People smiled and chatted as they ate their meals. My staff breathed a little easier, and things returned to normal.

And as I hop and skip from one cliché to the next, I’ll admit it. This is why we do it – for that feeling of satisfaction we get when others are happy for what we do. It's a relationship.

And this relationship of trust and respect is what's right about customers, and about us, the guys on the other side.

 

A Brief Note on Perspective

It has been a long time since I last wrote.

Six months and five days, according to my brisk calculation.

But no matter. We’ve much catching up to do.

In the past six or eight months the restaurant that I dreamt up here and at my posts at The Atlanic has become a reality. Soul Food Mahanakorn now hums with commerce and conversation and sometimes chaos; and after one year of work I finally have found enough time to sit down and reflect on what has passed.

This is an exercise in writing, to see how well my memory serves me, because ultimately I’d like to put these collective ramblings into a book. Recipes cross-stitched in the manic fabric of opening one’s first restaurant. Or something like that.

The greatest change that I’ve experienced over the past year has been one of perspective. Not only how I interpret the spatial relationships between customers and servers, or workers and owners, but really, how I view the world. As a writer, I used to look in from without. Now, that has been flipped 'round. 

A few weekends ago, sitting outside a bar I frequent after our service dies down, in those hours where waiters and bartenders and managers spill out onto streets full of people who are several hours ahead of them in terms of merriment, I was talking to a few friends. Most of them were writers. We traded stories. Of recent trips, political bullshit, drunken nights, single lives. I can’t remember what we spoke about, specifically. But as I said my piece, which I’m sure involved a tale of horror or surprise or (rarely) satisfaction within the four walls of my place of business, a friend said this, “Dude, I don’t mean to be a dick, but why don’t you tell a fucking story that doesn’t have something to do with your restaurant.”

Two things:

One, when someone says “I don’t mean to be dick” they are most likely being a dick.

Two, he was right. I had nothing else to talk about. I had been locked up on one of three floors, 47 square meters each, for a year. I hadn’t gone out into the world, but the world had come to me. And smiled sweetly, or threatened to burn my goddamned shop down, or had thrown up all over the wall behind the toilet or gotten engaged at table three as what became their favorite song played or had simply paid and vanished.

I had shuttled back and forth between those other realms of market and living room and bed, but really, this last year of my life has been illuminated in the dusky light of carefully dimmed halogen or the fluorescent and flinty steel of the kitchen. It has a soundtrack, of familiar songs I know not only words but of stories to.

It was all that I had to talk about. And so I went on. 

I will here, too.

 

 

Dancing With Compassion and Good Sense

A few folks have asked me what was the greatest challenge I've faced while opening this joint. I might make a joke about the ghosts in the space or the drunk electrician whose creations are still coming back to haunt me (on Thursday, 45 minutes before service, the circuit breaker caught on fire). There was water. There were smells. Yeah, all that.

But you can control those things. What I can't easily control are the relationships between myself and my staff, and their relationships with each other. To gain the respect of my staff so that they value their work and their own very particular contribution to this restaurant is by far the greatest challenge I've faced. It's not always -- as some would lead me to believe -- about being kind. One also needs to set examples. I'm learning that.

The most difficult thing I've faced personally is how to balance compassion and understanding with good business sense. This is a fascinating and frustrating place to operate a business; maintaining a working relationship with someone can sometimes, at least in my own experience, force you to bend your own boundaries of right and wrong.  

But service and kitchen work are also jobs that demand great professionalism and care and attention to detail and ridiculous hours and for all that rewards people with a pretty crappy salary. So sometimes, to keep everything from falling apart you need to let a few things slip. But in this elaborate dance between figuring out what is right for me and what's going wrong behind my back I've had to trust my instincts most. The thing is, I haven't. I've been conned a little and lied to a bit and accepted far more of that than I ever thought I might. (I do not think this is unique to Thailand, sensitive netizens. I think it is unique to the restaurant business. So please, relax your angry fingers.)

In the end, my gut has always been right. I knew the designers of the restaurant were incompetent fools. I gave them a second chance, and for my generosity they screwed me. I knew that a former staff member was a corrosive force, yet I let him stay and corrupt the culture of my place. And now I wonder when I'll really, truly trust my instincts. Now is a good time to start, I suppose. 

Woke Up, Fell Out Of Bed (a day in the life file)

Hey Everybody. So I'm sitting here at the bar, as the guests chatter. I'm spotlit in the corner by the specials board which makes me feel like a decorative object, and I'm wondering when the heck it'll be late enough to have a beer. I've learned a lot of things in the five weeks that we've been open, and one of the more important things is that just because you feel like you ought to have a beer in your bar doesn't mean you really should. Wait it out. Hold on. Keep an eye on things. Drink some water, fool. 

I thought I'd write a post today about today. Or any other day. Because I have fallen into a routine. 

A few weeks back I was drinking beers and bitching with another restaurant owner/chef (as we are wont to do). That chef has some pretty successful Thai restaurants around the world, and with sharp and cynical insight he said something that perfectly summed up what it's like to run a restaurant. "It's like running on a treadmill, you just keep sweating and running and growling and you never go anywhere but there." He's right. Really. It's all very stationary.

Each morning I wake up and look at my numbers. If I'm feeling brave I break them down and try to figure out what they all mean. Then, there are calls to the accountant. And the lawyer, on occasion. Then I make menus if we're doing a special menu for someone. I cuddle with my dog for awhile, stare into my empty fridge, suck down some coffee and head to the restaurant. Usually won't see my house for another 12+ hours after that.

I'd forgotten how empty empty restaurants feel. It's eerie being downstairs in my dining room so I usually head up two flights of stairs to the kitchen, where I can hear the clop-clop-clop of the stone mortar making paste from herbs and spices. I am met with the smiles of my five cooks - and then I hang with them. Sometimes, I show them tricks, like how to make yogurt for the samosas. Sometimes, they show me tricks, like how to wrap a fish in a banana leaf. 

That's Nym. She makes really good salads, and has an incredibly sweet smile.

Next comes my favorite part of the day -- my trip to the market. I gossip with the fish monger gals at On Nut market, sticking my fingers inside the gills of sea creatures, smelling bags of crabmeat, and still staring with wonder as a coconut husk becomes shreds of coconut, like snow, and then how that becomes the thick, fatty, luxurious cream that drips from the stainless steel press. At the market I wander and wonder about what to cook. Sometimes its a free-range chicken soup with herbs. Today I bought some gelatin and made coconut panna cotta with crispy/sweet/salty candied peanuts. Sometimes I just leave it to my team. They are pretty good now.

Then I return to my shop with seafood and whatever else, peel off my sweaty tee-shirt, put on something with a collar, make a playlist perhaps, feed the ghost outside, look up at King Rama V's photo, and wonder how busy we'll get.

Then, I open the door. Showtime.

Well, We're Open.

You expected a triumphant post? A coming-of-age tale? Too busy for that now.

So how about this: we're open, and we'd like to serve you sometime. Soul Food Mahanakorn is located at 56/10 Sukhumvit Soi 55, directly opposite the Grand Tower Inn, and very close to the BTS stop. I'm off the the market now to pick up coconut cream, herbs and fish. Today I'll be working on some seafood dishes, so expect a grilled fish and a seafood curry in addition to our regular menu, which I've posted below. That menu will grow, as we do. Hope to see you soon. Thanks for reading. Jarrett

              Soul Food Mahanakorn

Good ingredients. Honest cooking. Serious drinks.

Drinking Snacks:

Mieng Kham: Butterhead lettuce leaves, chopped limes, chilies, fried garlic, peanuts, ginger, shallot, herbs, grilled pork jowl and tamarind Jam. Wrap it. 150

Prawn Satay: Tiger prawns marinated overnight, char-grilled and served with sweet cucumber relish. 120

Chan Kao Chicken Wings: One-bite chicken wings with Sriracha chili sauce and pickled ginger. 120

Southern Thai Samosas: Minced chicken, cumin, spring roll wrapper, mint and yogurt dip.110

Dips

Nahm Prik Two Ways:: Northern Thai dip w’ char-grilled green chilies, Dai-style roasted tomato salsa, or pork and tomato naam prik ong (choose two). Served with raw vegetables, quail eggs, pork rinds. 150

Salads

Yam Makrua Yao: Sour, smoky Bangkok classic with hard-boiled duck eggs, mint, coriander, bacon. 140

Som Tam Thai: Our secret recipe of thick, crunchy papaya with dried shrimp, peanuts, fish sauce and coconut sugar. Served with organic red sticky rice from Surin. 90

Meats

Gai Tawt Hat Yai: Southern fried chicken, served with spicy and sweet sauce and watermelon pickles. 140

Nahm Tok Moo: Issan-style pork, marinated in fish sauce and tossed in a fiery dressing with herbs. 120

Curries

Gaeng Hang Lay: Burmese-style curry with dried spices, pickled garlic, ginger and braised pork served with ginger pickle and organic brown rice on the side. 150

Gaeng Om: Lao/Issan curry with grass-fed beef, chilies, pumpkin and dill, with red sticky or brown rice.  140

*We use organic and sustainable produce whenever we can, our food is MSG-free, and everything is made in-house.