Light Snacks Will Be Served

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.  

 

A Quick Note on Service in Paris: New Versus Old School

There is nothing so intimidating as a Parisian waiter glowering at you as you fumble through a menu.  I find myself lucky; I speak a few languages and so my mind is more malleable than those who speak one. Four years of Latin, and a career in the food industry helps too. I can read French menus -- I just can't make them come out of my mouth with any measure of grace.

Many overworked Parisian waiters seem to enjoy the pain visitors feel when ordering food. It's like a sprikling of schadenfreude in their mundane workday. I can sympathize to a certain extent -- many waiters are working eight or ten tables at once, far too many, and most of those tables are populated by foreigners. But then my mind turns to my own servers in Bangkok, who do the same job with mostly foreign clientele, without a hint of pretension, or worse, disgust. C'est la vie.

But I saw signs of change in Parisian service, and it was directly related to the age of those running the restaurants. In old-school brasseries and bistros with repute, the service was brusque at best and downright scornful at worst. The food allows one to (mostly) forget. But at two of Paris' newest and most promising restaurants, my wife and I were welcomed with the sort of casual grace that defines great service today. At Septime and Agape Substance we were greeted, served, and soothed by a kind of conviviality that was almost unnerving after eating elsewhere in town. 

I think that both of these places should be commeded for that; they are fashionable, they are modern, they are hard to get into, but they are also respectful of customers and mindful of the language gap. This seemed to me like a great departure from the old-school scowl and 'pffft!' that one often encounters.

It was a mark of prefessionalism and a desire to make people enjoy not just the food and the wine but the philosophy at work behind it. And today, no matter where you are, that's exactly what it takes to make it.  

 

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. 

Stuck inside of Bangkok, with the Paris blues, again.

So the story goes like this: 

You don't go on a lot of vacations when you work in the food business. Since I hung up the writing spurs and did this thing, I left exactly once for a four day trip to China for a (beautiful) wedding. There was a pipe-dream escape to Spain in May that never happened, for several reasons. And it all began to build up, the frustration and the heat and wet of Bangkok and the hours and the fact that I haven't left Asia in two years. And then I had a dream. My wife and I were eating oysters in some unknown Parisian brasserie, out on the sidewalk, and it was all so perfect in my intangible, dreamy belief, until I woke up and opened my eyes and saw the heavy rain falling on the palm trees outside.

I booked tickets that morning.

"Fuck it, you gotta go sometime," I thought. "And now you don't have a choice."

And so we went. And it was sublime.

And there were oysters.

(More to come on what we ate and where, and also a bit about my new little project at Soul Food Mahanakorn)

 

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.

 

 

A Day in the Life, Part 2

Thanks to my neighbor Tuan for this look behind the scenes.