Light Snacks Will Be Served

On surprises.

Life is a surprise.

From the very first moment when it strangely begins, a tangle of things, all the way to the end.

As I write I’m sitting on Thai Airways flight 409, three-fourths of the way to Singapore. As we cruise on this seemingly immovable, two-storey aircraft, my sous chef Eak is riding to my right. He’s staring intently at the in-flight entertainment like his fortune lies inside, considering possibilities. Pi Bun, my head chef, sits beside him looking vaguely afraid. I suspect he is.

Exactly three months ago today these two sat beside me, as air was forced in and out of my brittle lungs through a tube, inside Samitivej Hospital. I was stuck inside a body that didn’t want to work. My chef Pi Bun wept as I tried to shake my head, to tell him that I wasn’t going just yet. But my thirty percent chance became fifty, and soon my life wasn’t reduced to percentages. Time and medicine and care and the mostly the comfort of people close to me, brought me back.  I haven’t written about my accident since it happened, and I don’t know if I ever will, after this. But it happened. And it was quite a surprise.

We’re on our way to Singapore to cook brunch at the Ritz-Carlton hotel on the 21st of October. Those of you who have followed this blog, or have visited my restaurant, might understand how much this means to me. To have the opportunity to bring my boys – the ones who stood behind me for the last two years, as I took all the credit; who stuck with me as I fired my manager (their cousin); who ground their way through 700 services; who stood by my side as I nearly left them without a place to work, without so much as a shake of the head – to take them outside of Thailand and to cook with them is an extraordinary experience.

When we disembark with our luggage, we’ll drive across Singapore and into the strange and shiny cavern of a five-star hotel lobby. There will be a perplexing array of light switches to switch and a ridiculous number of pillows to sleep on and banquet kitchens that could swallow our little restaurant in one gulp. We’ll slowly simmer fish with ginger and pandan leaves and lemongrass, and fry the fragrant curry paste we pounded yesterday in Bangkok. Then we’ll grind pork and fold it with salt and turmeric, lime leaves and chilies, and stuff that into casings for sausage. On Sunday, we’ll frantically plate it all for 400 guests and maybe sneak in a glass of Champagne and hop back on a plane to Bangkok.

I won’t delve too far into this life and how my eyes might filter things differently. But today I woke up and sharpened my knives, quietly wrapping them in soft cloth. I kissed my wife and smiled, rode my motorbike to the shop and met my chefs for lunch. The air and the quality of sunlight felt different as I buzzed through the traffic, as if the draining rains had finally stopped and our dry season had arrived.

Maybe it has. Maybe not.

 

Before, After

 

There is so much I still need to write about this process of opening. The feelings of despair and exhaustion and pride and frustration and anger and joy from circumstances expected and absurd. But I'll save that for later because I am really, unbelievably tired. And in my narrative's place I'll share with you two pictures: One, of a rotting concrete box just three months ago, and another, of a bar that last night, for the first time, sprung to life. 

  

(We're not open yet. I am still dealing with licensing and legal issues, but when we are open -- in a little more than a week, after more practice -- I'll share that here. Last night was a test run. And all things considered, it went pretty well.) 

Show and Tell: Yasothorn Parasol

Bun Bang Fai, Isaan's (and Lao's) annual rocket launching festivities, fall on some of the hottest days of the year. This past weekend, the sun there was magnetically hot -- about 41 degrees centigrade -- and it glued your shirt to your back, and your feet to the parched earth. But people improvise nicely.    

 

Jump and Jive

The first time I ate goong tem, Northeast Thailand's 'jumping shrimp' salad, I was in a public restroom. Well, actually I was on my way to the toilet, in Bangkok's Chatujak Market, paying the attendant 5 baht to use her facilities.

Before her was a bright, shiny salad of krill-like shrimp, dices of crimson and emerald chilies, chives, mint, and cilantro. It was beautiful. She saw my hungry eyes, laughed, and thrust her plastic spoon in my face. I chewed on the crisp prawns, and they burst in my mouth, still wriggling. Then the herbs popped, and the chilies exploded. It was the best thing I've ever eaten in a toilet, and better than most things I've eaten in fancy restaurants. That was six months ago.

Last week I found myself on the Mekong, just outside of Chiang Khan, as fisherman drifted just above the fast water at Kaeng Kood Koo, a swirl of river currents and restaurants that draws tourists. They were casting small mesh nets into the water, fishing for tiny prawns. I was in the perfect spot for a plate of goong tem. 

  

We sat under a thatch sala, on cushions in our bare feet, and stared out at Laos on the other side of the stream. I thought about how many majestic trees there were in Laos, and wished there were more on our side. Then a dish arrived covered by another plate. It was speaking to us. 

'Thop, plop, dunk!' it said, warning us of the action inside. A few determined little prawns wriggled their way out the sides, making a run for the water (sadly for them, the Mekong was an unhoppable distance away - maybe 200 yards). As I removed the lid, prawns popped like grasshoppers out of the dish - one flew up about two feet, and landed right in the middle of my spoon, like an acrobat. I gobbled him up, like an acrobat-eating ogre. They were sweet and fresh - not muddy or fishy - but most of the flavor from this dish comes from the lime juice, herbs and the roasted glutinous rice that, when ground, holds Isaan's salads together. 

Better than the bathroom!      

 

Show and Tell: Cold Chillin'

Last night, when I went out to eat with friends, we didn't even break a sweat.

When you can eat a meal outside in Bangkok, without perspiring on it, that can only mean one thing: Winter has arrived. And that means that Thais will break out their winter hats for the next few months, when the mercury falls below 80 (that's about 27C). Street dogs will be seen wandering about with old t-shirts on, clothed in hand-me-down Buddhist compassion. And the streets will fill with even more people than normal, eating food and drinking.  'Tis a wonderful, and all-too-brief season, this short-lived drought of stickiness.

To kick it off last night, we went to my local beer garden. I call it 'The Tent' because that's what it is - a jolly bigtop that serves grilled chickens, rock salt rubbed fishes and sour salads to hundreds of locals every night. It's full of well-fed, friendly dogs and blind men wander through on occasion, singing mournful songs through their battery powered amplifiers. Occasionally, an elephant plods by and delights the drinking crowd by eating their fistfuls of sugarcane.   

This all probably sounds very routine if you live in Bangkok, but it's still strange and wonderful and very fun for me. Pots bubble over a single hunk of charcoal and friends plop cubes in each others' drinks, chasing them with whiskey and soda.  They'll laugh and eat talk and order all over again and stay long past expected. And from tomorrow night until February, that's probably what I'll be doing after dark too.

(The Tent is located on Narathiwas, just before Soi 24, on the same side of the street. I forgot the Thai name, but if you're heading north on Narathiwas and Rama 3 is behind you, it's the first restaurant on your left, just past the pedestrian flyover. I'll get firm details the next time I go. Soon.)

Show and Tell: The Fortune

The room was filled with smoke and the strange glow of lamps reflecting off green felt. I looked around the room. An Australian man, large, bald head, sleeveless shirt, beer belly, Heineken. A skinny Korean hipster, diet coke, satin jacket, tribal tattoos like spiderwebs on steady hands. Two African men, one dreadlocked, the other bald, bottles of water and slim cigarillos. That, and ten Thai girls working the room in what looked like dowdy prom dresses altered, hemlines rising like stakes on the tables.

This was my first trip to the pool halls of lower Sukhamvit. It’s a bizarre world, with pool sharks disguised as streetwalkers, and western men sizing up their female competition like Clint Eastwood in a dusty Spaghetti Western. I lost my game, stepped outside for air, and saw this fortune teller on the sidewalk. I took a quick photo, and went back in to lose again.   

Show and Tell: Isaan Caviar Truck Stop

I'm about to break with tradition here and write about a food that I ate that is 'weird'. Readers of my blog may remember that weird food coverage is a pet peeve of mine: Just because something is utterly bizarre to you doesn't mean that it is rightfully strange. It's entirely subjective. Many Americans, for instance, think that eating a fish that has bones inside, and a head still affixed, is a repellent thing to do. I danced around that idea here, in a recent Atlantic post about little pigs.

This Saturday I found myself at an Isaan restaurant with a great number of ant egg dishes, which is a fairly common thing to eat in that area of Northeast Thailand. And I'd never eaten them, so we ordered a bowl of ant eggs in a pungent soup, deeply flavored with musky herbs and lots of chili. The restaurant, called Crokmai Thai Lao, was especially delicious and festive on a crowded Saturday. The ant eggs, on the other hand, were very ordinary. Once again, the bizarre proved to be tasteless - their only contribution to the soup was a slightly sour tang and a pleasant, caviar-like pop when one bursts between your teeth.

 

Overall it was a great meal - a perfectly balanced papaya salad, a rich duck laab salad that contained chopped meat, crispy gizzard, and crunchy skin dressed in spicy/sour, and a moist grilled chicken. After polishing it all off, we did manage to see something pretty extraordinary. This truck, decked out with four tiny Michelin men on the lookout, waiting just outside the restaurant.