Enter Chef McDang…….

This name was unfamiliar to me until I saw him giving Gordon Ramsay a hard time on GR’s ‘Great Escapes’ segment on Thailand.  Anyone with a humourous ‘*&^% you’ attitude like that is a rare commodity in Asia.

Foodie friends started telling me about him and his book, The Principles of Thai Cookery, and the depth of knowledge contained within those pages told me all I needed to know about McDang.

Anyone interested in learning more about Chef McDang can read about it on his website.  By now, you will be wondering if he is of Scottish descent or somehow part of a sinister, underground gang of burger toting clowns.  The simple truth is, its his Thai nickname, spelt to the closest western equivalent.  Mystery solved.

Great book, great TV personality, but the question begs to be asked, “Can he cook?”  Thats what brought me to the Chef’s table at the St Regis Bangkok with a group of foodie friends.  The menu was in the Central Thai Cooking style and I sat down with a strange feeling of excitement and nervousness.

Similar to meeting someone online, in person, for the first time.  Was it going to be good or is this going to be another disappointment as it always turns out to be?

To lift the suspense  it was a great dinner and we had a great time!

The first dish was an impossibly light ‘Hor Muk’, McDang’s take on a classic Thai dish.  Its delicacy reminded me of Hidemi Sugino’s cakes in Tokyo and the pungent, tropical flavours of coconut, chilli and zesty kafir leaves left me craving a second helping.

We have something similar in Singapore called ‘Otak’, a Peranakan dish that is found in Singapore, Malaysia, Southern Thailand and Indonesia under different names.  This is one of my favourite dishes and I hardly pass up a chance to eat it at street markets.    My personal favourite is ‘Hor Muk Kai Mangda’, Thai otak with horse-shoe crab eggs.

It is a simple looking snack to pop in your mouth, but to make a truly good one requires a lot of effort and careful selection of ingredients.

My dear friend, Philip Chia fed me the best Peranakan version.  Now I’ve eaten the best modern Thai version.  I’m in trouble, because you can’t eat any of these outside of specially arranged dinners!

The Thai version is similar to the Peranakan version, but in McDang’s hands, his interpretation set the tone for the dishes to follow.

Braised pork belly with quail’s egg was served next.  This chinese style dish had a delicate balance of fat and meat accentuated by a skilfully braising sauce of soy and spices.  Oftentimes, the sauce ends up being too sweet or salty, but here, it was well executed.   Currently being on a liquid diet after a wisdom tooth extraction, I am tortured by thoughts of using pork cheeks for a porkier, fattier and unctuous rendition.

Following the richness of the pork, came a palate cleansing sour soup infused with smoked fish.  I may be mistaken, but this was a consomme of ‘Tom Klong Pla Krob’.  This is Thai style dashi on steroids!  Pleasantly sour with a hint of smoke, every bite with the condiments of shrimp, chicken, banana flower and sour mango brought different tastes and textures.  A true study in simplicity and complexity.

The next time you are thinking of ordering a Tom Yum, order Tom Klong instead.  Tom Yum is great if soured by lime, but nowadays, its oftentimes bastardised by cheap, flavoured lime juice.  Tom Klong is cleaner, sprightlier and brings the delicate flavours of the dish togather harmoniously.

This was my favourite dish of the night. It was the pomelo salad that got me, not the smoked salmon.  That said, the salmon was of high quality and went surprisingly well with the Thai flavours.  But the Pomelo salad…..my god.    Bursting sacs of sweet sour pomelo, crunchy fried shallots and a melange of ingredients that escape me makes this a truly memorable dish.  Every bite was a textural delight with a complex interplay of sweet, salty, sour and bitter.  Each taste distinct yet melodious in unison.  Knowing the exact recipe for such a dish is useless because without a knowing touch, one can only taste it again in their dreams.

The Thai salad, be it a papaya, mango or pomelo salad is a simple salad to make.  Just bung the ingredients in proper order into a mortar and pound away.  It more or less always turns out tasting ok, but very very very rarely does it turn out great.  Don’t ask me how to make it great, I eat, not cook Thai.

In the end, I’m sure McDang will say there is no secret, just a careful understanding of ingredients, selecting them well and treating each one with respect.  No one tamarind is the same, just like no one pomelo from Nakhon Pathom will be collectively awesome.  Terroir is a big part of Thai cookery, but sadly, this knowledge is slipping away.

This beautiful dish held morsels of smokey eggplant.  After being blown away by the pomelo salad, this dish unfairly did not have the mouth tingling ‘wow’ factor.  hence, my memory of it isn’t that strong but I do remember enjoying it.  Smokey eggplant is always one of my favourite tastes!

At this point, bellies were getting full when we were served this unusual dish of watermelon with smoked fish flakes.  Sweet and salty is a big thing in Asia, but here in the tropics, we like sweet, salty and fishy!   I loved this dish as it reminded me of my childhood, eating soy caramel coated dried cuttlefish sold from the back of an ice cream truck.  Loved it.

This dish of osso bucco in green curry.  I wasn’t a fan of the osso bucco (Not a fan, unless its the whole shank from an old animal) but I loved the curry!   Any coconut based Thai curry is not a personal favourite due to personal taste.  In this instance, it had the pungency and aroma that almost all green curries lack.

Tom Kha, oftentimes paired with chicken is not one of my favourite dishes.  In the hands of the normal, its a heavy, coconutty affair with the careless acidity from a shoddy cook.  In Chef McDang’s rendition, this was a totally new dish to me.

Firstly, the coconut sauce was light with a tartness that revealed the dish’s depth of flavour.  Like a perfectly made beurre blanc in perfect emulsion, bass notes of krachai (lesser galangal) accentuated by herbs made the sauce good enough to drink on its own.  The sauce was a study in Thai cuisine, but the use of snapper was a stroke of genius.

Chicken is bland and in the wrong hands, as palatable as erasers.  Tom Kha Kai, not one of my favourite things to eat.  In this instance, however, the snapper was browned, crisped and salted well.  Every bite of the firm flesh had a saline dose of marine goodness followed by a deep, roasted flavour only browned fish can give.  Napped with the sauce, it was a contrast in flavours and textures.  A truly masterful dish.

Desserts are usually given little airtime in a fine dining setting, which is a shame really.  Good pastry chefs are hard to find, more so in Thai desserts, which to my ignorance, does not have that great a variety from which to draw inspiration from.

The standout dessert here was the orange in caramel syrup, pictured on the far left.  Why was it so fantastic?  One bite brought me to a citrus orchard, sucking up al that sweet orange nectar not wanting to waste a drop.   Simple is hard.     The other desserts were nice as well, full of flavour and not too sweet but I’d have preferred lighter compositions as it was a heavy meal!

In conclusion, we all left the restaurant feeling extremely satisfied.  I am happy knowing that Thailand has Chef McDang who is truly passionate about Thai food.

Just like molecular cuisine has spawned a thousand and one wannabes going around making spheres and foams with nary an idea of what they are doing, there are many going around touting ‘Royal recipes’ and traditional methods whilst serving up shit.

I was thankful that Chef McDang’s food turned out better than expected, as such dinner full of expectation oftentimes falls flat on the plate.  Thai food is one cuisine that I can never cook, as it requires a special touch of ‘Thai-ness’.  Hopefully, we can continue to be fed so well as we did at this dinner, by other chefs who follow in his spirit.

There are only 2 ways to get there, drive, or grab a cab.  You can get the GPS coordinates below, but if you are going the taxi route, get your concierge to make a deal with the cab to bring you there and back.  Throw in a crab lunch for your cabby and it’ll be too hard a deal for him to resist!   I’m not sure how much a return fare is gonna cost, but personally, I’m willing to pay 1000 baht for the ride there and back.  Don’t offer that of course, let the cabbie tell you how much!

This pool of coral crabs are for the uninformed who failed to book their crabs for lunch.  Allowed to swim freely until they are despatched, they offer a bit of consolation for those who have made the journey to Pranburi without booking their meal.

These brown crabs (Mud crabs, Mangrove crabs) are the business!  Growing up to 3.5kgs in the wild, us SE Asians will know that these are some of the tastiest crabs around!  Whilst eating a Japanese King Crab is a tasty experience in itself, I just might grab for one of these mud crabs first if both were placed in front of me!  It seems to me that there is just more flavour to these mud crabs, or perhaps its the satisfaction from digging around for your meat!

The poor suckers are steamed and chopped, and the shirtless uncle chopping ‘em up has an interesting story of his own.  On weekdays, he is a professor of logistics at the Japanese Thai Institute (TPA) in Bangkok.  Yok Sod is his weekend getaway where he can indulge in his true passion for food.  In his younger days, he trained and worked as a cook, and it shows in his attention to detail, run down restaurant shack not-withstanding.

We took our seats on the edge of the estuary and saw thousands upon thousands of tiny crabs going about their business.  Pranburi is near the gulf of Thailand and we were sat next to one of the many tributaries that feed it.  We spied fish feeding on these crabs, along with kingfishers and wild storks at the top of the mangrove food chain.  The crabs are gathered from the wild and fattened on farms along the estuaries for eating.  If these thousands of wild crablets (sic) are anything to go by, I’d say this is a highly sustainable industry!  These mangrove crabs we were about to eat were grown just down the road, and the amazing quality of crabs here is a story in itself, to be told later!  On to the food!

We started the meal with Tom Yum Pla Thu, an intensely flavoured clear Tom Yum with steamed, fresh Pla Thu on the side.  This short bodied mackerel is oftentimes sold in baskets of three, head snapped downwards to facilitate packing and boiled in salted water to extend their shelf life.  Fatty Mackerel tend to degrade very quickly, unlike fish like Sole which benefit from a few days of ageing to improve flavour.

Here, they are fresh off the boats in the morning and have a sweet savoury flavour with a hint of Mackerel’s delicious fattiness.  This was the best Tom Yum Pla Thu we’ve eaten, the Tom Yum intense but balanced, with its sprightly nature complementing the snow soft mackerel.  We weren’t expecting the side dishes to distract us from the main show….but boy were we wrong!

Seablite was on the cards next, an estuary vegetable that grows wild in saline waters.  Just like Samphire in Europe, this vegetable has a unique savory tang and a crunchy heart.  Perhaps it was blanched in fresh water prior to cooking just like Samphire to take off the salt?  I’m not sure, having seen this veg for the first time.

Cooked over high heat with chili, soy sauce and tiny local garlic, this dish made me wonder why I’ve never seen it before!    I will be looking out for seablite now, its a fantastic vegetable!

We could not resist ordering the prawns too, and they were smashingly fresh as well, but then again, we just ate them the night before in Huahin.  Great prawns are not in short supply in this region!  Excellent nonetheless, but we were awaiting the main show.

Large crabs, booked at 9 in the morning for a table of 2.   Oh yea!    Loaded with roe that was oh so damn *&^%ing sweet.  These were the best mud crabs we ever had.  They were harvested from the farms down the road only a few hours ago.   “They don’t travel so well”, is what the uncle told us.  Perhaps seafood are no different from mammals? Transportation is stressful and the stress hormones screw with the meat’s pH and mush up the meat and depletes it of its natural flavour.  Does this happen to seafood too?  Who knows.

What we do know is that here, they are creamy, sweet, savoury, chunky with that tender, flaking quality.  You don’t need any sauce or condiment other than a quick swipe in its own roe to send you deeper into crab heaven.  Scrape out its innards (Brains) with a spoon and eat it with rice and you get a rich, umami mouthful that will leave you groaning in pleasure.

For the best steamed crab, his secret is to steam only a lively crab (Dying or dead ones are discarded).  He left out the part where he instinctively cooks different batches of crabs at the same time, pulling them out as they each perfection, dipping them into cool water to stop the cooking before chopping them up.  The other secret, is the story of how Yok Sod came to be.

Between plucking crabs in and out of the steamer and chopping ‘em up, he regaled to us how years ago, he did a project with the universities in this area. He saw how unscrupulous middlemen were lowballing crab prices, which they then sold on to restaurants for a huge profit.  Farmers, as we know, always get screwed, so this uncle decided to open a crab shack, buying only the best crabs the farmers had for up to 3 times the going price.

Yok Sod, in return, charges its dining customers a low price due to its location and his need to attract customers.  High volume, low profit.  The only problem was that this was in the middle of nowhere!  The strategy was simple at the start, placing signs on the road telling people that there was cheap crab to be had at Yok Sod.   The road that passes Yok Sod services seaside resorts and perhaps a golf course and military camp.  This well travelled road just needed a gourmet destination and Yok Sod filled tha gap!  No sane Asian can ever pass up the chance for cheap crabs, and one only needs to taste Yok Sod crabs once to become an evangelist for their cause.

So, the farmers win, the customers win, but…..uncle Yok Sod became victim to harassment and threats of bodily harm from the unscrupulous middlemen.  As Yok Sod’s fame grew, so did the efforts to bring them down.  These middlemen were jealous of his success and accused him of spoiling the market.  They vandalized his signs, tearing them down to affect his business.

Thankfully, Yok Sod Uncle didn’t retaliate, but took the middle path, understanding that everyone has to make a living.  Therefore, in order to continue helping the farmers earn more, he just kept his mouth shut, took down all the signs and quietly continued to run Yok Sod with no fanfare.  Thats why this is the crab heaven not many people know about.   In a rare case of civility, the middlemen stopped harassing him too.  Perhaps they tasted his crabs and realised that it takes a special talent to elevate a simple dish of steamed crab into a gastronomic feat?

Yok Sod operates during the weekday as well, manned by his staff.  Perhaps there is a profit sharing system going on?  Who knows, but talking to this uncle, it feels like he doesn’t really care about the money.  He really loves his job as a weekend chef, enjoying nothing more than steaming and chopping crabs while the rest of his family and friends do the rest.  There is magic in Yok Sod’s crabs, and the uncle just humbly says its the crabs and the land that make it taste good.  One thing’s for sure, Pranburi and its wonderful crabs would be worst off without his efforts.

I would give this place 3 spare tyres, definitely worth a journey.  I have no idea how to read this card, but the information follows:

GPS Coordinates: N12.19420, E99.99381

Phone: 085-0657123 or 0868832356

Remember, get your concierge to call ahead to book your crabs.  Don’t leave it to chance.

Can the team at Smith live up to St John’s philosophy to which they have so blatantly subscribed?

A dish of calf’s tongue with mexican spice and shallots.  Firstly, the tongue was slightly chewy, not rubbery, but this hints at a wrong temperature and time for cooking sous-vide or just badly cooked on the hob.  I personally like my tongue with a bit of bite, giving lightly after you bite into it and then melting on your mouth.   Smith’s version came up short.

The dressing had a bit of acidity to cut the richness of the tongue, but the greasy red pickled stuff (I assume this is pressed cabbage) brought nothing to the dish other than a leathery texture.  It seemed to be deep fried to a neither crisp nor tender texture, presenting itself as nothing more than a badly executed garnish on a mediocre dish.

The sticky rice cake cubes interlaced with the tongue cubes was perhaps the nicest component in this dish, even though it puzzles me why the rice cakes were on the plate.   You will find a better piece of tongue from a roadside stall in Bangkok that sells all manner of stewed beef parts.  This dish did not inspire confidence.   Very bad memories of a very bad meal at Hyde and Seek (Same restaurant group as Smith) were flashing back.

We like potatoes in all forms, and I wanted a side of fries, but decided to steal them from a friend’s plate later on.  So, we settled on roast potatoes with garlic and rosemary.  Other than being greasy, overcooked and tasting like old cardboard (or Old cold potatoes reheated in a deep fryer), I have no idea why the sprig of rosemary is stuck into the potatoes.  Will a deep fried sprig do anything?  Am I supposed to spear myself in the eyes to distract myself from the pain in my tongue?  I stole this pic off a Thai website as I was busy nursing my Guinness.

The best starter came in the form of mini-haggis.  I’m not sure if these clowns have ever tasted a haggis before, or even know what it is, but this is a bad bad version of a northern Thai sausage, Sai Oua.  Pretend as much as you like that this is a haggis, but I’ve eaten more than a fair share in my life, including 1 quid haggis specials at ASDA (Which taste very good by the way compared to this one).

The sausages were dry and mealy, with a very bad smell that reminded me of andouillette, other than the overtones of spice in a real haggis.  I love andouillette by the way, but this haggis was inedible.  I doused it heavily with yellow mustard with which it was served, only to be further tortured by a cheap tasting ‘dijon’ mustard probably sold by an American brand.

No acidity or punch to cut heavy flavours, only a heavy, cloying flavour that leaves a curious, powdery texture on the tongue.  This dish was a massive fail.  If they had served us a real Sai Oua or Saikrok Issan they bought from the roadside and marked up the price, I would have been happier to eat that.  The photo here was also stolen.

So we ordered a safe choice, smoked, slow cooked pork belly with a honey glaze.  Its very very hard for a restaurant to screw up pork belly, and spying 2 immersion circulators in addition to a Rational combi-steamer in their open kitchen, they had a multitude of means to cook this to perfection.

Well, ladies and gentleman, I stand corrected.  All the technique, PR and hype in the world cannot hide a cook’s ineptness in the kitchen.  What should be instinctive to any old grandma was lost on this kitchen team, as they overcooked this piece of pork.  Instead of being soft and melting with a crisp top, this was dry and stringy.   To be fair, it wasn’t dry and stringy in the sense of jerky, but dry and stringy in that there was no delicate gelatinous quality to it.

A piece of pork belly can be tackled by slow cooking until it is falling apart tender, just like in a Japanese Buta Kakuni. Or it can be cooked until just before the point of falling apart, where a butter knife can easily slice through it. Every first bite releases some juice before breaking down gently in the mouth from chewing, simultaneously lubricating it with a wonderful mix of meat, gelatine and fat.

Not this dish, overcooked and tasting more like a Burger King Breakfast Ham patty rather than a beautifully smoked piece of meat that you’d find in America’s BBQ belt.  Ok, so they said lightly smoked……but still, whats the point if its going to taste like this?

The burger was just like Hyde and Seek’s, bad.  The fries were badly cooked and tasted like a cheap frozen kind fried in oil at the wrong temperature.  It wasn’t crisp on the surface with a fluffy interior.  Instead, it tasted like fries you would get at a school lunch, with a bit less mushiness.  The burger bun with squid ink and parmesan left me wondering if black colouring had not been used instead, as we could not taste anything.  No sharpness of parmesan or earthiness of the ink.  And yes, we ate the components separately.

The burger patty was mushy mushy mushy.   You either have a burger that falls apart in your mouth in small chunks with a bit of a chew, or you can have a burger patty like the one in Maccas or Burger King.   This one was like biting into an undercooked meatball.  The only saving grace for this burger was the taste of the beef, which was nice and beefy.

I recently ate the signature burger at Daniel Boulud’s Bistro in Singapore and their signature burger was worst than this one in terms of taste.  DB’s burger was bland, unbeefy and a total waste of foie gras.  Congrats Smith, this burger was not a total failure as it had a very nice beefy flavour.

Thai beef has improved a lot recently and continues to improve.  Cooked a pot au feu last week with Thai Brangus (Brahmin crossed with Angus Cow) and it was fantastically beefy.

This unbaked lasagna was a few pasta sheets draping a very badly cooked tomato sauce with chewy sausage slices.  This was no ragout, but cheap tomato sauce cooked with mystery meat that reminded me of insoluble jelly babies rather than a beautifully made Cotechino cooked very slowly until it is tender.

Great ragout has a depth of flavour gently married togather from a long, slow simmering at low temperature.  This one was more akin to a cheap pasta restaurant with the added insult of cheap, fake parmesan cheese you get at crappy chain pizza restaurants.   Greyhound Cafe makes a better lasagna than Smith, and I’d choose Greyhound any day.  To be clear, I don’t think the lasagna at Greyhound is much good, but I would not mind eating it, as the price is good for the taste.  Smith’s lasagna price is good too at 330baht, but I’d rather take my chances at Swensen’s.  At least they would give me more fake cheese to drown out the taste of bad tomato sauce.

I thought we were in Swensen’s when this dish arrived on the table.  Overcooked fish lacking all the qualities we look for in fresh sea bass.  There was no gently flaking quality or moist interior to enjoy.  Instead, it was mushy and bland, with a bad taste of browned fish flesh.    Fish browned off the skin usually has this horrible taste to it, as was evident here.

To add insult to what once was a nice piece of fish, its skin was deep fried and subsequently lapped with a foam to accomplish this higher form of cookery technique called soggery.  The dodgy green soup this was bathing in added no complementary flavour whatsoever and the cauliflower puree was just not needed, even if it was the nicest tasting thing on the plate.  Maybe a big dash of Sriracha chilli sauce to bring me back to dodgy fish and chips.

Speaking of which……we saw a plate of what seemed like overcooked salmon sitting on a bright orange puddle of commercial chilli sauce with delicious helping of FD&C Orange Number 1.

Here’s a stolen picture for you.  Its supposed to be a smoked salmon, perhaps inspired by Japanese Shiozake in bento boxes.  Would you like to try this?

I think by now, you already know what the desserts would be like.  This chocolate terrine with citrus tasted like cheap chocolate with cocoa powder (There was a powdery texture, or the chocolate was not refined enough) .  They could’ve told me it was Amedei and I would have believed it, as it shared that signature tasteless quality.  What was not tasteless was the orange fluid gel blobs of citrus that tasted curiously like Tang.  I’ve never ever tasted mandarins like that before.  Smith never ceases to surprise.

This was the best dish of the night.   No, not the maraschino cherries re-marinated in something or the powdery meringue or the fake tasting chocolate sponge.  Its the passionfruit ice cream that tasted really good and refreshing.  A perfect way to cleanse all our tongues of the bad food we just ate.

Conclusion

If you are in to handcuffs, hot wax and all that S&M stuff, I’d advice you not to come here, as it may ruin your plans for the evening.  Nothing destroys one’s libido faster than bad food.  Unfortunately, Smith is packed full night after night, as this kind of food is new to Bangkok, high class restaurants aside (At which you can as well get a very very very bad meal pray for a small handfull of restaurants).

Marketing and PR goes a long way in promoting the virtues of crap food to an audience that doesn’t know any better.  It is a pity that if Thai people took a closer look at their own cuisine and apply the same standards to foreign cuisines, we might be spared the onslaught of well marketed crap food.  Sadly, that is the reality of fine cuisine outside of Europe.

The prices at Smith are ok, not too expensive.  However, one should never ever mistake a cheap price for a good deal, meaning that I should not complain since it was not that expensive.

However, badly cooked food and cheap ingredients are not the same thing.  At St John, cheap cuts of meat are turned into culinary gold, as they do in many other restaurants cheap and expensive.  A good understanding of ingredients and cooking is required to pull this off.  It can be a granny in Bangkok’s Chinatown selling brain soup, or the porridge shop opposite Sukhumvit 49 selling deep fried intestines to the shop selling beef penis and offal soup in Ekkamai.

At Smith, what we had was just very badly cooked food with very bad flavour combinations designed to fool the masses rather than be respectful to food and cuisine.  Much like Thai politics, the masses will, and have been fooled into thinking this is great cuisine.  Rather than waste your money on restaurants like this, please keep your money and go to any street food stall that doesn’t look too dodgy to you and plow back a bit of money into the pockets of the hard working folk.

Eating at Smith’s means propagating bad food and it will be painful to see great food be usurped by mediocrity backed with a great marketing team.

Nose to tail eating INDEED.  Nothing at Smith’s made me believe that they embrace this concept in any way, just a bunch of hype and conceptualized marketing to create a gimmick so beloved by the masses.  The true nose to tail eating is on the streets of Bangkok, not a restaurant with a copied concept more worthy of a bloodied pigs head hung on the front door than in a pot in Smith’s kitchen being cooked badly.

No visit to Paris for pastry geeks should exclude a visit to the temple of one of pastry’s greatest cakes, Storher at Rue Montorgeuil near Les Halles in Paris.  Storher made the original Rum Baba, a simple yeast leavened cake soaked in copious amounts of Rum.

Historians (Read, the internet) says that a greedy Polish king exiled to Alsace made a Rum Baba by soaking a rich, German cake, called a Gugelhopf in alcohol.  He was as well a fan of ‘A thousand and one nights’, thus he named his creation a Baba au Rhum.

There might be a bit of history twisting there in regards to the origins of the name, as Babka is a similar cake in Poland, and Baba (According to the internet) means to be dizzy or ‘fall over’ in French.  This same Baba au Rhum is called Borracho in Spain, which means ‘Drunk’.

Regardless the origins of the name, we can all agree that this is one helluva cake that gives you a good boozy horsekick.  Nicolas Stohrer, a patissier in the King’s court brought it to Paris with the King’s daughter and the rest is history.  Mixed with butter, eggs and strong flour, this rich dough is left to rise either in cylindrical molds (Like in the pictures above), or in round circle molds with a dimple in the middle.

After the dough has risen and baked like bread, its left to dry out a bit before being soaked in hot rum syrup.  Simple adorned with candied cherry and angelica as above, its the original Baba au Rhum.  Bake it in a round circle mold, pipe whipped cream on it adorned with fresh fruits, and it becomes a Savarin.

The original version fed to the King is said to have been a dough perfumed with Saffron and soaked in Malaga wine.  I guess we’d have no choice but to make it ourselves if we would like to feast like an exiled King!

When Stohrer set up shop in Rue Montorgeuil (The shop still stands today!), he made the current version with rum only.  Biting into it, the strong Baba dough gives a nice chew, releasing sweet alcohol shots with every bite.

Conclusion

Well worth a try, if you are in Paris, because it is a nice way to get some extra ‘legs’ from all that walking.  Personally, its a pleasant cake, but not one I’d go googoo about.  I’d sure like to try the original with Saffron and Malaga wine, as it sounds like a more flavourful counterpart to this one.  If I walked past Stohrer again, what the heck, I’d still buy it to have a taste of history!

Filed under: All about Pastry and Desserts, Pastry and Desserts in France Tagged: Borracho, Gugelhopf, Nicolas Storher, Saffron and Malaga Wine Soaked Cake, Savarin ]]> http://eatthatyellowsnow.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/stohrer-the-originator-of-baba-au-rhum/feed/ 0 Nick baba au rhum1 baba au rhum2 http://eatthatyellowsnow.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/stohrer-the-originator-of-baba-au-rhum/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ALifeOfTravelShamelessGluttonyHedonismAndOccasionalEnslavement/~3/82e2sDWFV4E/ http://eatthatyellowsnow.wordpress.com/2012/04/06/st-john-restaurant-nose-to-tail-eating/#comments Fri, 06 Apr 2012 06:39:51 +0000 Homer http://eatthatyellowsnow.wordpress.com/?p=1220 Continue reading →]]> This is a very memorable meal from the past, waaaay back in 2009, when I was living around 30mins walk away from St John Bread and Wine in London.  However, this is at the main, St John restaurant, where we tucked ourselves into one of the most memorable meals of my life.

The simple surroundings, bare, white walls with simple wooden chairs and tables, spoke volumes on how St John went about its food.  Its unfussy, but downright brilliant in its simplicity.  Not many chefs or restaurants in the world can make the kind of food that we ate that night, and I have never eaten anything similar since.

Probably the most famous and copied dish from St. John.  The roasted bone marrow with parsley salad.  So, you take a slice of crusty bread, schmear the heavenly bone marrow on it like butter and finish it with a touch of salt and salad.  It just works.  Picking through the salad, you will not find one slightly off-green or even brown bit.  The kitchen picked each and every stalk and leaf.  The onions are sliced in even thicknesses.  The attention to detail makes the difference here.  Simple and delicious.

A country style pate with various pig parts inside that provided texture, crunch and flavour.  Simply presented with a bundle of cornichons, the reverence to the porcine gods could not have been clearer in this dish.  A different restaurant would have served it with mustard or a chutney or two.

Not here at St John.  Why mess with the surprisingly delicate flavour of the pig with other accompaniments?  I don’t know where this pig came from or its progeny, and it may just be hog-wash (Pun intended) from my brain, but it sure tasted different from Mr General Porks I could buy from the local butcher.

Thats why you come to St. John.  To eat pork you’d never find or prepare yourself and to eat those wonderful cornichons.

This was the least interesting dish, a lightly curried, crab mayo spread on toast.  Singapore being the home of chilli crab, and Thailand having a curried crab dish, we were underwhelmed.  However, we are unfairly comparing it to our own taste memories of home.

However, crab was in season that time, especially the hairy ones which have annoyingly small bristles that prick you when you hold them.  Billingsgate market was full of ‘em, and I’m glad St John removed the sweet, flesh for me.  We cooked them for dinner once and its bristles left more than one of us with a bleeding gum.

The rolled pig’s spleen was the highlight of all the starters.  You can find the recipe in the 1st St John book, but perhaps finding the spleen is a bit more difficult!  The pickled onion was the perfect foil to the rolled up pork parts.  The textures in this dish were a treat for the mouth!

I cannot remember what sexy little bird this is, but it was game season and this may either be teal or any of the other small wild birds in the UK.  Most game birds are very very gamey tasting, oozing ‘blood’ as you cut into them and slightly chewey.  This one was no different, and its a challenge to the uninitiated to eat them.  I specifically ordered this in a quest to eat as many types of birdies as possible.  What struck me most was the veggies that came with the bird.  Cooked to utter perfection, making it seem like the bird was the garnish, rather than the main.

Thinly sliced, marinated ox hearts quickly cooked over hot coals.  The hearts were so tender and juicy that you’d not have expected that this was offal.  The watercress salad with beetroot was excellent too, but the ox hearts really stole the show on this dish.  Brilliant!

The absolute star of the all the dishes we ate was the roasted Berkshire pork loin with crackling.  Brined and roasted to perfection, this sent us all into pork heaven.

This magnificently scrumptious porker originates from Berkshire in the UK, and is a rare breed along with the Gloucester Old Spot and several other British species.

Grown in Japan as Kurobuta, this breed has highly marbled and tender meat with a slight, pink hue.  Our slice on the the plate above exhibited all these characteristics.  Cooked to perfection (Slightly pink in the middle), it melted in the mouth along with the veggies.

The vegetables stood up to the perfect pork, flavourful kale simply wilted with a bit of butter in a pan.  Lovingly placed on the plate next to the pork, one cannot imagine a more perfect pairing to a simple, wonderful dish.

Conclusion

There will be those who come to St. John and dismiss it as everyday food anyone can make at home.  Sure, anyone can roast a loin of pork or sweat some veggies in a pan.  If you want fine dining, go eat at one of those fancy restaurants, where you pay more for the cost of up keeping the Michelin stars than anything else.

Simple, honest food that is fairly priced is very hard to find in any developed city.  St. John, with its quality, is a steal.  They don’t try to wow customers with culinary heroics and cramming 12 components and flavours on a plate.  No smears of this, foams of that or emulsion of somethings.

Pretentious food has its place in the culinary world, but I’d rather spend my money here at St. John, where I can get more intimate with my animal (s) of choice.

Filed under: All About Food, Food in Britain Tagged: Bread and Wine, Fergus Henderson, Offal ]]> http://eatthatyellowsnow.wordpress.com/2012/04/06/st-john-restaurant-nose-to-tail-eating/feed/ 0 Nick 20091121-DSC_0718 20091121-DSC_0719 20091121-DSC_0723 20091121-DSC_0724 20091121-DSC_0725 20091121-DSC_0728 20091121-DSC_0727 http://eatthatyellowsnow.wordpress.com/2012/04/06/st-john-restaurant-nose-to-tail-eating/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ALifeOfTravelShamelessGluttonyHedonismAndOccasionalEnslavement/~3/73SDLJoiJms/ http://eatthatyellowsnow.wordpress.com/2012/03/27/obaroi-thai-seafood-grill-bangkok/#comments Tue, 27 Mar 2012 19:37:39 +0000 Homer http://eatthatyellowsnow.wordpress.com/?p=1195 Continue reading →]]> Potential 2 hour traffic jam?  30mins minimum waiting time for your table?  Not so far, but not so near to the city?  You’re dependent on a taxi to bring you to Ram-Intra? Speak no Thai?

But……you’ve just landed in Bangkok, as have I, and you are craving craving craving for some seafood, local style.  You’re tired, cranky, desperate in need of some stomach lovin’ and wanna boost your cholesterol levels up a notch.  Do you REALLY want to come here?

These are the challenges awaiting you, should you decide to skip the tourist trap restaurants that ply Sukhumvit road and take a short taxi ride up past Ekkamai into this place called ObAroi.  With the nifty map link at the bottom of this post, your taxi driver should have no time finding this joint.  Chances are, he’s been there with his family and friends.  Thats how local this place is.  With probably more than 200 seats, its bustling like crazy.

Time your trip correctly and you will be ok.  There are massage places around the corner from Obaroi where you can nip in at 5pm for 2 hours of relaxation before rocking up for dinner.  This lets you avoid peak hour traffic and have dinner at 7.15pm.  Perfect.

Whats the fuss all about?  Can you see that orange cauldron behind that gentleman?  Yes, that is a scorching fire fueled by charcoal.  Your seafood sir, comes grilled to perfection on charcoal.  Sea bass, cockles, river prawns, scallops.  They don’t mess around here.  Their menu is small and they do it all consistently well at a great price.

This fish tom yum burnt the tonsils.  A few sips was unbearably painful inducing thanks to the prik ki nu suan used.  These are tiny chillies, smaller than prik ki nu, the bird’s eye chilli or chili padi and pack a mean punch.   It was extremely flavourful with the kaffir lime, coriander root and galangal, and strangely addictive too despite the heat.

This place serves the best stewed glass noodles.  Puu ob woon sen the call it here, served with crab.  The sauce is flavoured with coriander root and szechuan peppercorns, making it oh so deliciously savoury and beautiful.  This is not a spicy dish at all, but so packed in flavour.

Not content with just one serving with crab, we got another with prawns, goong ob woon sen.  Personally, the seafood is merely a garnish to the glass noodles, which soaks up all the sauce and drippings from the seafood they are stewed with.  This is one of my favourite dishes in the Thai-Chinese repertoire and ObAroi does the best version I’ve eaten thus far.

Pla grapong tod nam pla.  Deep fried sea bass served in a tangy green mango salsa.   A flippin’ fresh sea bass is spliced in half, dipped in fish sauce and deep fried in a hot cauldron of oil until crispy golden outside, and steaming, fluffy and soft inside.  Be sure to ask for the seafood sauce, nam chim seafood.  Its made with coriander roots, coriander, lime and chilli.  The perfect sauce for Thai seafood.

A dish that would make any high end restaurant proud.  Charcoal grilled scallops with scallions, a dash of fish sauce and butter.  Ok, so they use a butter with a bit of butter flavour added into it, but its not fine dining is it?  As much as I love Echire butter and eat almost nothing else, I’d order another plate of this everytime.  Did I mention that the scallops are cooked to perfection?  Its cooked to the middle, with a bit of bite at first, but it gives easily to a juicy, sweet treat.

Thai style curry crab, with a curry ‘scrambled egg’ sauce.  This dish wasn’t given a fair chance to my tastebuds, as I grew up on Singapore chilli crab.  It was pleasant, but not something I’d order again.  My favourite preparation for crab is still Puu Kai Dong, marinated raw crab.

We eat bi tter gourd here in Singapore, but why don’t we as well eat the leaves and tendrils?  Cooked chinese style with garlic, soy sauce and a bit of chilli, these tendrils are crunchy and full of fantastic flavour, without the bitterness of their fruit.

Conclusion

ObAroi is on my Bangkok hitlist of top 10 places to eat.  I used to love SornThorng in Rama 4 road, near Emporium.  If I’m hankering from raw marinated prawns and crab, I go there.  For other seafood, I’ll come here.  Life is simple when you know where the good food is!

Link to Map

Filed under: Food in Thailand Tagged: bitter gourd tendrils, charcoal, goong ob woon sen, pla grapong tod nam pla, scallops ]]> http://eatthatyellowsnow.wordpress.com/2012/03/27/obaroi-thai-seafood-grill-bangkok/feed/ 1 Nick IMG_1439 IMG_1443 IMG_1564 IMG_1458 IMG_1457 IMG_1455 IMG_1452 IMG_1454 IMG_1453 http://eatthatyellowsnow.wordpress.com/2012/03/27/obaroi-thai-seafood-grill-bangkok/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ALifeOfTravelShamelessGluttonyHedonismAndOccasionalEnslavement/~3/sHyUwdGOfDg/ http://eatthatyellowsnow.wordpress.com/2010/07/04/maids-of-honour-tea-cakes-newens-kew-garden/#comments Sun, 04 Jul 2010 05:55:55 +0000 Homer http://eatthatyellowsnow.wordpress.com/?p=1159 Continue reading →]]> “Qu’ils Mangent de la Brioche!” or perhaps, “Let them eat their tea cakes!”, as Anne Boleyn actually mouthed before she was given ‘Le Chop’.  The “eating brioche’ part was actually said by someone else and mistakenly attributed to Anne Boleyn.   You read it here first, through lots of dubious research, I have uncovered a famous quote lost to history just until now*.

As fascinatingly brutal as that era was, we can be grateful that Henry VIII’s and Anne Boleyn’s brief pairing gave birth to this delicious tea cake called a ‘Maid of Honour’.  The best place, according to marketing hype, to eat this is at Newens at Kew Gardens in Richmond, London.

According to folklore, Henry VIII first met Anne Boleyn when she was a Maid of Honour.  This historical event took place at his Richmond Palace, and he fell in love with her eating this dainty little pastry.  Love never tasted so sweet, and if this story has a romantic ring of regality to it, there is also a dark story attached, if you believe the myth (As printed on Newen’s website).  However, it would not be surprising if this story was true, considering Henry VIII’s reputation.

Now Henry VIII’s key achievements were plenty, not excluding breaking away from the Catholic Church, beheading 2 of his wives, of which one had a younger sister who was his mistress prior and executing tens of thousands of people (72,000+ according to a less than trustable internet source*).   His daughter, Queen Mary 1, is credited with burning around 300 Protestants to their deaths and thus, earning the nickname, ‘Bloody Mary’, to whom bar-goers and bartenders around the world pay homage to with a shake of the jigger*.   Back to the dark story……

King Henry VIII was so enamoured by Anne Boleyn and these tea cakes (He died a disgustingly obese man with a 60″ waistline), that he named them the ‘Maids of Honour’ and had the recipes AND the maid who invented them, locked up at Richmond Palace.  This creation was to be only created for himself and the royal family, presumably to be munched on whilst lounging in his backyard jacuzzi.

In a case of royal espionage almost on par with the British stealing tea secrets from the Chinese, this recipe was leaked to a Bakery at which the founder of Newens was an apprentice.  A century or so later, bada bing bada boom, we have Newen’s Maids of Honours, touting themselves to be making ‘em from the original recipe. Fantastic!

Maids of Honour are puff pastry rounds with a hollow centre filled with a lemon scented quark custard filling.  Quark is just fresh cheese also known as curds of ‘Little Miss Muffett’ fame.

Dusted with icing sugar and baked in a hot oven, I have to say that these little tea cakes are absolutely scrumptious, if a tad too sweet.  The buttery pastry and creamy curd custard so waist expandingly good, it makes you wonder how British food got its bad reputation.

This being England, and it being tea time, it is only fitting that an order of scones with raisins should grace our table.  I can never ever get bored of English clotted cream, jam and scones, NEVER.  The only sad thing is that we were served bottled jam, not a house-made one, which would have made all the difference.   This was good nonetheless, but not overwhelmingly so.

In the end, everyone should plan a day out to Kew Gardens for their magnificent foliage and make a short trip to Newens for lunch or tea.  I’ve been told that their chicken pie is particularly delicious.  Newens is definitely a destination place for any foodie who finds themselves in London for if I had a Newens here, I’d defo be a regular!

Newens – The Original Maids of Honour

Nearest Tube/Train Station: Kew Gardens

Directions from Station: Cross the bridge over the station, follow the directions to Kew Gardens.  At the T-junction with Kew Gardens in front of you turn right and keep walking about 5 minutes.  You will pass Newens on the right.

*If the journalists of today can make up facts and figures and take sides to sensationalize news, so can I in fabricating stories.

Morocco and indeed, the continent itself since the earliest of times has seen its fair share of bloodbaths from invading Europeans, so it should come as sweet revenge that the ‘Moors’ managed to annex a part of Spain over a warring period lasting some 800 years.  This is according to my oracle of truth, St Wiki.  This Moorish part of Spain was known as Al Andalus, and the global table owes a debt of gratitude to these ‘invaders’ as they introduced sophisticated farming techniques like irrigation and rice farming, along with their architectural style that has merged over time into unique, Spanish Mediterranean designs.

The Moors brought Arroz Bomba (Paella rice), almonds and spices amongst many other things to Al Andalus.  Probably the most notable of these are Arroz Bomba and this curious horticultural bulb called Saffron.  Marry the two togather and we have Paella, so often badly represented globally by charlatans in the kitchen passing off shit as Paella.  The best Paella I’ve ever had by the way, was at Restaurante Monastrell in Alicante on the Costa Blanca.

The regions of Valencia and Murcia were part of Al Andalus, and whilst their ancestors would have lived in constant fear of marauding attackers from the South, the modern Valencians and Murcians fear crop pests, unemployment and legions of hard-grafting latinos.   Peaches, apricots, citrus fruits and figs now dot the roads in this sparse, hilly region and in thanks to the Moors for their contribution, they’ve come up with a smashing fiesta.

The Fiesta de Moros y Cristianos is when all and sundry line the streets to take part in an orgy of colour and sound.  In celebration of the end of Moorish occupation in Spain, this festival commemorates their expulsion with lots of drinking, eating and street partying.  I wonder how many of Moorish descent actually take part in these celebrations.

This is quite a big event held at different times in different cities throughout the region (End of April), and you get different groups of paraders, dressed in exaggerated medieval finery.   It was really cool when the ‘Moorish’ representatives marched by accompanied by ‘Darth Vader’ like music.

I can see why this is one of the biggest events in city’s annual calender because in these secluded places, life is really different from what we are used to in big cities.  In the sleepy town of Monovar, the bullfight was the biggest spectacle and talking point for weeks prior and after. Participants prepare for the whole year waiting for this day to take part in some Spanish pride.  I’m sure if they win the world cup this year, there’ll be a marching contingent of football players in 2011!

This was one of the highlights of my time working in Spain, as life consisted of work, eat and sleep.  Ecuadorian friends brought my flatmate, Joel and me to this festival, a welcome break from our mundane existence in a lonely apartment on Monovar’s outskirts.  How pathetic was it that in this town of 12,000, we lived right on the edges on the way to Elda, a bustling city about 15 mins away by car?  You can just imagine how much fun we had after a period of deprivation!

A fun time was had by all of us, and we ended the night with some Spanish tapas and San Miguel.  A befitting end to a wonderful night.  To my Ecuadorian friends, Gracias por Todos.

Perhaps this luminary cemented Whitechapel’s place as a ‘special’ part of town, but really, it is a diverse, multi-ethnic area of London where you have congregations of immigrants from all over the world.  Yes, the streets are dangerous at night (Drunkards, drug addicts and pushers), but you could say that of any other street in the UK.  Well, we lived in front of Sainsbury, right next to the IdeaStore and along the stretch of the famous Whitechapel ethnic day market across Royal London Hospital. Therefore,  you could say it was in the safer part of WC that we went about our daily lives.

Besides having been the CENTRE of Britain’s H1N1 epidemic, this is also the home to the Bell Foundry, where Big Ben came from.  These historical streets have seen everything from serial killers to mob hits and more recently, Chinese people touting pirated DVDs.

Brick Lane happens to be just down the road (20 mins walk) from Aldgate Station and is home to the famous Brick Lane market and the interesting shops that throng the area.  I’d avoid the ‘curry mile’ of Indian restaurants serving up lip-smacking portions of ‘Chicken Diarrhea’, and head straight for them Beigels.

NY’ers say Bagel, Brick Laners say Beigel, and just like in 1773′s argument over a cuppa, there will be no end of the ‘our bagel is better than your beigel’ argument.  For those like me who believe in the truth of St Wiki, here’s a treatise on Beigels.

Whichever is better, I don’t really care, for as long as they are made with love and not some factory using more E-numbered ingredients that a cat has whiskers on its face, I’m there.  Here, at Beigel Bake, as in most Bagel joints, they’ve got different flavours but our sole agenda was to scoff down a Salt Beef Beigel.  I got them hunger pangs now dammit!  But first, to the Bagel…..

Starting with nothing more than good bread flour, salt, yeast, water and perhaps some oil, these mounds of dough are traditionally fermented very slowly for religious reasons (Apparently, according to St Wiki).  However, of more interest to foodies, a slow fermentation = flavour, as them yeasties and other processes of fermentation condition the dough with flavour and organic acids (i.e., yeast and bacterial shit).  This guy is heaving large rounds of dough onto a dividing plate for an automated bun dividing machine.

After shaping and final proofing, the beigels are boiled on both sides in a hot water bath.  Not being familiar with the beigel making process, it might be plausible that temperatures and alkalinity of this water solution plays a big part in the finished product.  I just love the pride in the eyes of all the people in the bakery.

If just plainly boiled, the bagel would be a tasteless, soggy affair, so into the oven it goes to firm up the surface and more importantly, to give it a nice golden sheen that contributes so much to the wonderful beigel aroma.  Maillard reactions rule!

They look so beautiful that I feel kinda stupid that I’ve never had one plain.  If anyone has an awesome Beigel recipe and cares to share it on this page, please email it to me.

Huge chunks of salt beef straight from the boiler make their debut dramatically at the front of the shop, luring all passersby into a lurid bovine fantasy.  These brined sides of brisket have been boiled till they are fall-apart tender and so damn bloody irresistable.  The knife cuts through them like butter, making the wait for your order seem unbearably long.

In the great British tradition, a healthy dollop of horseradish and mustard sauce lubricates the whole assembly.  Packed in a nondescript, brown paper bag, the uninitiated would not be faulted for wondering why every other person walking down Brick Lane seems to have one in hand.

Here’s my mate, TF, shoving it down his face.  Dense and chewey beigel gives way to a savoury, soft and flakey beef brisket punctuated with spikes of piquancy.  The only thing that was missing from this ensemble was a pint of beer!

What a way to end a day walking down Brick Lane.  Here’s to memories and I will eat you again soon, my friend!

Beigel Bake

159 Brick Lane, London, E1 6SB

Open 24 Hours

Nearest Tubes: Aldgate East, Shoreditch, Liverpool Street, Old Street

You have 2 days and 1 night in Bangkok, armed only with an iPhone and you need to eat and document some food.  What do you do?  What do you do?  Well, this is just a very small list of the places I frequent to satisfy desires and cravings.   Whether you can find these places or not…….its another question and up to your abilities to navigate your way around.  Here are some recommended eating places for those on a tight schedule:

Day 1 – Lunch

There’s no better way to start off your afternoon than at a Moo Krob joint, better known as Siu Yoke…or cantonese roast pork.   Chances are that you will go hungry if you followed this recommendation of mine, as there is no other way for a foreigner getting there than by Taxi, its in Prachachuen and my friend drives, so tough luck.

This place gets sold out by 2pm, so just salivate at what goes on here.  They’ve got 7 pots of soup on sale, and on this day, only 1 was left, a melon soup which was really tasty but not the focus of our attention.  Half a kilo of roast pork for SGD$5 for 2 of us sounded like a great deal!  The crackling is perfectly crisp and dissolves in the mouth for it has a light, airy, honeycombed texture.

The meat is soft and yielding, with the right amount of chew to get the saliva working on extracting all that porky goodness.  I would KILL to learn how to make Moo Krob like this, but I don’t think they take non-Thai speaking stagiaires!   In the back, from an ancient looking deck oven, they roast these heavenly slabs of the best Moo Krob I’ve ever come across.  Could we find better ones in Hong Kong?  I don’t really care, because Bangkok is sure as hell nicer and nearer than Hong Kong!

Day 1 – Dinner

Since you would be absolutely starving from my unfindable lunch destination, this one is way easier to find.  Its name is Sorn Thong, and its a Chinese Thai Seafood Restaurant.   If you’ve been following this blog, you know about my exaggerated exclamations for the best ‘this and that’ ever!   Its no different for me to proclaim that this is my favourite restaurant and the BEST Chinese Seafood restaurant ever!  Forget the chilli crabs and what nots in Singapore, its good, but its not everyday food.

To find Sorn Thong, ask your taxi driver to go to the end of Sukhumvit Soi 24 (Thats the Emporium road), to the MacDonalds.   The maccers is at the junction of Sukhumvit Soi 24 and Rama 4 road.  There’s a huge petrol station there with an equally huge maccers.  If you miss it, you are blind.  Get the cab to turn LEFT into Rama 4 road and drop you off about 50 metres from Macdonalds.  You cannot miss it, as its the only restaurant there with fish tanks out front.  If you happen to drive, they offer valet parking too.

On the left, is raw marinated crab, one of the best things you can ever part money for.  Not exactly for the faint of heart, but here’s what happens in this dish called Puu Kai Dong.    Take a good crab (Not them skinny blue flower crabs), brush it till its spotlessly clean, ignoring its foaming mouth.

In a pot of your special Thai mixture of fish sauce, lime juice, garlic, chilli, sugar and coriander, chuck the still writhing crustacean into the pot, cover and put in the fridge to chill.  The theory is that the drowning crab will ingest all that wonderful marinade and flavour itself from within. Not sure at what point this pickling exercise stops, but its then frozen and when its brought to our table, its been de-gilled and expertly chopped into conveniently handled pieces.

You cannot imagine how awesome this tastes……sweet, sour, spicy, salty……..

On the right is what could be also one of the best fried rices ever.  Perhaps you will have your favourite, but this flavour is sadly missing from lots of fried rices in Singapore, the ‘wok hei’, or breath of the wok.    The rice used here is a medium grain rice with the perfect texture and tastes its best when fried by the old man, AKA, the current owner’s father.   I’ve tasted this on his off day before and it pales drastically in comparison..   (Edited Aug 2012: I’ve since eaten here on 3 occasions in the last 6 months, and probably 6 or more occasions in the past year and find that the Fried Rice is no longer worth ordering.  This is based on every occasion I have come here in the past year.  Someone else has taken over the frying and it is a soggy, tasteless affair.  The other dishes are still good, but can’t endorse the fried rice anymore.  It was amazing when it lasted, thanks for the taste memories.)

Sometime in the future, I will learn Thai properly just to beg to stage at this place and learn how they cook and make these 2 sauces!  Thai food is simple right?  All the ingredients are the same…..but…..its the proportions that make the magic.  These two simple chilli sauces perfectly complement every dish.

Another must have would be the salt baked sea bass.  When you enter the restaurant, there’s a grilling station out front next to the tanks, and this is where this baby is prepared.  Covered in salt and foiled before grilled to perfection, the slightly salty skin crisps gently to reveal the wonderfully soft and moist insides.  A waft of lemongrass and kaffir lime emanates from the stuffed belly cavity, making this one of the healthiest, delectable items on the menu.

In keeping with our 5 meats and 1 veg policy, we ordered a stir fried coconut shoot dish with prawns.  This is a first taste of coconut shoots and if anything, its like fresh bamboo shoots.  Nothing spectacular about this.

Another dish that gets eaten every visit here is Goong Chae Nam Pla, or raw marinated prawns.  If the raw crab doesn’t get your juices flowing, this one will!  Superbly spicy and garlicy, the addition of raw bitter melon slices just brings home the ideology behind Thai cuisine.  Sweet, sour, salty and bitter, yark kin maak!

If coconut shoots don’t strike your fancy, another veg. dish just might in the form of Pak Boong Fai Daeng, loosely translated into Red Fire Kang Kong.  This is a curiously hollow stemmed vegetable better known as Chinese Water Spinach.  When asked about the origins of this dish’s name, a street food vendor spoke passionately of a legendary colleague whose stove cooked with such ferocity that when the kang kong went into the wok with some Thai whisky, the flambé would shoot up 7 storeys high.  Frenchmen with their dainty copper sauteuses, eat your hearts out!

There is no better way to continue the night than have some beers, no, not just any beer, but Belgian beer.  Beers like Hoegaarden and Leffe are common elsewhere but in Thailand 3+ years ago, I led a very pathetic existence surviving on headache-inducing Asahi.  They had Erdinger, and as nice as it is, its not my preferred poison.

So, imagine my happiness when HOBS opened up in Thonglor, right across the road from J-Avenue.  HOBS of course, means House of Beers, and this place is awesome!  Its a pity the food is only so-so, with the fries resembling matchsticks and the nachos averagely pedestrian.   Its truly a pity, for with some good pub food, HOBS would be even more awesome than it is now!

After a night of chilling at HOBS, hunger pangs will either lead you to Sukumvit Soi 38, the usual clubber’s late night food destination, or if you are not that late, head down Ekamai to have Ba Mee Kai.  Ekamai is parallel to Thong Lor, so its a short bikey ride away.  It should be located at Ekamai Soi 19, tell the driver you want to eat Ba Mee Kai at Ekamai and they will know.

Ba Mee Kai is a Thai version of Char Siew noodles, but add a ‘Kai’ to it and it becomes a sinful after hours indulgence. Char siew noodles done the old way (With pork lard) and a whole egged cooked to molecular perfection.  Modern chefs use a thermal circulator to cook their eggs to precisely x degrees celsius for x amounts of minutes.   At this Ba Mee joint, which is actually a back of a pickup truck (Yes, that is a pickup truck!), they cook their eggs with a crappy aluminum pot and portable, gas powered stove.

There are many hole in the walls around Bangkok that draw me back time and again, and hopefully, in the near future, revisiting these places will result in more blog posts on one of the best foodie destinations in SE Asia.