Best Food Writing 2014 (20 page)

This has been a special April Fool's edition of Eat the Love. I write this disclaimer because inevitably someone will believe that this is a legitimate recipe for how to boil water and try to correct me about the Maillard reaction listed above. To that person, I say
. . .
you are a fool. Good day.

T
he worst meal I ever ate in Southeast Asia was at a beautiful candlelit restaurant in Bangkok. The waiters wore sarongs and offered lemongrass-scented towels to wash off the day. Back in the kitchen, the chef, a young European, had taken to reinterpreting traditional Thai food, adding modern twists and foreign “refinements”—replacing chicken with duck confit, daubing noodles with foie. It was twice as expensive and half as good as any other meal I ate on that trip (including the tame farang fare of the island bungalow circuit). Later that same night, I went out and ate the dishes the young chef was trying to approximate and promised myself to never eat inside a real restaurant in this part of Asia again.

That experience, coupled with other letdowns over the past decade of travel to the Far East, helped form the basis of what I'll call the Pretty=Shitty Postulate: That is, the more attractive the restaurant in Southeast Asia, the less likely it is to serve delicious food. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, but they are shockingly scarce. No, to eat well in this part of the world, look for the establishment with
the tiny plastic stools, the gathering insects, the fluorescent glare of a hospital waiting room.

While you're at it, might as well skip the place with the credit card machine and the his and hers bathrooms. And there's really no use for that team of waiters. Or even a menu. Come to think of it, what you're really looking for is a stretch of cement with just enough room for a few plastic stools and a raging fire. That's where the good stuff is.

Street food is big news these days. Guidebooks dedicate entire sections to street food safety, tour operators take westerners to not-so-secret locations to observe this exotic style of eating, and vast blogging communities busy themselves with mapping out the best of a city's sidewalk offerings. All the while, the Western world tries to find a way to make it theirs. Some people buy trucks and pass black bean burgers and Korean tacos through the window. The more ambitious ones, the chefs with names you might recognize, make the pilgrimages to these cities, often with their team of underlings in tow, where they eat and eat and eat. Back in their spotless kitchens, they set about recreating the stars of the street scene with impressive precision and first-class products. They add that garnish of fried shallots they tried in the Chiang Mai market; they serve their shrimp with lime and black pepper like it's done in Hanoi. But when you bite into that $19 “small plate”? It is fine. It is perfectly satisfying.

But it isn't street food. Not even close.

The first thing I do in Bangkok is the first thing everyone does when they come to Bangkok: I get lost.

I spent weeks doing research, emailing experts, marking maps, setting up interviews—doing what I would normally do before eating my way though a town. Only, when the bus doors open and spit me out into that cauldron of spice and sin, all of the preparation evaporates into the warm city air. In Bangkok, where the best places to eat come without names or addresses, you can't Google your way to the promised land; you just need to feel it out.

As someone accustomed to planning Thursday's lunch before Monday's breakfast is fully digested, this takes time and patience and a considerable surrendering of compulsive behavior. But once you accept the reality, there is something deeply liberating about intuiting your way to a good meal.

It's well past noon and my hunger burns as hot as the midday sun. I come across a sad set of stands under a freeway overpass, but just before dismissing this shabby collection, I spot two tables of well-dressed men, all silently attacking the same dish. I follow the smell and the breath of the wok until I come upon the tiny old woman responsible for the small crowd. She stares up at me blankly from behind her wok. I point to the men behind me. She turns around and goes to work.

Ninety seconds later, out comes a heartbreaking version of
pad kha-prao
: roughly ground pork and wilted leaves of holy basil, spiked lavishly with chilies and a beautiful sheen of fish sauce, a violently fried egg resting atop it all. Whatever expectations I have for the meal come not from the months of reading books and blogs before the trip, but in the seconds between ordering and eating.

With even the most rudimentary skills of observation you can sniff out an astounding meal on any block of the city. A few clues: Is that wok firing especially hot? Is she cooking to order, rather than scooping out the warmed-over creations cooked hours prior? (The latter is, of course, the only way to serve many of Thailand's great dishes—jungle curries, tom yum—but if it's a dish that comes from the wok or the fryer, it should burn your lips with the first bite). Is the cook's prep area well stocked with vegetables, herbs and protein? Is the menu short? Better yet, is there no menu at all?

When it comes to density and intensity, Bangkok is unrivaled in the world of street food. Next to the wild tastes of Bangkok, the hawker flavors of Singapore seem domesticated. Take my 3am nightcap at the Huay Kwang Market. After a round of beers and sundried pork that has a sweetness and chew stranded perfectly between satay and jerky, I order a plate of raw prawns. The fat crustaceans are plucked live from a fish tank, summarily executed, shelled and butterflied on the spot. They are then slathered in what looks like pesto and buried under tufts of fresh herbs and nickel-size circles of raw garlic. Everything looks so fresh and innocent . . . and then you bite down. First, a rush of sweetness from the shrimp, then a sharp hit of garlic, and finally, blackout levels of spice from the puree of green chilies painted onto the crustaceans. It takes two large Chang beers to extinguish the fire.

Thai food is a high-wire balancing act, one that pits salty, sour,
sweet and hot against each other in equal and opposite measures. Ever wonder why you find yourself so consistently disappointed with Thai food in places that aren't Thailand? Out of fear of offending sensitive Western palates, the kitchen holds back on the heat, they pull back on the fish-sauce punch, and the whole dish falls apart.

But it's not just the impossible juxtaposition that makes Thai street food so special. Thai street cooks, like great restaurant chefs, know the value of the little touches that take a dish over the top: the leaves of crunchy fried holy basil that add texture to a salad, the crust of coconut encasing molten chunks of fried bananas, the drizzle of vinegar infused with chilies and lemongrass that makes your whole body buzz.

To take those little touches one step further, street vendors empower eaters with a table full of condiments, turning you into a sous chef of sorts. Too spicy? A squeeze of lime and a dusting of sugar should curb the burn. Lacking punch? A splash of fish sauce and a spoonful of fresh chilies should fix that right up. It's an unspoken agreement between cook and eater: I give you these tools, if you promise me you won't fuck up my creation.

It's one of my favorite parts of eating on this side of the world: I find myself constantly tinkering, dusting a midnight pad thai liberally with dried chilies, cutting the funk of a breakfast bowl of boiled offal with a few squeezes of lime, goosing a Chinese-style stir-fry of water spinach and pork belly with spicy vinegar and fish sauce.

A few meals into a trip to a place like Bangkok you begin to wonder how it ever got so good, how they cracked the code on one of gastronomy's most enduring challenges: how to make food fast, healthy, inexpensive and unthinkably delicious all at the same time.

It starts with the fact that these countries have the building blocks: fresh produce of exceptional quality, cooking techniques developed and refined over millennia, potent condiments that can be combined in thousands of different ways to create vastly different effects. But just having the right paint isn't enough to make a work of art. The proliferation of street food—in Thailand and Vietnam, just like in ancient Rome and Athens—is, by definition, an urban adaptation. When the bulk of Thailand's population lived in rural villages, most meals were cooked and eaten at home, but as people began to swarm towards the cities in the mid to late 20th century, domestic life underwent
radical changes. Urban kitchens were ill equipped for family cooking and busier lifestyles left little time to stand around the stove. Plus the economies of scale made eating out every bit as cheap as eating in. And while Mom might make a mean green curry or tom yum, it's tough to compete with the legions of street cooks who dedicate their lives to making the same dish over and over until its part of their identity.

On my last afternoon in Bangkok, standing in front of a dizzying number of street vendors besides Siam Center, I decide to play a game. With a bus to catch in 20 minutes and unable to find my preprogrammed location, I set out to deposit my remaining 300 baht (about $10) into the hands of as many cooks as possible. I start with dessert: an old man covers a flattop with a dozen mini crepes, toasting them to a rich mahogany brown. The crepe itself is as thin and crunchy as a candy shell, the warm savory filling evoking the sweet, salty comfort of an American diner breakfast. A few stands down, a plump middle-aged woman cooks chicken meatballs: smooth, pale orbs threaded onto bamboo skewers, grilled until gently charred on the surface, then dipped into a crimson vat of sweet chili sauce and served with a few slices of cucumber. Next stop,
som tam
, the ubiquitous northern Thai salad of green papaya, chilies, and dried shellfish, pestle-pounded into an electric mix of spice and sweet and ocean umami.

If the game is to eat one of the best meals of my life for as little money as possible, I've already won, but I keep going: I still have a wad of bills in my pocket and the last stand in the line of vendors is the most enticing of the lot. A mother and daughter work in a tight formation, pulling chicken parts from their fish-sauce marinade, dredging them in flour, then dropping them into a vat of burbling fat. The chicken emerges with a craggy coat the color of maple syrup. By the time I board the bus five minutes later, it's still too hot to handle without a napkin.

And so I sit there, lips blistered with chicken crackling, fingers singed with pounded capsaicin, watching the whole of Bangkok sink into the horizon behind me, smilingly stupidly, wondering what to do with the last 150 baht.

Context and environment have a profound impact on how we experience food, but there is something else that makes this way of eating so vital, something beyond the scooter cries and the tiny stools and the mugs of iced beer. It's the fate of the wok that has seared
millions of meals into submission. It's the fact that not one motion is wasted in transforming that pile of vegetables and meat into a beautiful plate of food. It's the years of cooking the same dish over and over until the pan handles and the spatula rivets have worn away at your skin like a river rounding out the edges of a stone. That doesn't travel; that doesn't translate.

That stays on the streets, exactly where it began and where it belongs.