I walk into the eating area. It would be a reach to call it a dining room, but a low counter and chairs are there, and, on the counter, there are two bowls. One contains a small, nearly black, pile of ground pork, onions, and olives. The other some nameless vine that has been cooked – too thoroughly – with some shallots in a thin sauce. It is seven o’clock in the morning and this is breakfast.
Well, not quite. Missing from that description is what ties those disparate bowls together and which is the centerpiece of literal millions of other Thai breakfasts today and every day.
Rice soup.
Khao tom, as it’s known hereabouts, is the archetypical Thai breakfast and can be served with anything from the two toppings I mentioned above to chicken or pork meatballs to an omelet to whatever is left in the fridge from last night’s dinner. The various toppings are added, sauced to taste, and consumed in their uncounted gallons daily.
And despite this popularity, until now, many (all?) of you have never heard of this most representative of Thai foods.
I have written about how if you take Thai food as a whole and consider it as a pie for visualization purposes, then the Thai food you’re familiar with is but one slice. Outside of that one slice is the whole of the rest of Thai cuisine which can range from a variety of insects – no, not yet – to chao kuay, a dessert of rubbery cubes with a rather too raw-shellfish-like consistency served over ice and topped with brown sugar – which has been one of my favorites for a decade and a half.
Today I’d like to take some time to look at the rest of that pie and also talk about some of the things that stood out to me during the time I’ve spent in Thailand.
Eating in Thailand is pretty much a full-time job. From the early morning until well after midnight a place to buy food – ready to eat – will be closer than the nearest 7-11. Many are open all night. And, as the Sun and Moon course through their daily motions, the foods on offer will subtly change.
Thailand doesn’t have the same breakfast – lunch – dinner rigor found in the west. If you, as a working stiff, were to have a lunch of Cocoa Pebbles at your desk, your coworkers would be at a minimum curious and at most planning an intervention. Western breakfast is probably the most tightly constrained meal in terms of allowable edibles: toast, eggs, bacon, cereal, pancakes, pastries, juice. That’s about it. Very rarely will somebody roll out of bed and say: “Goddamn, I could use a tuna sandwich.” Sure, there are the steak-and-eggs crowd from the US Midwest making the payments on their cardiologist’s Rivians, but, all-in-all, you’re not going to see much outside that short list and never something like Cole slaw or mac & cheese.
It is at lunch when western cuisine starts to wake up with a wider available palette (ahem) of choices. Sandwiches, shunned at breakfast outside of fast-food establishments, are in their glory. Salads, which apart from the lettuce lovers in Europe, would be akin to using Mountain Dew in the Sacrament if served at breakfast in America, take up pages in lunch menus. Real meals – those metabolically unfriendly piles of fat and carbs – make their full debut at lunch.
Dinner, like lunch, is mostly a savory affair with bigger portions and fewer sandwiches. It is the formal meal of the day and, in the commercials anyway, a time for the family to come together. Dinner, for some reason, just feels different. Like Saturday.
In Thailand, there is a similar progression, but the changes are much subtler. As I wrote, rice soup is the traditional core of breakfast. It’s close cousin, jok, a rice porridge that is similarly used, is a much thicker and tastier – thanks to MSG, the king of flavors – variant. Either can be topped with whatever you have on hand. It is particularly good with pickled vegetables and a donut-like delight called a pa-thong-ko. And while you can find shops that serve khao tom or jok all day long, its availability peaks at breakfast. Other popular dishes at breakfast are moo ping an easy to eat stick food usually served with finger-friendly sticky rice, as well as the fiery-hot pad kaprao. Chilies at breakfast does take a bit of getting used to, though.
But other than rice soup, after breakfast the list becomes virtually endless. I enjoy getting a moo ping and sticky rice lunch, grabbing a bench in the park, and sweating slowly to death in the unrelenting heat that is noonday Bangkok. But I’ll also eat that for dinner, or breakfast. Same with pad kaprao, only that’s more of a sit-down place kind of food. But the entire spectrum that is “Thai” food is available everywhere.
Ummmm…?
Yeah, the scare quotes. Here’s the bitter truth: Unless you’re very adventurous, you probably won’t eat any Thai food.
Thailand, for the past millennium or so has been a regional melting pot. The original Tai people migrated into the area from southern China and, as migrants do, took advantage of local ingredients to mix with the cooking techniques they brought with them. The basic original cuisine of Thailand is the blisteringly spicy, fermented fish and meat, bitter leaves and vegetables dips found in the north and northeast. Plus tom yum, but not the famous coconut-milk based tom yum goong that was the foundation of Thai soft power until Lisa came along. The local stuff in the noodle shops – plain tom yum – is a clear broth served with fresh bean sprouts and holy basil, and seafood or pork. I am getting hungry just writing that.
But even that has been, ummm… corrupted might be too strong a word, by the Great Migrations. Wok cooking and noodles came in with the later Chinese. Curries from South Asia. Even the archetypical Thai ingredient – chili pepper – was brought by the Portuguese from South America. So, yeah, coming to Thailand and thinking you’re getting “Thai” food is a lot like going to North America and thinking you’re going to be eating real “American” food.
And this pattern is now repeating as ever more outside cuisines wash up on the sundrenched shores of the Land of Smiles. Just in the past week, I’ve eaten bibimbap at a Korean place, Sushi at a very funky Japanese hole-in-the-wall, and a cheeseburger at a new-to-me place tucked in behind some bars and a massage parlor. (Sadly, I am mourning the passing of Fat Dad’s and looking for a replacement. EasyBurger, the name of the establishment, is not going to make the cut. But that little alley it was at the end of has some promise for other cuisines.)
Japanese restaurants are perhaps, with their garish lighting and signage, the most visible of the latest culinary invasion, and the most successful. Noodle shops are slamming down their shutters to reopen selling bowls of rice topped with ponzu-soaked slices of meat and vegetables. Long-active Japanese restaurants are throwing up construction screens and reopening as… Japanese restaurants. In newly trendy districts, even hardware stores are re-identifying as sushi counters and izakaya, like my recent hole-in-the wall.
But not all the influences are good. Thailand’s cuisine is founded on the street. Everywhere you go there will be food carts, street stalls, and tiny restaurants with plastic stools that serve one or two dishes. And that’s it. Frequently, if you want something to drink, you go to another vendor to get your tea or whatever, then return to your waiting food. There are restaurants further up the food chain – to malappropriate a phrase – than this, where all of the street food delights are available under one roof. The problem occurs when you go further up the ladder to the very high-end places you’ll see self-aggrandizing as “street food reimagined” or some such hogwash, where the moo ping, som tam, or khao man gai is ten times the price.
But not even half as good.
When I’m looking for lunch, I seek out not the new, but the familiar. Street carts and stalls where they know me and start my order before I’ve even said anything. Someplace I can grab that least heralded Thai food of Thai foods.
Deep fried chicken wings.
No. Really. Fried chicken in Thailand is so good it will make you weep. Find a stall or cart where they cook it fresh, spice it right and the experience is transcendent. I’m convinced that chicken wings are the reason that all the statues of the Buddha in Thailand show him smiling.
In the end though, it doesn’t matter. Whether you’re slurping up some Mama noodles, trying high-end street food at Nahm, having a Big Mac, or enjoying some moo ping khao niao sweat-drenched on a bench in the park. You’re in Thailand.
It’s all Thai food.
