Steam Steam“In Chinese culture, being a cook is not an occupation,” says sociologist Luke Fung. “It’s a lifestyle choice.” Presuming there is any choice at all.
It’s the dinner rush and the seven cooks at Mongkok’s House of Fortune Seafood Restaurant don’t utter a sound. With total concentration they plow through their tasks to prepare black-bean squid, sweet-sour pork, carved “squirrel” fish and a host of other elaborate dishes for a nightly buffet that will feed up to 600 people. The industrial speed at which Chinese cuisine is produced has always made the lives of its producers more exhausting than any factory work. With competition and downsizing ever on the rise, it is estimated that 80 percent of Hong Kong’s restaurants regularly require their cooks to put in more than the usual back-breaking 10 hours a day — more like every waking moment of a lifespan. While hot kitchens can be physically punishing, they are even more debilitating psychologically, with isolation from marital partners, gambling problems and little societal recognition as part of the norm.
Fung should know. The Hong Kong-born California Culinary Institute graduate just completed some unique academic research for his Ph.D. at Hong Kong’s Chinese University. To chart “the markers of this particular in-group,” as Fung describes in the jargon of his trade, he spent three-and-a-half months working with the “cold kitchen” crew of a luxury Hong Kong hotel. The 12-hour shifts and after-hours parties left him confused about whether he was participant or observer, and even put a strain on his marriage. “After all, I was spending more time in the kitchen than at home,” he recounts. “Most nights, I woke up with terrible shoulder pains.”
As part of his doctoral thesis, Fung found that the scullions’ existence was marked by constant foul language and sexual jibes, betting on almost anything, and “family relationships that lack intimacy, with little time for genuine communication.”
Years before, Fung had been moved to consider the effects of the occupation for which he was in training when a close friend and fellow chef at a Kowloon restaurant suddenly committed suicide. “It haunted me because there was no apparent reason,” Fung says. “He just couldn’t find the means to put the stress behind him.”
At first glance, the crew at House of Fortune look like typical, jaunty young Hong Kongers. But even in their mid-30s, they can already be veterans of a life spent in stifling, windowless conditions. Many started work at 15, taking apprenticeships that cycled them through endless menial tasks such as scrubbing plates and cracking crab claws. House of Fortune’s head chef Chan Kim-hong, 39, recounts, “I wasn’t good at studying, and restaurant work guaranteed me three meals and the skills to emigrate at one point to Australia.”
In a society where merit is most commonly judged through academic achievement and even master chefs remain largely anonymous, Fung believes that many in the food trade have self-esteem problems from leaving school early. “The common Cantonese phrase for this job title isn’t ‘cook,’” he explains. “It’s ‘dumb cook.’”
Unlike in the past, when many cooks were bachelors whose sole social outlets were in brothels and mahjongg parlors, all but one of Chan’s crew are married. But most don’t get home each night until the early hours of the morning after suppers and drinks that can start at 2.30 a.m. Some, like Chan, also prepare family meals on their rare days off at home so “the children can look forward to something special.”
When diner demand slows, the crew’s first chatter is about which horses to back at the Wednesday night races. Explains Tse Chi-ho, a longhaired 21-year-old, “You see me here slicing all night, I’d be bored to death if I didn’t pick horses.”
As one chef mans the slicer, shoving half-frozen blocks of lamb against the blade, and the other pulls out racks of soup from trays of a warming oven, both use discreet earphones to listen to the racing. One even pulls a betting form from under a counter.
“We wouldn’t do this if the big boss was here,” admits Chef Mok Ka-lok. “But he only comes around when business is very bad. And I need some sort of spiritual relief.”
That’s not quite the case at the family-run restaurant, that basic molecule of Asian food’s DNA. For instance, at places like Restaurant 369 — a common name for Shanghai-style outlets the world over, since the numbers are a winning combination in mahjongg — owner Tai Tak, his sister, his wife and their adopted family of more than 20 staff, share everything from stringing long beans to folding hot towels. Safe refuges for unskilled labor, newly settled or growing old, these abiding, if slowly vanishing, units of food production are places of comforting continuity. Here, owners and staff serve and share meals in intimate communality, passing down ancestral dishes as they nurture future generations.
Wages are low, to help outset insanely inflated rents, but nobody has to worry about getting laid off. Some have been in the kitchen here for thirty years, laboring for father and son from noon until closing at nearly 4 a.m., seven days a week and every day of the year, to “catch extra business.” Yet they insist, “Without this work, done with such friendship, life would be empty. I couldn’t sleep enough hours.”
The bigger threat now are fast-food chains encroaching on the same customers, and the dwindling sense of community where, says Tai, “family restaurants are in trouble because families themselves are getting smaller and smaller.” Like many others, his own sons didn’t want to carry on such hard work. They have become insurance agents.
As researchers like Luke Fung are discovering, a special sort of psychological make-up is as crucial to Chinese cuisine as the skill of squeezing a thousand perfectly round fish balls through one’s thumb and forefinger. In particular, one 20-year veteran of the dumpling trade estimates, “It takes eight hours for us to make what gets eaten up in one hour.” A dim sum chef, rising before dawn to meet morning-tea demands, often contends with six to eight different doughs — some wheat, some with egg added, others bean-based. What’s more, no machine yet rivals the shaping done by deft, trained fingers. Yet do these most admirable of piecework workers get more kudos than their sweatshop sisters?
“We live off specialized knowledge, just like doctors and lawyers,” moans one of the unfortunate House of Fortune crew. “But society sees us differently, because we’re professionals whose hands are wet.”
We are 50 kilometers northeast of Tiananmen Square, as the uncooked bird flies. The skies are cardboard, ponds icy, trees desiccated to brittle sticks. Yet an unpromising side road dead-ends at a gate made of two giant duck figures. Their white necks form a 6-meter-high arch.
It’s hard to believe that one of mankind’s most hedonistic pleasures could begin here. But Peking ducks have to start somewhere and Shunyi County is it.
Atop a drafty building guarded by peasant girls knitting red sweaters, the gigantic office of general manager Huang Li is much like all Chinese rooms reserved for welcome briefings: wide armchairs covered in doilies, teacups on the rosewood coffee table, a painted mural of the Great Wall. Then Huang points proudly to his collection of peach-colored duck livers preserved in jars of formaldehyde — each the size of an American football.
Everything about Qian Lu Farm is similarly out of scale. Of the five million ducks consumed per year in Beijing (roughly half a duck per human), fully three million are packed and processed here. The farm supplies some 80 percent of all roast duck restaurants. “I wouldn’t mind a monopoly,” admits the Communist Party member.
Once hatched in nearby rows of brick-covered laying yards, the chicks are lent out to 1,500 individual farmers spread across five neighboring areas of China’s bleak Northeast. They’re fattened — force-fed — with grain, corn and beans for 45 days, then returned (weighing around 3 kilos live) on the back of motorbikes. The farmers earn 25 cents per chick for their labors.
After the ducks are slaughtered, air is pumped between skin and flesh to help ensure proper crisping when cooking. The plump white carcasses are then coated in a sugar-water glaze that lends them their caramel color once roasted. The next morning, they’re delivered to restaurants that hang the birds for another 24 hours to drain off excess fat.
Sold wholesale for about $3.50, they will be offered on most menus for around twice that price — a hefty sum just a few years back, but now readily affordable as a regular treat for Beijing diners. “Before the reforms in the 1980s,” explains Huang, “there were only around 10 roast duck restaurants. Today there are close to 600.” (Huang has benefited greatly from this new prosperity; the farm’s production has increased tenfold since 1979.)
And these fields are still far enough from the expanding capital to avoid growing concerns over pollution. “Thanks to the many rivers, there have been ducks bred in this area since the Han dynasty,” which ended some 1,800 years ago. However, it wasn’t until the 19th century that China’s imperial headquarters fully embraced the creation that would spread throughout the world.
For visiting gourmets, the proliferation of Beijing’s duck means more alternatives to the cavernous, state-run standbys listed in every guidebook, such as Sick Duck, Wall Street Duck or the venerable Quanjude, where the force-feeding of greasy meat and side dishes to package tours is known as “death by duck.” At a new generation of roasters, there’s far more care paid to reviving the dish’s true flavor and careful rituals of consumption.
The main difference between true Peking duck and what passes for it elsewhere is the wood used for roasting and the care taken to move the hanging ducks in and out of direct flame to achieve just the proper color and crispness. Lunching at one of two public restaurants run by the farm, I’m fed the first sampling of skin, straight off the waitress’ chopsticks. It’s been dipped in sugar to bring out the special tang of the date tree logs used to fire the deep ovens.
For those who don’t drive out into Beijing’s boondocks to find their dream pancake house, the top in-town alternative, favored by knowing locals and Japanese businessmen alike, is Tuanjiehu Roast Duck Restaurant. An unsmiling, chain-smoking fellow in undertaker suit who is tall enough to be a point guard for Yao Ming, and who will become famous as Da Dong (“Big Dong”), stands careful watch over every detail of the duck-roasting revival, swearing, “To maintain our traditions, I would gladly give my life.”
Wood slabs in lieu of an oven door maintain “the balance between heat and moisture,” claims Chef Dong, who has also spent three years perfecting a “lo-fat” version in which fat under the candied skin magically melts away. And while most of the older duck houses simply lay out scallions to stuff inside thick pancakes, Tuanjiehu makes five courses out of one bird — stuffing their paper-thin roll-ups with sugar, green onion, garlic and even raw strips of white radish. The heads, split open for convenience, provide a gooey tidbit of brain, said by some Chinese to be the best bit of all. And his duck soup is no longer Marxist or Marx Brothers, but a murky rinse that seals all previous flavors.
Back at the farm, more of the world’s most pampered variant of Long Island ducklings continue to meet their merciful end. In a metaphor for recent Chinese history, Huang tells how imprudent collectivization of Peking ducklings at the height of Communist fervor once led to increased disease and lowered production. But now that peasants have incentive to produce — and chefs like Da Dong can claim full credit — everything seems to be ducky.
This is one hell of a way to work up an appetite. Just before 5 a.m., when I should be enjoying every expensive minute and centimeter of my Tokyo hotel room (the word “room” used advisedly for this single-piece bath-and-bed module), I am instead navigating the dark alleys of the 250,000-square-meter Tsukiji Fish Market. I’m not enduring these early-morning hardships just to witness the manic mumblings of auctioneers or to ponder the primacy of albacore in the Japanese way of life. I’m here to get my tongue around the world’s closest-to-swimming seafood.
Barely awake and dodging one-man motorized cargo movers, fork lifts and handcarts — the market is home to an estimated 20,000 vehicles in all — I make my way past the rows and rows of fish wholesalers displaying their wares toward two frigid warehouse hangars beyond. There I find the big draw, as evidenced by signs on the doors warning against unauthorized entry: the tuna rooms.
Unauthorized, I slip inside, staying alert to the sharp hooks of fishmongers inspecting the slippery rows of giant carcasses, and to the sharp-eyed auctioneers seeking a chance to enforce the rules against me and other culinary voyeurs. Yet Tsukiji, transit point for 3,000 tons a day of the world’s most prized fish, has become a prime attraction for intrepid foodies. Thanks to a growing hunger for authentic culinary experiences, and books like The Sushi Economy or The Fish Market at the Center of the World, this maze of marine bounty has found a place on Japan’s tourist map.
With the number of curiosity-seekers growing, an outright ban is being considered (and seems reasonable in light of the dangers). And the overcrowded market itself faces shutdown and relocation to a much larger and more modern facility about three kilometers away at Toyosu on Tokyo Bay — though the move has generated controversy, most recently because the new site, formerly owned by Tokyo Gas Co., has been found to be contaminated with toxins that include arsenic.
For now, guided groups of Germans move furtively through the surreal expanse. “Tours” advertise on the internet, but offer no special access to the tuna auctions; groups spend most of their time peeping through cold-fogged windows. But if you do manage to sneak in where the auctions are held — for fresh tuna, bellies slit and tails cross-sectioned, and for their frozen counterparts, swathed in vapor — you can follow an entire bluefin or yellowfin through its carving by saws and filleting into tenderloins, then steaks, then bite-sized slivers.
The rows of small wholesalers outside the warehouses are as intensely lit as an operating room, with no dirty bits to hide. Their sharp-edged slicers, laying out the wares for display to distributors and restaurant suppliers, are as worthy of awe as any of Japan’s other craftsmen. The tenderness they lavish on urchins, scallops and snappers borders on the embarrassing.
Tsukiji’s 39 unheralded eateries are as tough to find as they are to squeeze into, mostly housed in a row of barracks-like huts separated from the main action by dank loading docks. To get a taste, you must cross over to the six two-story shop blocks, painted lime green, where the sushi restaurants have their narrow stalls, though you may first come upon a long row of other eateries snuggled against an outer wall, offering cheaper alternatives — the likes of noodles, cutlets, curry rice and even pizza.
Still, few restaurants in Asia can boast lines out the door at just after dawn. These elbow-room-only establishments were founded to fuel market workers. They may be Asia’s ultimate lunch counters, though most close well before normal lunch hours. In the words of Dokoro Yamazaki, the 85-year-old head of the Tsukiji Restaurants Association, “It’s like eating in the back of the whole city’s kitchen” — or, more aptly, straight out of its refrigerator.
They began as simple stand-up counters and stalls, in the days when “horse mackerel” (as some tunas are called in the West) still moved by horse. They open as early as 2 a.m., in time to serve the needs of Tsukiji’s thousands of workers, and the many thousands more buyers and shippers who pass through each morning. (The sushi bars open later, around 5 a.m.)
The families licensed to operate the 39 restaurants can be traced back three generations or more — and actually owe their prized business locations to distant acts of community service. After Tokyo was leveled by the Great Earthquake of 1923, fish dealers at the old Nihonbashi market handed out free food to some 12,000 stricken residents. Those who offered the most civic charity were the first granted restaurant slots at Tsukiji, built in the wake of the quake.
Today, charity’s rewards can be seen at Daiwa Sushi and rival Sushi Dai, where locals and tourists alike form long lines. Both remain full for nearly their entire operating day — and grab the biggest chunk of an estimated 12,000 patrons who sample Tsukiji restaurants daily. “The mass media and internet,” says Yamazaki, perhaps with some jealousy, “have given these two brand names, just like handbags.” Establishments here are actually forbidden to advertise, since long lines of tourists mean less access for market staff.
Too hungry to wait, I head off to explore a less-packed competitor, Sushi Bun. Time and room both being short (the narrow spaces measure between 20 and 30 square meters), the market restaurants prefer to dole out sets (“setto,” in local parlance) comprising the basic tuna, squid and anago (sea eel), plus a seaweed roll or two. I go for a second round at Ichiba Sushi, which aims to stand out from the crowd by claiming (in Japanese script) to serve only “wild fish” — as opposed to the tuna or salmon farmed in controlled conditions off Australia and other countries. I feel rather undiscriminating when I can’t taste any difference in my “free-swimming” setto, until Yamazaki assures me that “most Japanese are so used to farmed fish that they prefer it.”
Some storefronts carry on bravely with other specialties. Two doors down from the crush at Sushi Dai, there’s always an open stool at Yachiyo — a true mom-and-pop operation, run, or rather hobbled, solely by a couple in their seventies. It doesn’t draw the sushi crowd because the bulk of the menu is deep-fried seafood — breaded shrimp, scallops and oysters. Served in deep-brown combos for as little as $12 on mounds of cabbage slaw, with accompanying mustard, lemon, and mayonnaise, this is a Japanese answer to British fish and chips or a New England clam fry. Anywhere else but Tsukiji, and the place would be packed.
Irino Mitsuhiro, son of Daiwa’s boss, tells me the restaurant was opened by an aunt 40 years ago, and that the family has resisted many offers to open branches in new office towers. At Tsukiji, says the son of Daiwa’s boss (busy slicing at a back sink), the public “pays only for fish, not fancy land prices.”
Putting Daiwa’s reputation to the test at last, I feel like someone has reached inside one of those warehoused tuna bellies and handed the best bit directly to me. This breakfast in the raw may be the best reason of all for losing sleep.
Whether in Japan, Singapore or the founding restaurant in Taipei, the Din Tai Fung kitchen is exposed to the public through full-length walls of glass: an all-white, powdery laboratory. Customers can watch teams of surgically masked stuffers, folders, rollers, kneaders and twisters churning out dough with near-scientific precision.
Every precious 4.8-gram piece of Din Tai Fung’s dough, weighed on delicate solar-powered scales, is allowed to vary by only a tenth of a gram. Each dumpling must have at least 18 folds or it is rejected. Every one of them, like everything else here, is handmade. “There just isn’t a machine that can do it,” boasts Taiwanese founder Yang Ji-hua. But the system he has taken from the Taipei operation to this one in Hong Kong includes digital timers that steam the dumplings to the second. If this McDonald’s of Chinese restaurants can export its formula for dough-encased morsels, so melt-in-the-mouth they make every other restaurant roll seem second-rate, it’s thanks to the mechanistic mania of its head engineer.
“Each of our kitchen staff should take under one minute to turn out 13 xiao long bao,” says Yang of his top draw card. “With the number of workers in our Taipei branch, that should come out to nearly two thousand an hour.” All amazingly fresh.
Such calculations come easily to Yang, whose rimless glasses, button-down shirt and trim black vest make him look more like an academic researcher than one of the region’s consummate restaurateurs. Looking at a basketful of his special chive-crammed vegetable dumplings, he speaks less of flavor than an obsession for standardization, pointing out, “Every single dough is slightly different to fold, more or less elastic, with varying amounts of water or yeast.”
Inheriting a peanut oil factory in a storefront on busy Hsin Yi Road, Yang started to produce dumplings as a sideline. The choice of business name, Din Tai Fung, describing a traditional, three-legged wine vessel, is still something of a mystery to the son. But not the restaurant’s success: to lessen the lines gathered on the sidewalk, patrons are handed Din Tai Fung’s order form on a clipboard, so they can write out their requests before they have even been seated.
“I’m just a very lucky guy,” Yang declares. “In middle school, I dreamed of having my own bicycle. In the army, it was a motorcycle. Now I can afford more than a few cars.”
Fame has only brought Yang more problematic calculations. “It took half a year for our chefs to train the mainland Chinese correctly and get them to work as hard as Taiwanese,” he says with predictable patriotism. He also points out that Japanese and Western tourists like to linger 40 minutes longer over their stacked baskets than more gobbling-intent Chinese. “The turnover has to be recalculated,” Yang of his virtual time-and-motion study of dumpling stuffing.
Timing is everything. And Din Tai Fung has laid a base for worldwide expansion through a scrupulously scientific approach that, like a perfectly told book or film, makes you wonder why someone hadn’t done it before. Or why more kitchens-cum-laboratories can’t do the same.
When Chef Tung Siu Chung greets those come to sample his famous Shanghainese cuisine, he can call out, “Please feel at home!” Because that’s exactly where he is.
To get here, diners must ride fifteen floors in a smelly service elevator in the city’s grimy North Point neighborhood, and sometimes walk past Tung’s wife doing her ironing in the hallway, to the one corner room at the back that has windows and room for a single round table seating up to 14.
With every inch of its overvalued space subject to regulations, Hong Kong hardly seems the place to sneak anything under the table. So why then has the best food in what many Chinese once called their favorite place to eat turned out to be found in the most unlikely, unlicensed and unadorned spots? Call it black market cuisine. Call it the mechanism of the marketplace making a natural correction on making diners pay mostly for high retail rents and little else. The illegal restaurant has become one of Hong Kong’s main draws — forcing the law-bound Crown Colony to both eat another way and look the other way.
Where many of its Cantonese restaurants have grown predictable, impersonal and expensive, ad hoc restaurants have stepped in to revive Hong Kong’s culinary choices. Their sudden appearance has been driven by several converging trends: the unaffordable cost of doing business, the arrival of enterprising mainlanders, bringing China’s many regional cuisines with them, and the time-honored Chinese precept of focusing on food above ambience.
Tung’s 75-square-meter dive, christened Loong Ho (“Propitious Dragon”), is already booked for the rest of the year. Though the main view is of the tiny galley kitchen and an aluminum-wrapped air vent that hogs half the cramped confines, said kitchen produces a steady stream of smoked fish, garlic cucumbers, bean curd rolls and chopped pea shoot flowers with ham, all decorated with purple blossoms and professional rosettes of carrot. Cold courses are followed by hot giant shrimps in a sauce of tomatoes and homemade rice wine, and a glorious whole baby pumpkin stuffed with sweet bean paste and glutinous rice.
The first such place to gain notoriety was the Yellow Door Kitchen, started by gray-locked bohemian foodie Lau Kin Wai in a Central office walk-up, and featuring walls scrawled with the manic calligraphy of famed street artist “The King of Kowloon.” After that, new places began springing up every week: a vegetarian experiment by a Buddhist monk; an artist who loves to cook fusion and invites a select few to his studio; and a local wine merchant who expanded his Francophile knowledge into nightly repasts that are now reserved three months in advance. When one Sichuanese couple hung out their basement shingle and took reservations for set meals accompanied by the wife’s nightly renditions of Chinese and Western opera, everyone knew that being illegal had suddenly become in.
Wendy Chau opened Mum Chau’s Kitchen along with two other women investors so that her mother would have something better to do than sit at home after migrating to Hong Kong from the Yangtze River town of Yibin nine years ago. The younger Chau insists that making money (conveniently untaxed so long as inspectors don’t crack down) isn’t what the restaurant is about.
“This is a hangout for friends to meet and enjoy our true Sichuanese culture,” says Chau, who still keeps her day job with an insurance company. Indeed, the restaurant’s appeal is enhanced by the personal attention given to regular clients and the evident bond between mother and daughter. “Don’t we look like two sisters?” asks Chau, her head on her mother’s shoulder as the cook takes a break. “Here, my mother can create the real Sichuanese food that she couldn’t find when she went out to eat in Hong Kong,” Chau claims. Cold chicken smothered in chili paste, the classic “two lovers” of black beef strips and white intestines, superb peanut-topped mung bean noodles, strips of fresh squash — all are infused with the resonant tang of genuine Sichuan peppercorns. Have these been smuggled in under the nose of inspectors as well?
There aren’t any ringing cash registers here, or written receipts. Chef Tung as well prefers to accept money slipped into lucky red packets. In his casual setting, people can relax and forget business pressures or pretensions of showing off with fancy dishes. They can even peek over the chef’s shoulder and learn a thing or two as he stands over a hot wok. He learned his craft in Yangzhou, a city renowned for those who earn a living with one of the “three knives” — cooking, haircutting and manicures — then spent years at the Ningbo Association, one of Hong Kong’s semi-private (but thoroughly legal) eating clubs. When he and his wife first began their own place, the confines were so small that they were constantly fined for putting tables on the sidewalk.
Threatened at first, the Hong Kong government raided such establishments in apartments — where strict laws about closed kitchens have long kept disastrous fires to a minimum — and punished offenders to the tune of HK$50,000 (US$6,426) and six months in prison. But now, Hong Kong tourist brochures tout the crowd-drawing delicacies at many of these latest, tastiest outposts of unfettered enterprise.
When it comes to eating in Thailand, there are no Red Shirts or Yellow Shirts. There are just a lot of stained shirts.
“I am in the middle, I have to stay neutral,” says Ban Promlee, 42, of the clash between the populist and monarchist forces who have become known for their modeled colors. This vendor has just taken over Laab Yaso, a popular sidewalk stall run for ten years by her sister along Ratchadamri Road. When the site beside Bangkok’s fanciest shopping malls was occupied for two months by Red protestors, she went on serving the demonstrators — who were used to her Northeastern treats like fiery ground pork laab. But she lost all family income for three weeks during the ensuing crackdown and curfews, and fears that her regular customers, as well as the four other vendors who once made this stretch a major source for evening meals of grilled fish, may never return.
But the neighboring stall’s founder, ethnic Lao Khaohoun “Bun” Sayasith, says that she doesn’t blame the mostly poor protestors — roused, ironically, to support the return of Thailand’s richest man, former prime minster and telecom tycoon Thaksin Shinawatra. “These are my fellow countrypeople,” she admits, adding that she even went to listen to speeches when she could take a break from pounding her papaya salads.
With Thailand divided as never before between north and south, rich and poor, state and army, monarchist and anti-monarchist (or, some might say, various competing demagogues fronting corrupt mafia), Bangkok has become associated more with images of burning tires, smoldering grenades and exploding petrol bombs than with flaming stir-fries, steaming cauldrons and burning tongues. During this period of turmoil, around 1,500 restaurants closed and estimated losses ran to $300 million. But licensed, indoor eateries don’t give the true picture of Thailand’s food industry or eating culture.
This is one country where, to reprise a favorite slogan of the Sixties’ riotous rebels, “the streets belong to the people.” Sidewalk by uneven sidewalk, an underemployed yet entrepreneurial underclass of caterers have claimed their rightful place in the hot sun, at the heart of urban action, and forged an above-ground, underground economy. David Thompson, the chef-creator of acclaimed Thai restaurants in Sydney and London, points out in his just-published Thai Street Food that much of what we view as traditional Thai cuisine comes out of the exodus of rural labor (and cooks) to Bangkok, beginning in the 1960s. This army of occupation has proved more formidable than the country’s power-wielding generals, conquering not with tanks or tear gas, but one gas-powered wheeled cart at a time. (Even along Convent Road, within earshot of shootings and bombings as Red Shirts made their stand in nearby Lumphini Park, they kept serving from behind protective coils of barbed wire.)
Despite their leaders’ inability to create an equitable place for all at the social table, your average Thai isn’t really a “street fightin’ man” — as The Rolling Stones once crooned — but a street eatin’ man.
Having moved to Thailand, I, too, had to give up my bias against squids moldering in hot display cases, wobbly tables with views of stalled traffic, or pink plastic plates washed in soapy tubs placed a little too near sewer covers. Now when friends or colleagues visit, expecting me to provide a list of genteel spots where the green curries come with air-con and atmosphere, I have to inform my guests that the vast majority are unimaginative and over-priced, offering decoratively re-plated staples better found down the block (or rather, on the corner), and they should instead make like last month’s protestors: throw caution to the wind and hit the streets. Not only will they be remarkably safe from food-borne illness, but, along the way, they’ll get the added flavor of genuine Thai culture.
Take the wonderful block leading into Tha Prachan (“Moon Pier”) and the side entrance to the elite Thamassat University. Here the delicate shrimp cakes, the perfectly fried-up baby mussels and dessert plantains, the specially coated satays of pork liver and the fixings for miang kham (betel leaf packets stuffed with dried shrimps, peanuts and more) come side-by-side with herbal medicines and compresses, as well as the city’s largest trading post for Buddhist amulets of all sizes and prices.
Each night, Yaowarat, the ever-jammed main street of Chinatown, becomes the top showplace of Bangkok street food. Divisions between sidewalk and storefront, the raw and the refined, seem to dissolve as competing seafood purveyors like Lek and Rut churn out with industrial rapidity some of the biggest tiger shrimps and best crab fried rice on the planet. Of course, a trip to Chinatown comes with a crack at dim sum, lotus seed and gingko nut desserts, ultra-cheap shark’s fin and bird’s nest soups. But the covered markets off Rama IV Road and along Thanon Mangkon may be even better by day. Mom-and-pop stalls offer subtle and delicate pad thai beside vast assortments of rice in banana leaf bunched like grapes, quivering pans of coconut custards.
Though it’s just across the road, or one subway stop, from the famed Chatuchak weekend market, the true Mecca of Thai food gets missed by many a traveler, however street-savvy. The MOF (Marketing Organization for Farmers) market, begun under the auspices of Thailand’s Ministry of Agriculture in 1971, is a serene showcase of Thailand’s seasonal fruits and highly seasoned curries under one sweep of corrugated tin; it features 600 vendors approved by provincial agricultural officials for their ability to get the goods from field to stall in top condition. While tourist English is spoken, there’s no watering down of authenticity, especially at the crowded lunch counters where diners select from immense vats of coconut-creamed stews.
It may seem a bit too tidy to fans of Asia’s funkier wet markets, who may miss the acrid scents, the pointy elbows of housewives, the ankle-deep floods of fish detritus and the dank corners one dare not scan for scurrying critters. But this is the place to find, among other delights, stuffed baby crabs, young mangoes the size of quail eggs, fresh tamarind pods, a full array of khanom (traditional desserts), plus an equatorial bounty of mangosteens, rambutans and pungent durians. Just point and gather at the many specialty stalls churning out smoked catfish, steamed green eggplants, basil-chocked fish cakes, luscious pork barbecued on a stick, and so on. No single restaurant in Thailand can match such a menu, and half the fun is in the scouting and assembling one’s own spread.
In the realm of outdoor snacking, at least, there’s no such thing in this nation’s capital as some rural-urban civil split. Bangkok’s most popular stalls are in the style of Issan, the northeast region where the Red Shirts predominate. Staples like gai yang (grilled chicken) are accompanied by sticky rice, while som tam (papaya salads, often with soft-shell crabs or salted egg for added kick) are supplemented by central Thailand’s fresh catch of fresh seafood — seasonal river fish, cat fish or tilapia stuffed with lemongrass before it is charcoaled. Still, street food here does have political overtones — underpinning a national safety net where salaries remain pitifully low and income gaps vast.
No wonder there are no social stigmas attached to eating outdoors: at lunchtime, white-collar workers and their bosses crowd elbow-to-elbow into noodle stands that agglomerate around office towers. Such sidewalk mess halls aren’t just local color for tourists but a vital and necessary resource, providing reasonably healthy and inexpensive sustenance. In eating, as in politics, this is business as usual.
“Only the bullets could drive me away,” says Ratchadamri stall-owner Bun about cooking in the midst of the upheaval. That’s how most people in Bangkok feel about their street food.