Disclaimer: I’m no expert on Thai food. The best Thai food I’ve eaten is at Thai Express, which isn’t Thai at all. My uncle married a Thai wife and I have cute Thai cousins. I visited Thailand when I was 8, 24 and 30. When I was 8 in Bangkok, I didn’t know the meaning of “moderation” and ate pineapple until my tongue burnt and I became allergic to the fruit. I slept with two Thai boys (not at the same time) who are hot and passionate; that is all the experience I have with Thai food.
But in my experience, Thai food is usually spicy and sweet and sometimes salty. Thai food is rather like Chinese food in many ways: rice and noodles as staples; emphasis on balance; but Thais don’t have sweet-and-sour pork. Do they?
There is only one chef to achieve michelin stars in Thai cuisine – and the irony, he is White. But strangely I haven’t really tasted mindblowing Thai food before. However, Thais are very creative. In Singapore, we eat hotdogs with mustard and ketchup, copying from the West; but in Bangkok, they create their own sweet and spicy sauce to go with the hotdogs, very delicious.
Pad Thai
My friends commented that I ordered pad thai wherever I go but honestly, what is there to order?? The rest of the food on the menu looked so Chinese that I could eat it in Singapore. The photo on the top is from a little restaurant along a busy shopping area with little quaint shophouses shops. (Yeah, very helpful). The middle photo is a stall in Chatuchak, seafood pad thai for only 180 baht or S$7. And the last photo is soft-shell crab pad thai, 300 baht or so, from a restaurant called Spring Summer. (I’ll do a restaurant section in Bangkok later.)
The sad truth about pad thai is they all taste the same, whether it’s 20 baht or 2, 000 baht. It is delicious, no doubt, but not much can go wrong, and there is nothing to be creative about.
Leave a Reply