Light Snacks Will Be Served

On Bangkok.

I wasn't going to put this piece of writing on the blog. It's ponderous and dark. Probably too much so for this medium. But today I read this piece by Pankaj Mishra (my restaurant gets a shout-out, which is nice!) and I thought, what the hell. I'll give you a slice of my Bangkok pie. It's of a different flavor.

The prosaic sort of poem below was colored by two events that happened outside my house. And those things that happen within the confines of the restaurant. Bangkok has a sinister side, but most writers don't get it right. I'm not sure I do either, but this is, I guess, an attempt.

I read this piece at the Bangkok Literary Festival held at the Neilson Hays Library a few months back. The topic of the readings was the city in which I live. And so, here we go...  

 

After the wild-eyed tuk-tuk driver nearly ran me down,

In front of a festering canal beside my house,

He scowled, then spilled out of his machine.

He came at me with an amphetamine tick and a beer-perfumed hiss,

And I wondered what the hell I was doing here.

Then I began to run.

Once, when my best cook disappeared, I wandered to the bank through the back streets of Sukhumvit.

Morlam chirped from cheap speakers, as I made my way to the teller, and I thought about him.

I cared about him.

And looking down at the cracked pavement, trying not to trip, beside the bus stop,

I spotted my chef.

He was sitting on the sidewalk, on a straw mat, a block from the restaurant.

Beside him, an ancient-looking fortune teller, sipping an energy drink, whispered in his ear.

My eyes met the chef’s, and then they didn’t, as if guiltily we shared the same secret.

The chef came back to work the next day.

I had dreamt of a restaurant, and then I had one, and so I stopped writing stories about others and tried to make one about myself, under this backdrop of Bangkok.

And it was through the eyes of others, like the Burmese furniture maker who swam across a river to become a waiter, that I began to understand this place.

And the chef from Yasothorn, with a sharp stutter from a motorbike accident, who pages through catalogs of amulets, looking for one that might bring him something better.

Then there’s the dishwasher whom I once watched kill a rat with his hands. “I wouldn’t dream of cooking,” he said, when I tried to promote him. “There’s just too much noise in my head.”

We are guests, 13 of us, sitting at the same table, waiting for what comes. The one thing we know is that Bangkok does not belong to us.

After a long night at work, we sometimes go to Rama 9 Road, to eat Isaan food and drink beer.

The restaurants there bear the names of places and dishes from upcountry – Larb Phet Sisaket, for instance – which must make customers feel closer, or farther, from home.

The massage parlor girls spill in, with the bartenders and the taxi drivers, and in the fluorescent light, their hard lives seem less so.

And after many drinks we sometimes talk about our dreams, and often, my staff talk of going home.

This Thursday, after midnight, I returned home from work.

And on the same street where I was almost run down, beside the brown canal, there were piles of blood-stained cotton.

Pairs of surgical gloves were ripped inside-out and left to lie beside the empty wrappers of life-saving things, syringes and bandages and the shattered plastic from a broken bike.

I sat and stared at it in dim light from my own motorbike, as it idled, alive.

The next day, as I began to write this piece, I thought about dreams, and how they drift into our lives, changing our perception of a place.

This city we live in invites cliché, as we catalog the strange sensory experiences here that come to define Bangkok.

But they don’t, really. They’re just smells and sounds and sights that we cling to, for safety, on our way home.

They’re our handlebars. 

 

On Top 50 Lists, Crowd-sourced Reviews, and What Makes a Restaurant Great

When Restaurant Magazine releases something like its World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, sponsored by that avatar of good taste, San Pellegrino sparkling water, people are bound to talk. Outrage, backslapping and head-scratching ensue. And that’s precisely the point.

People take this shit seriously. NOMA is the best restaurant in the world. For three years running! Seriously, what could be better than that? (For me, the answer is, a place that’s open after 11pm in my neighborhood serving pretty decent sushi where I can eat after service. One that serves cold beer, and remembers what kind of fish I like to eat.)

I was considering this list last week. Much as anyone else who writes about, eats at, cooks in, or owns these sorts of restaurants probably was. And so we’re clear: I occasionally eat at and write about these sorts of restaurants. I don’t cook in or run one.

Forget about who came in at one, or ten, or, to my great delight #50 (nahm, in Bangkok). It’s not a representative list by any measure. Asia barely gets a nod, as Lawrence Osborne cleverly writes about here. Japan is largely (and bafflingly) tossed by the wayside, as are Hong Kong and mainland China, Singapore and Bangkok, KL and Seoul and Saigon.

But does that mean that Asia deserves half, or even a quarter of this list? I’m not so sure.

As anyone who evaluates restaurants on their relative merit knows, it’s about more than what arrives on your plate. Is there ice in your drink? Is there even a drink menu (or ice)? Is the drink menu sticky? Or the table for that matter? Are there napkins?  Is the flatware clean? Are they playing Celine Dion on the flat-screen? Is there air-conditioning? Is the kitchen a filthier, open-air extension of the dining room? Are your waiter’s fingernails dirty? Is there a toilet? Is there an old man sleeping on a cot wearing a diaper in the back?

These are experiential things to consider. And there are a few dozen more. And Europe, America and Japan mostly do those front-of-house things much better.

Conversely there are many, many westerners who romanticize the allure of eating on the street. There are some who’ve made writing careers out of it, insisting that Asia’s finest food is cooked out-of-doors. That’s all fine and good, and the dish or two that one might serve on the corner could be unspeakably, RM-SP World’s 50 Best delicious, but that doesn’t make it a great restaurant. It makes it a street food shop serving a great dish. To be truly great, your pony needs to perform a few more tricks than putting good food on a pink plastic plate.

The RM-SP list is a recent phenomenon. An even more recent, and I would argue more influential one are crowd-sourced review sites on the internet. And here is where I think more people really, really get it wrong.

Consider this:

Nahm, which I mention came in at number 50 on the RM-SP list, and which I firmly believe is the finest Thai restaurant in the world, barely cracks the top 75 on tripadvisor.com, IN BANGKOK ALONE. This, from what seems to me the most influential restaurant site for independent, English-speaking travelers in Asia. (Meanwhile an Indian snack joint sits snugly at #2. Have a look, and draw your own conclusions).

Crowd-sourced reviews can be useful, venomous, venal. Sometimes all at once. After nearly two years in the business I can assure you that customers who have bad experiences are far more likely to convey them to their imagined readership than those who enjoy good ones.

“I read about you on tripadvisor” seems more of a threat than a greeting sometimes. Like arriving at your table dressed in chain mail.

The internet is populated with a lot of food reviewers who take their unpaid profession rather seriously. There is nothing wrong with this, but what is flawed is their lack of accountability, experience, or accuracy

(Should I really take the time to respond to Jaquilp, and tell her that in fact we don’t serve Mekong whiskey in any of our cocktails, let alone all of them? Or that there is no order to the food that arrives, unless you ask for it? Is Metacritic798 really just a disgruntled owner from up the street? Should I bother to explain to PapabearandPanda that Soul Food isn’t in a “weird neighborhood”? Probably not. But I know I'm not the only one considering their words.)

It’s far too easy for dishonest owners to fluff their numbers, and price seems to be the first consideration for many online reviewers. (Fair enough, but is value a measure of greatness? I don’t really think so.)

Which brings me back to the beginning...

Lists are infuriating. Lists are tantalizing. Lists are fucking lists.

But ice-cold Sapporo, some fatty slices of hamachi, and a smile, at 1145pm… That shit is for real.

 

Wintersummer

(Because it's Christmas, and because it's not-quite-hot outside today, I thought I'd share this little snippet of life in Bangkok that I wrote for my friend Christine's Summerzine project earlier this year. Happy holidays, wherever you are...)

Wintersummer

In Bangkok, we celebrate this fleeting hint of winter.

It is our summer.

But it is shorter than your summer. Sometimes it never even comes. When it does, we know it will soon be gone. And there is sadness in the almost cool air, like there is on the last day of vacation.

Our summer comes around Christmastime, except that it’s not Christmastime, unless you’re a tourist here on your Christmas vacation, or you're shopping. The city’s many shopping malls do play Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer and fake snowflakes are strung from their ceilings. There might be a sale on bathing suits or flip-flops or plastic trees. And this reminds us that our summer is about to come.

Outside, in the thick and sticky air, beer companies erect monuments to themselves in front of the shopping malls to remind us it’s summertime. We come by the thousands to drink watery beer from toy-like plastic towers emblazoned with logos of lions, tigers, leopards and elephants. Some of us wear wool hats while we drink, as if the beer might give us a head cold. The centers of those toy-like beer towers are filled with ice to keep the watery beer cold in the middle of our not-quite-sweltering wintersummer. This is the only time one might wish to sit outside on the baked concrete plain that is Bangkok. And so we drink to forget.

And the surest sign that it is summer in Bangkok is when our street dogs, who roam freely in our alleyways and block the jigsaw sidewalks as they sleep through the afternoons, put on their tee-shirts. The dogs might get cold if they didn’t, but in wintersummer they usually do. It’s like the plum blossoms in Japan, announcing the arrival of spring. But weirder. Funnier.

So if you ever find yourself in Bangkok, in the middle of winter, and you see drunks in wool hats wandering around shopping malls festooned with the roaring logos of jungle cats and surrounded by sleeping street dogs dressed in colorful tee-shirts, smile.

It’s summertime.   

On Looking Back, And Forward

The other night my wife told me that I don’t write enough, anymore.

This is an uncharacteristic thing for her to say, as she spent many years with a man who stared for hours at his computer screen, polishing sentences, forcing her to read pieces, or raging at clumsy revisions from an editor who obviously didn’t understand what the fuck he was talking about. Obviously she’s right: I haven’t written much at all, and I do miss it. Perhaps she also misses the silence my writing allows.

Well,  

This past week I decided to celebrate Christmas with my staff, as an excuse to have fun, and to bring us all closer together. I like to think we're like a family at the restaurant (albeit a dysfunctional one where a member occasionally disappears or needs to get bailed out of jail.)

I sat with my head chef Pi Bun at my side, the same man who helped my father hang the wood boards on the walls that, sixteen months later, are beginning to buckle from the humidity in Bangkok. Pi Bun doesn’t talk much, but communicates with me in much simpler, humane ways. A hug sometimes, a pat on the back others. Sometimes, after a crazy service, he'll hold my hand and quietly laugh. We don’t really need words.

Across from me was Eak, my sous-chef. Eak has been the focus of much of my ire and pride over the past year-and-a-half. He is my strongest cook and was the weakest link in my kitchen – a headstrong, reckless kid who once disappeared for nearly a week before crawling back, with bloodshot eyes, to ask for his job back. That day marked a turning point in my relationship with Eak. I was impressed – moved – by the fact that he could face me after behaving so carelessly. He looked me right in the eye and asked for forgiveness, and though I told myself a hundred times that I would never let him back into my kitchen again, I did. He has rewarded me with hard work, insight, and an attention to detail that is rare. Eak is very proud of his cooking, and I am proud of him.

It’s not all winsome tales of triumph over adversity. Staff come and go and every time I lose someone I care about I try to tell myself it’s just business. It’s just a job. Putting plates on a table, then taking them away. Making a dish the same way, again and again. But it feels like more than a job when you pour all of yourself into it, and expect everyone else to, too. And so each time I lose someone who is good, I take it personally. I wonder what I did wrong. I wonder if they’re happier working wherever else they might be. I’m not sure if other chefs or owners feel this way, or if they’d even admit it. But I suspect the ones that care, do.

The other night, as I sat next to Pi Bun and across from Eak, and beside my manager Chai – a Burmese man who went from delivering shoes to managing a restaurant in under a year – I felt a certain swelling of pride. We drank Black Label and beer and ate oysters with chili jam and talked about how we wanted to change things for the better. We made menus for Christmas and talked about service issues and smoking meat. And then I left them, to use the bathroom.

The rented toilet was located some distance from the beer garden, inside the husk of a forgotten restaurant. A few decorations still hung on the walls, and I sat there, tipsily staring at them, swimming in the lost possibilities of that place. In every failed restaurant or bar, there is a lingering whiff of the pain and frustration people must have felt. It hangs in the dead air, forever.

But as I walked back my cooks were clinking glasses, and they saw me and smiled. We finished the bottle and staggered home. The next day Eak was in the kitchen before me.  

 

A Quick Note on Service in Paris: New Versus Old School

There is nothing so intimidating as a Parisian waiter glowering at you as you fumble through a menu.  I find myself lucky; I speak a few languages and so my mind is more malleable than those who speak one. Four years of Latin, and a career in the food industry helps too. I can read French menus -- I just can't make them come out of my mouth with any measure of grace.

Many overworked Parisian waiters seem to enjoy the pain visitors feel when ordering food. It's like a sprikling of schadenfreude in their mundane workday. I can sympathize to a certain extent -- many waiters are working eight or ten tables at once, far too many, and most of those tables are populated by foreigners. But then my mind turns to my own servers in Bangkok, who do the same job with mostly foreign clientele, without a hint of pretension, or worse, disgust. C'est la vie.

But I saw signs of change in Parisian service, and it was directly related to the age of those running the restaurants. In old-school brasseries and bistros with repute, the service was brusque at best and downright scornful at worst. The food allows one to (mostly) forget. But at two of Paris' newest and most promising restaurants, my wife and I were welcomed with the sort of casual grace that defines great service today. At Septime and Agape Substance we were greeted, served, and soothed by a kind of conviviality that was almost unnerving after eating elsewhere in town. 

I think that both of these places should be commeded for that; they are fashionable, they are modern, they are hard to get into, but they are also respectful of customers and mindful of the language gap. This seemed to me like a great departure from the old-school scowl and 'pffft!' that one often encounters.

It was a mark of prefessionalism and a desire to make people enjoy not just the food and the wine but the philosophy at work behind it. And today, no matter where you are, that's exactly what it takes to make it.  

 

A Piece on Authenticity and Memory

Foreward: I read this tonight at a poetry reading at a friend's bar. I have admired from afar the bravery of others at this occasion, and enjoy how this night feels warm like stories do when told around a fire. My hands shook a lot. Don't think I've ever read my work in front of an audience. It was strangely scary for my limbs, nice for my brain. The topic was (science/fiction). And so it goes...

 

I struggled with the topic here tonight – because I usually write non-fiction, and more specifically about food. And two nights ago I sat up in bed, very late, reading an article by a writer named Todd Kliman. The piece was called The Problem of Authenticity. And somewhere in the article, as he picks apart the ideal of authentic food, he quoted another writer, Wright Morris, who wrote something more profound than I’m ever likely to. Morris wrote: “Anything processed by memory, is fiction.”

And my mind started to spin. There is no word in the English language, in the realm of food writing, that I despise so much as Authenticity. Because it says more and means less than any other word. And so, in the spirit of Morris, I begin.

“Anything Processed By Memory, is Fiction.”

I remember a meal I ate, once, on the coast of Spain, in Cadaques.

There was a light blue breeze rolling off a sweep of sea, and I sat on a stone wall and ate cheese that was runny and smelled like wet sheep.

The wine I drank from the bottle dripped down the side and on to my pants. And I marveled at how authentic this was; the sea, that special air, the church bells and the stinky cheese and the wine stain that slowly spread across my white pants like a memory.

I saved the label of the cheese, and weeks later, in my apartment in Shanghai, I unfurled it. It read, Made in France.

Once, in Chengdu, I stopped at a hotpot shop after many bottles of beer.

Food was one mao a stick, so cheap you could eat for hours and pay pocket change, I mean change that was really in your pocket, coins made of metal, and the meat was cut from strange parts of cows and pigs and ducks.

The meat looked like creatures from the deep sea that had somehow swum into a skewer. And as I chewed through boiled flesh I bathed in the authenticity of it all, like enlightened sunshine on a drunken night. Yet I never saw another hotpot shop in Chengdu quite like that one.

Across the street from my restaurant, two blocks away, a woman wakes up early each morning and cooks khao mok gai, a sort of Thai biryani, in her head scarf.

She adds turmeric, ginger, onions and chicken stock and slowly simmers the rice, then she makes a sweet sauce with little wisps of coriander and mint which you are supposed to drizzle over the rice and really you should.

At the very end, in between the rice and the spice and the sweet sauce and the salty soup there are raisins. They’re everywhere in there. And no one asks her why, because they know why when they taste it. Goddamnit, it’s the most authentic tasting Thai Malay Indian rice dish with raisins that I have ever tasted.  

Recently, I read about a woman in Bozeman Montana named Florence Dunkel. She makes chocolate chip cookies and studies bugs at a university.

In her free time, Florence creams butter and sugar together, adds some vanilla extract, eggs and flour and chocolate chips, and as she does that she roasts a tray of crickets in the oven.

The crickets emerge crisp and smelling of toasted walnuts and she folds the insects into her mix, forming little cookies on her baking tray where feet poke out. Because Florence is going for authenticity, isn’t she?

When did pizza become more than just bread?

When did soup become stew?

When did words become verse?

When did sandals become shoes?

When my grandmother’s mind began to slip and skip beats, as Alzheimers set in in her seventies, the dishes she cooked for me in my childhood began to change.

She forgot to soak the beans before she braised them with ham hocks, and so we ate hard, chewy bean soup and made faces at the table.

One night, as we sat beside each other on the sofa, she offered me a taste of her dessert.

“This is the most delicious ice cream, Jarrett” she said, handing me her bowl like a secret. “It’s the kind your grandfather and I used to eat, down the shore, in summertime.”

I took a spoonful of ice cream, and it stuck to my tongue like an oiled cloth.

My Nana was eating a bowl full of soft, salted butter.

But that’s not how she remembered it. 

 

La Cagouille

Before travelling, I ask people whom I trust where I should eat. Especially when going to a place like Paris, which is so dense with restaurants one might never know. And at the end of a friend's email on that subject, there were a few lines that went something like this: "Near Montparnasse there's a fish restaurant called La Cagouille. Unassuming. Very good seafood. And it's open on Sunday."

La Cagouille was then forgotten.

But two Sundays past, in Paris, my wife and I found ourselves wandering around hungrily. The cheese shop I had found the day before was shuttered, scrapping our plans for a picnic. And then I remembered the email, and the seafood restaurant that was open on Sunday. And so we jumped in a taxi and zoomed across town on a crisp, clear afternoon. 

La Cagouille is unassuming. There are understated nautical touches in the dining room, there's a simple patio, and it's located in a recently constructed apartment building on a quiet residential street. It does not magically transport you to the Paris of accordions, roses and cobblestones. In fact, it feels more like a chain restaurant somewhere in Boston. 

Then the first course comes. Cockels, swimming in Breton butter. You scoop the tiny shellfish up and slurp the sweet, tiny pieces of meat. If you're me, you then use the shell as a ladel to pour butter in your mouth. 

After that, the mussels arrived, which were thrown on a hot iron plate to ease open, then simply dusted with sea salt. They were tender and sweet and as we drank a bottle of white wine from the Rhone that was perfectly complimentary my eyes started to roll back into my head.

Then the Fines de Claires were thrust in front of us, freshly shucked, and as I squeezed a half lemon atop them their edges slowly curled up in the sunlight.  The oysters were so rich and briny, so expressive of a cold, clean sea, that I shivered as they slid down my throat. "That's the most intoxicating thing I've ever eaten," muttered my wife. I smiled at her, gulped more white wine, and grunted affirmatively.

The final thing we ate that afternoon -- an afternoon meal which neither of us will forget because of the perfect combination of summer sun and tastes -- was a plate of grilled sardines. Each table of middle-aged Parisians was picking at the little fish and so we followed suit.

The rich, oily fish slid of the bone and melted in your mouth. The fish were also, gleefully, slicked with butter. There was smoke and sea and salt that was about it, and it was about the best thing one could ever eat. And we did, hushed, scraping meat from the feathery bones. And as we finished the meal I felt a rush of sadness, because I knew that I wouldn't eat anything so elementally good in a very long time.

Then we left the restaurant and walked through a market where painters sold bright canvasses and odd sculpture and moody photographs. But my mind was still spinning from the beauty of the food. 

Stuck inside of Bangkok, with the Paris blues, again.

So the story goes like this: 

You don't go on a lot of vacations when you work in the food business. Since I hung up the writing spurs and did this thing, I left exactly once for a four day trip to China for a (beautiful) wedding. There was a pipe-dream escape to Spain in May that never happened, for several reasons. And it all began to build up, the frustration and the heat and wet of Bangkok and the hours and the fact that I haven't left Asia in two years. And then I had a dream. My wife and I were eating oysters in some unknown Parisian brasserie, out on the sidewalk, and it was all so perfect in my intangible, dreamy belief, until I woke up and opened my eyes and saw the heavy rain falling on the palm trees outside.

I booked tickets that morning.

"Fuck it, you gotta go sometime," I thought. "And now you don't have a choice."

And so we went. And it was sublime.

And there were oysters.

(More to come on what we ate and where, and also a bit about my new little project at Soul Food Mahanakorn)

 

Plying With Fire

A few weeks ago a husband and wife team, who were writing a story about new Bangkok restaurants, were asking me questions. They were on the other side of the bar, sipping martinis, which I've found is a very agreeable way for journalists and I to conduct interviews. I stood there and tried to say something clever, while watching the drink tickets come in.

Then I got an order and lost my train of thought, just as they asked me “what is your favorite ingredient in Thai cooking?"  

Prawns? Lemongrass? Mint? Roasted sticky rice powder? Lime leaves? Fried shallots? Or maybe something more elemental, say, fish sauce or palm sugar or coconut cream? I don’t know. There are so many.

Then I started to mix the drink. Cucumber, smash. Passionfruit, just a bit. Gin, lots. Lime, ice, shake, pour. Where's the ginger ale? Shit. Seriously, where is the goddamn ginger ale? Is it down there, under the sink? There it is, behind the ice bucket. Top it, slice of cucumber, stir, wipe glass, table eight.

And I'm back. 

"Now what were we talking about?"

"Your favorite ingredient."

"Oh, right."

I looked at what the two were eating. Duck larb -- a clamorous salad that resonates with sour and spicy and smoky notes – smoky, because we add smoked duck breast to the mixture. They were also eating ribs, which I slow-braise in a sort of tamarind barbecue sauce with lemongrass and chili and finish on the grill, for another taste of smoke. And stir-fried flowers with egg, which I have my wok cook blast with heat at the beginning so that my cast iron woks breathe their smoky heat into the food.

And I had one of those empty-headed revelations that you get when you’re doing four things at once. “Smoke. I like to play around with smoke. Yeah. That’s my favorite ingredient.”

A country meal of beef and two jiim jeow dips, cooked in Nong Khai, Isaan.

Thing is, it’s true. I’ve seen smoke disappear, in its myriad forms, as kitchens modernize across Asia. Smoke is drifting away from Chinese cooking, as home cooks stir-fry over low-heat ranges, in non-stick woks. Many mainland restaurants would rather drown vegetables in peanut oil and garlic than try to execute a proper, smoky stir-fry (it’s easier to do so).

I remember the first time I tasted a stir-fry of mushrooms, in a grimy Chengdu alleyway at dusk, from a wok that was so hot it glowed. It was cold and damp outside and I wondered if the cook could poke his metal spatula right through the wok (I know now that you can’t). There was chili, and soup spoons of salt and msg, and soy and oil and cornstarch maybe even a dusting of spring onions in those mushrooms. But it was the smoke, which sprung out of a pressed disk of coal underneath and heated that wok a shade of tangerine, like a cow-brand, that made the mushrooms sing.

Smoke is disappearing from street food, as more cooks flash-fry meats in little saucepots over gas rings, rather than slow-grilling the way they should and always have. Smoke is disappearing from Thai food as more people eat in sterile mall food courts in between shopping for tee-shirts and outfits for their dogs to wear. Meatballs and sausages are cooked over middling electric coils, as fat collects in little detachable plastic trays. 

A charcoal grill is not difficult to install in a restaurant kitchen in unregulated Bangkok, but fewer restaurants do. Charcoal is dirty and it is tedious and it is absolutely essential if you are going to serve Northeastern Thai food.

Smoke is disappearing from the ripping-hot red dried chilies that people used to roast in their woks and grind in their kroks (that’s a mortar and pestle), but now buy pre-packaged in the super or wet market. These flat, lifeless chili flakes are not allowed in my kitchen. (It is also not hard to roast your own chilies. Cough.) It is disappearing, too, from northern curry pastes and nahm prik pao, where shallots and garlic and other things should be grilled and smashed into heady pastes. 

Pounding roasted chilies into powdered form, for cooking.

Sometimes, when I spy a guest nervously start to rock back and forth in their chair, as they wait for their chicken wings or their steak nahm tok or a fish grilled in a leaf to arrive, I smile inside. Because two floors up my grill man Pi Bun is carefully cooking their food over the slow, low coals that people from Lao and Isaan have cooked over for centuries. Pi Bun knows about smoke.  

He knows that it takes some time. But when the food arrives, suffused with the perfume of mangrove charcoal, it’s worth it.

It’s the best ingredient I’ve got.   

 

A View From Behind the Bar (and a recipe)

I don't write much about drinks. 

I think this silence stems from a stint, in 2003/04, as a reviewer of bars in Shanghai. Even in my mid-twenties, with an ambitious liver and a thirst for discovering new places, this was not a great gig. Most bars are not very interesting, when one is forced to write about them. Even less so with a research headache. The cocktail scene in Shanghai, circa 2003, wasn't terribly interesting either (it is more so, now).

But over the last few months at Soul Food the bar and I have become bedfellows, so I thought I'd write a bit about it. The reason we're so well acquainted is because it's difficult to find a decent bartender in Bangkok. The kind that cares more about making good drinks than juggling shit or unsnapping beer bottles with an unnecessary whip of the wrist.

The tender of the bar has more responsibility that that of floor staff. You must trust -- or at least think that you might be able to trust -- your barman. And I have gone through several, including one who called himself Beer, both for lack of trust and an abundance of flourishes. Beer also drank a lot of beer, I presume, because he arrived at work late in the afternoon with eyes like maraschino cherries. Beer didn't last long. 

Nor did Ken, who quit after I pinched him in secret, below where the customers could see, for sneezing on his hand as he cut fruit. His feelings were hurt, he explained later that night, because I had gotten upset and asked him to wash his hands. A pinch and a whisper can be dangerous. Because Ken never returned.

I bartended full time here for about ten weeks before training Chai, a server who was trustworthy and intelligent enough to take the slippery reins of the bar. But Chai had to return to his village last week, in the moutains of Burma between Thailand and China. He's getting married, and is gone for almost a month. Chai hadn't been home in seven years, and I let him go so that I can have him back.

And so here I write, again behind the bar, on a quiet Sunday night.

A lot of people come to Soul Food to drink our cocktails, which are made strong and (usually) sour. The drinks are designed to complement the food -- which is strongly flavored too, and sweet and sour and spicy. 

  That's not the cocktail below. It's one made with chili, lime and tequila.

But as complicated or fussy as that may sound, the philosophy at work behind this bar is to push simplicity and quality. A subtle tweak or two on a classic that is unique and familiar at once. That's what I'm aiming for, though sometimes guests see lemongrass or chili or kaffir lime leaves and don't realize they're really drinking an Old Fashioned with ginger, or a Tom Collins with a Thai herb or two.

And so I thought I'd share with you a drink made on this simple premise. One that I really like, and one that you can easily recreate at home. It's called The Lemongrass Daiquiri. Use good rum, a double shake, and a strainer for best results. The egg white is optional, but I like the body it adds and how it tempers the acidity a bit. See my recipe below: 

The Lemongrass Daiquiri

6cl Havana Club Silver (or any good, white rum)

1 stalk lemongrass, peeled of outer layer and sliced thinly

4cl fresh lime juice

3cl sugar syrup

Dash egg white

Directions:

First, take a martini or daiquiri glass, and chill it by filling with water and ice.

Slice one stalk of lemongrass, place it in a cocktail shaker, and muddle it until the fibrous herb is smashed up. You can't muddle too hard. Beat it up.

Add the rum and lime juice and sugar syrup to the shaker, and the dash of egg white.

Shake the mixture -- WITHOUT ICE -- 4 or 5 times. Then add ice, and shake vigorously again, for about 15-20 seconds.

Strain into the cold glass, making sure you get all the foam out of the shaker by shuffling it side-to-side over the glass. 

 Serve (or better yet, drink it).