Why There Are So Many Thai Restaurants in America
munchies.vice.com
munchies.vice.com
The best way to build a bridge between peoples is through culture, and food is an important part of culture.
The next step in bridge building is sharing meals with people of other cultures. Starting or strengthening friendships around food is a great way to lessen the power of prejudices, and put aside our national identities for the benefit of sharing a common bond as humans through our cultural identities.
Edit: even though the stated reason in the article has a political motive, I still think it helps at a human level.
I agree, and I have a theory/dream that this same principle can be extended and to all identities, including gender, sexual, and political (which are all subset of culture, of course). The value of having these discussions over a meal may be in part that there are certain expectations of social behavior in play, so people tend to be on better than normal behavior, and everyone knows they're going to be there for a while anyways so might as well make the best of it. As a result, it facilitates an environment where people actually listen to what other people are actually saying, rather than relying almost entirely on subconscious, preconceived notions, as is what routinely happens on internet forums. This extra time and dialogue helps bring people's perceptions of reality, in this case their understanding of the beliefs/culture of others, more closely inline with reality itself.
In a sense, discussions over a meal forces good behavior on people, and the result of that is that people realize their preconceptions were off the mark. Absent a meal and the social structure and expectations/rules that come with it, and particularly in the case of internet discussions where there is no physical presence and often no strongly enforced behavioral expectations at all, we're left to rely on rationality, conscious awareness and personal discipline, things that aren't really taught or practiced in certain cultures. I'm a big believer that this is one of the key enablers of the increasing polarization we are witnessing in our societies, Western societies in particular.
People come from different nations, a country that allows different nations to exist in the same physical space is a great way to bridge that gap and food seems like a good starting point. Anyone can probably gain some appreciation for some culture if the food is good( like, this culture actually has something worthwhile to show). I think it works in a subconscious level. Also given the lack of worldwide history education it's also an interesting way to get people in a first contact with a different culture.
When I go to a Thai restaurant, I also frequently hear the cooks speaking Mandarin Chinese (I'm conversant in the language).
Except when it does. Attention to detail and skills matter. Clientele demographic and competitive pressure matter too.
In most survivalist/subsistence businesses, the owner typically optimizes for volume and profit rather than quality. He/she will typically do just enough to appeal to a broad clientele and keep costs low. There is no culture of craftsmanship or perfectionism -- it's just business. The owner is merely trying to feed his/her family... there is a nobility in this, but it doesn't always make for good food.
Many suburban sushi joints in the U.S. run by non-Japanese people fall into this category. Good enough to satisfy an American clientele, but not really done to the level of a craft (e.g. the rice in the nigiri falls apart as soon as you pick it up, the vinegar is left out altogether, etc.) Sushi is a craft that takes years to perfect and commands a premium.
Truly good places are run by people who know the essence of the cuisine they are serving, and make an effort to be true to it. They don't necessarily have to belong to the culture of origin, but they have to be serious about getting the details right. Such places are typically not run as survivalist businesses.
As an enthusiast of Thai cuisine, I am grateful for the link.
Exception is San Francisco. There's a place in Little Saigon that is run by Thai people and she said the food there is exactly the same as home.
Here in Toronto we recommend Si Lom Thai Bistro. Which is good but not perfect.
Edit: Lots of Thai places in Little Saigon. Pak Nam Thai Noodle Bar, Zen Yai Thai Restaurant, Lers Ros....
Best guess would be Lers Ros, though Sai Jai Thai around the corner is more understated and has some solid dishes too (e.g. they offer khao kluk kapi, which is near-impossible to find outside of Thailand.)
Worth mentioning too is Saap Ver, around the Design District. Super legit, focus on Northeastern (Isan) cuisine.
Prime example (for me) is "Chinese food". Found all over the world, yet nowhere it is the same, let alone something a Chinese would call Chinese.
Better even, there is one particular Chinese dish that inspired a documentary about all its different implementations. The Search For General Tso. Check it out if you like.
> Good cooking doesn't care where you're from.
Except for some reason it's hard to find good pizza outside the Northeast. What's with that!?!
Well, it's not true for one thing.
Having said that my favorite Thai place is still Morningside Thai and I'm pretty sure it's native run.
That and most of these family owned restaurants just don't have the headroom to try challenging their clientele, so they stick to what's tried and true with their local diners. They have to keep the prices low and the food broadly palatable to unadventurous eaters.
I only really noticed this after I started copying some Gordon Ramsey videos I was watching online. Preparing easy, simple meals the way that he prepares them (taking care to select produce and quality dairy, using fresh herbs, etc.) yields food that's better than I've eaten in 90% of restaurants. These aren't the really long "how to cook like a Michelin chef with a blowtorch and truffles" videos, either, these are like the "quick and easy broccoli soup with goat cheese and walnuts" videos.
I can get better ingredients mailed to me than what I can purchase locally, and the meals taste better than the area restaurants.
Consistency is key, but seems hard to implement in practice.
Regardless, I've also been to Memphis, and I had some really good BBQ there, and I had a lot of really average BBQ. I think another problem is that a lot of regions coast on the reputation of their "regional" food, and there's a lot of people that aren't great chefs or aren't dedicated to the art of food that ride the coattails of the region's reputation.
Another big reason for the decline in the quality of these cuisines is that the old people who know how to make them are retiring and dying and their descendants aren't interested in maintaining their own culture.
Yeah, the BBQ was good, but I didn't get the "best in the world" effect in my mouth. I once ate meat cooked by a Texan at a house party, I was seriously impressed and blown away after the first bite. This guy told me that he caters BBQ parties in Texas as a hobby. He told me about his marinade process, it bordered on science. His skill was legit.
It's possible that the my Memphis friends directed me to the wrong restaurants. But if I can't trust the locals to tell me which are the best restaurants in their city, who can I trust? Plus, their opinions matched up with what I saw on Tripadvisor.
I'm sorry if I've offended anyone. But I've also anecdotally found that some people who brag about their food haven't tasted food around the world, so their frame of reference is a bit limited. For example, I'll never say I've tasted really good Italian food because I've never been to Italy, and my gosh, the descriptions I hear about real Italian food blow my mind (and I think I've been to a few good Italian restaurants in North America). It's just like my high school friend once recommended a bunch of us go to the best sushi restaurant he ever tasted on the last day of school; as we ate there, the rest of us realized he had just unfortunately never been to an actually good sushi restaurant in our city. Either that, or his tongue actually couldn't tell the difference the way a tone-deaf person is incapable of hitting the right notes.
I'm not trying to be condescending when I say certain people lack a good frame of reference. It's not their fault. It is what it is. I'm sorry for not being able to figure out a different way to say it.
If your guy was also a short silver-haired ex-Soviet guy who tells a lot of questionable jokes and works for NASA, that's a heck of a coincidence.
Living in Seattle for the past year, and loving Thai food, I noticed that there is a general overall difference in the type of restaurant a Thai place is between Reykjavík and Seattle.
Thai places in Seattle seem a lot fancier then in Reykjavík. In Seattle you most likely have to order a table, or at the very least have a waiter show you to your table. In Reykjavík, on the other hand, Thai places tend to range all over the place, all the way down to having only 4 bar-like seats by the window.
The menu is also way more diverse in Reykjavík. In Seattle, you can pretty much guess the entire menu before you walk into a Thai place. While in Reykjavík a Thai place might only have three types of pad thai on the menu, or only sell soup, or even sell have 3 or 4 pages of stuff on the menu, including non-thai cuisine.
Generally, I like the Thai places in Reykjavík better then in Seattle.
One thing I've noticed over the past decade is that the diversity of tourists has changed dramatically over the years. The first time I went to Thailand I saw mostly Americans, Australians, and Europeans. Nowadays its common to see people from all over the middle-east, Africa, South America, and of course the rest of Asia (China and Japan in particular). I was even surprised to see a Vietnamese tour group at Suvarnabhumi today (interesting to see Vietnamese with the disposal income to travel and the interest to travel to their next door neighbor). Just goes to show everyone loves Thailand.
Gastro-diplomacy appears to have paid off! What a great investment!
I live in Vietnam. Virtually every middle class Vietnamese I know has been to Thailand. For two simple reasons: it is one of the few places on Earth a Vietnamese can travel visa-free and it is relatively cheap. (Especially compared to, say, Singapore, which also allows visa-free travel.)
That's three countries within a pretty easy bus ride, making international travel relatively common.
As far back as 2007 (the oldest numbers I could find quickly), Cambodia was seeing over 125,000 Vietnamese tourists a year.
There's a reason there are massive casinos in Cambodia all along the border. (Vietnamese aren't allowed to gamble in Vietnam, so they go to Cambodia to do it.)
Vietnamese have been traveling throughout Southeast Asia for a while now. It is just that their numbers have finally caught up to (and in many cases surpassed) Japanese & South Koreans so you can notice them.
More disposable income certainly helps. But so do things like the increase in the formal economy (it is impossible to get a visa anywhere unless you have a bank account, a labor contract, etc). So do things like the spread of "Western" work hours (even now, the typical non-office job is 6 days a week, usually 10 hour shifts, which doesn't exactly leave much time or energy for travel; so travel most often happens in between jobs).
My pet theory: foreign cuisines do better when there are clear boundaries. There's sort of a continuum between Indonesian, Malaysian and Singaporean cuisines, which then overlap somewhat with Cantonese. This makes it harder for foreigners to find the cuisine memorable. The boundaries get blurred further because in many places, it makes sense for an Indonesian or Malaysian family to just call their restaurant Chinese or "Asian", and then offer a mix of the most popular dishes.
Thai cuisine overlaps with Laotian and I guess probably Burmese cuisine a bit, but it's otherwise very distinctive --- and it's not like there are many Laotian or Burmese restaurants around.
In Thailand, you get four pages of Thai food, going way deeper in variety than you ever see exported. Enough that you could eat there every day and not feel the need to flip to that last page full of Pizzas and spaghetti bolognese.
In Indonesia, though, you get Nasi Goreng, Mee Goreng, and if you're really lucky a single curry, before learning about their wood-fired pizzas and other western junk.
So you can go there for a month and come back having eaten a lifetime's worth of salty noodles, but not really learning anything about all the other good food you can get there.
It's pretty rare that I choose Indonesian over Thai, when I have the choice.
Also, where I live, many specific Latin American restaurants (Peruvian, Costa Rican, etc) have started offering burritos and hot salsa, even though it's not typical of their cuisine.
I'd honestly rather have sabre rattling, because at least it's in the open and subject to popular scrutiny.
Also, as I alluded above, sabre-rattling hasn't resulted in armed conflict between superpowers since nuclearization.
Someday, we'll just call it "food".
Help I'm being oppressed!
epic fail. Should be "Someday, we'll just call it 'Good Eats'" cue AB.
I've also noticed that Thai restaurants tend to be a little more hit-or-miss than other ethnic food places. I imagine the Thai gov't pushing to encourage Thai-Americans who are on the fence about whether they should open a restaurant would explain that as well.
As with nearly all foreign cuisines, London tends to have some of the best 'authentic' examples of Thai food and some of the most heavily adapted examples...
It's the same with Indian (some excellent restaurants and some very British, cream-filled takeaways), Italian, Mexican and definitely Chinese food.
I assume it's at least partly down to many of these more exotic cuisines having been introduced to Britain earlier than much of mainland Europe, resulting in them being more heavily adapted to local tastes.
I also wonder why people buy sushis in a thai restaurant here, they are usually much worse than in real sushi restaurants and equally expensive. Maybe it's because the different persons at the tables disagreed on which food to buy but still, what's the next step? Selling pizza and Kebab in chinese restaurants?
Regardless I think this is a brilliant idea by the Thai government. I'd love to see other regions / governments do a similar thing!
There are also plenty of Japanese restaurants, yet very few Japanese. Many of them are run by Chinese who have learned to prepare Japanese food.
By the way, are you the dataflow guy?
It's variable. There are some I'd avoid, but there are also some good Chinese-run Japanese restaurants.
> By the way, are you the dataflow guy?
Yes. I've had to move my pages (now at http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/FMJ.html ). I've recently made major changes to the numeric type system, which now has a built-in Prolog interpreter and supports units and numeric ranges. I'm planning to add dependent types at some point but not soon. The system's still not ready for release.
Also, have you looked at the static checking of units of measure in F#? I find myself wishing I had something like that since I work with a lot of physical measurements.
Units of measure in Full Metal Jacket are SI, similar to those in F#, but it also supports prefixes, e.g. 2.3mg expands to 2.3e-6 kg. The types and units are checked while the program is constructed in the IDE. At present there's no fully working compiler.
Omaha, where I live, has a growing local chain of Thai restaurants (Salween, if you live here) that are owned and run by Karen refugees who have been resettled here. Their food is very, very good, the restaurants are very popular around town, and they greatly assist their community.
If you want to help refugees and other people groups, patronizing businesses owned by them is a fantastic way to do so.
Authentic Thai Food is also a difficult thing to search for.
Ayada Thai is my favorite, but there are several good ones. Just keep in mind that ‘Thai hot’ is really really spicy.
They usually cook large batches of three dishes, and are open 11 AM to 2 PM or whenever they run out, whichever is sooner; and they do seem to frequently run out, I've found that going at 1:45 is not a good plan.
Wow! That's a lot of food!
However, you inspired me to hit them up for lunch again. Work from home and usually eat lunch at home, but went out and had Wilaiwan's today. Excellent as always; I ought to do that more often.
Have you tried Star of Siam? It's on, err.. I think maybe Illinois? Sorry, haven't been there in a while, but it's just north of the river, and a couple of blocks over from Clark Street.
Edit: this is the place. It's probably my favorite Thai restaurant in Chicago.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Star+of+Siam/@41.8906454,-...
Most of the places that non-Thai people recommend in the Chicago Loop are mostly of the Americanized variety (because restaurant economics -- these places need broad appeal to turn a profit given the high rents).
Don't get me wrong, I'm ok with non-authentic cuisine as long as they are good, but Loop Thai restaurants are mostly only "passable". The better Thai places are in locales with cheaper rent, e.g. JJ Thai Street Food in West Town, and Aroy Thai in Ravenswood (Aroy was recommended to me by a Thai person). These serve dishes that are much closer to what you would find in Thailand (i.e. spicier, more fish-sauce punch), but the downside of this authenticity is that folks with milder palates might be put off -- you probably wouldn't be able to bring any Olive-Garden-loving relatives to these places.
My personal barometer of how good a Thai place is the sweetness. The sweeter the pad thai, the less authentic the place.
Tyler Cowen, the economist, has this to say about Thai food in the United States: [1]
"Thai food in the United States is becoming bad. It’s getting sweeter—with excessive use of refined sugar—and the other flavors are growing weaker and less reliable. In absolute numbers, more excellent Thai restaurants exist than ever before, but I wouldn’t want to vouch for the average quality of Thai food in America these days.
One problem is that many Thai people have such a wonderful service ethic. I don’t think I have ever once been treated poorly in a Thai restaurant. That has made courting wide audiences relatively easy. Thai food also looks healthy and has beautiful colors—all those greens, reds, yellows, and oranges.
As a result, Thai food has become cool. I first saw this trend in California, in the 1980s, when young people in black started turning up in large numbers at Thai restaurants in Hollywood. It spread. Americans eating in a Thai restaurant are likely more hip than those eating in a Chinese restaurant. Yet hip people do not always have superb taste in food.
As Thai restaurants have become more popular, they have become unreliable. It is so easy to make the food too sweet, appealing to lowest-common-denominator tastes or masking deficiencies in the food’s preparation. The best sweet Thai dishes mix sweet with tart, but there’s been too much abuse on the sweet side and not enough use of fish sauce or fermented shrimp paste or ground white pepper. The most-reliable indicators of bad Thai restaurants are a large bar and sushi on the menu. Those are both signs that the restaurant isn’t that serious about food. Stay away."
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/six-rul...
I like Andy's Thai Kitchen a lot. They've managed to treat my friends and I really well even during peak times. Also, you get a lot of food with your order. (Downside: Cash only)
Ocha in Bucktown is good.
https://journal.dedasys.com/2008/05/13/restaurants-immigrant...
YumYum in Cary
Thai Villa in Cary
Thai Cafe in Durham
Thaiphoon in Raleigh
Champa in Raleigh
Thai Palace in Chapel Hill
etc., etc. So sure, thank you Thai government, for sending all this yummy goodness our way!
Maybe they say the same thing about "classical French" (i.e. Lyon/Paris) cuisine's reliance on cream, shallots and bacon :)
My Indian family often complains about Western cuisine's penchant for slathering butter, cream, and cheese on absolutely everything.
Even most of the cheap Indian food served in America is way, way too loaded with cream for most Indians' palates.
Something I just realized is the group that owns Sawasdee Glenwood doesn't own the Capital location. I would have sworn that when the Glenwood location opened it had stuff in the restaurant (e.g. on the menu) that talked about both locations...
A quick google shows something fishy definitely happened with the Capital location - https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/crime/article8702121...
Regardless, Sawasdee on Glenwood is good. Like most restaurants, it was really good when it first opened and went through a low (food was super inconsistent, and sometimes terrible) for a while, but over the last year it looks like they've updated menus and the people working there have changed. Maybe a change in ownership? My experiences have been good.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Thai+Lanna+Restaurant/@35....
It's very good.
Edit: It's still there, but I'm not.
Can we get a Triangle Food thread going?
In no particular order or connection, some of my favorites:
* Relish, by Crabtree
* Salt & Lime Cabo Grill, by North Raleigh
* Fiction Kitchen, Downtown Raleigh
* Remedy Diner, Downtown Raleigh
* Beer Garden, by Glenwood (The pretzels <3)
* Trophy Pizza & Brewing
* Orient Garden in Cary (our favorite Chinese takeout place)
* Himalayan Nepali Cuisine, Cary (watch out for that spicy scale)
* Coffee & Crepes, Cary
* Mac House, Durham
* Mura Sushi, North Hills
Please, no.
Yelp is a thing. This is not what HN is for.
Yelp long ago stopped being a venue for amateur critics and reviewers and turned into a space for entitled, angry consumers to vent their frustrations about the world failing to cater to their whims.
- Buck Jones Road, Cary
- Leesville & Strickland, Raleigh
Beyu Cafe, Durham
Taberna Tapas, Durham
Mateo, Durham
Rasa, Chapel Hill
Tylers, Durham
Q-Shack, Durham
Nanataco, Durham
Los Palmas, Raleigh
Cosmic Cantina, Durham
Irregardless Cafe, Raleigh
* C&T Wok in Morrisville (amazing authentic Chinese) * Backyard Barbecue, Durham (Eastern NC BBQ) * Kokyu Na'Mean, Durham (Korean sandwiches) * Sushioki, Durham (Sushi burritos--yes, really) * New Hope Market, Chapel Hill (local farm-to-table food)
Ditto for North Texas. Some of my favorites include:
Banana Leaf in Far North Dallas
Thai Spice in Far North Dallas (they live up to their name!)
Best Thai Signature in Far North Dallas
Legends Thai Cuisine in Plano
SaWaDiKa in Richardson
And there are so many others around I haven't tried... TBH, I mostly go to a handful because the ones near me are so excellent I don't see a need to shop around.
It works though, my wife and I spent 2 weeks in Thailand largely because we were so enthralled with Thai food in the US.
(People who are going to comment without reading the article will do this regardless of whether you have an abstract.)
> But as it turns out, there is a much simpler answer: The Thai government paid for it.
For what it's worth, I prefer Afghan cuisine, but all food is a fusion of earlier ideas anyway.
Buy onions by the 50lb sack, chop them up, put them in the food processor, cook them once then freeze them into smaller containers. Whenever I want to cook a quick meal in 10 mins, grab the onion puree from the freezer, throw it into a pan with garlic and oil and paprika, fry it up and serve over some bread :)
a) Having eaten supposed Thai food in the USA I can tell you it's not Thai! Most of it's Chinese based.
b) You're talking about a government that couldn't organise its way out of a coupe let alone have a foreign policy. There's no way they are organised enough to do this.
It would be a great idea if it was in fact real.