The Political History of Pad Thai

Which? In Taiwan for example it’s easy to get inexpensive Thai the same as it is to get a tonkatsu

In the UK a Thai restaurant is typically at least semi-fancy, but you'll often be able to find a pad thai or thai red/green curry as an inexpensive option on a pub or cheap restaurant menu.

I went to Thailand a couple of a years ago and visited a restaurant in Bangkok that was supposed to have the best pad thai in the country. It was decent, but I've had better in the UK. The best thing about the restaurant was that every table had a pot of peanut dust that you could add as liberally as you liked to your meal.

I remember Thai restaurants being fairly fancy back in the '90s and early 2000s. Its evolution into regular "take out" food over the past ~20 years has been interesting to see.

In the US, there's an informal hierarchy of what kinds of cuisine can be "fancy" and demand an above-average price. French, obviously, and most other Western European cuisines can be fancy. Which isn't to say that there can't be a cheap pizza or pasta restaurant, but if you look at the range it will be above average. Japanese food - sushi especially - can successfully be expensive, more so than other East Asian cuisines like Thai and Vietnamese. There are regional variations here - if there is a regional interest in it, you can have more expensive restaurants of a particular cuisine - I'm talking more average across the US.

Interesting observation!

In Australia it is similar. Roughly speaking, the following cuisines have these types of price ranges:

Indian: $-$$ Chinese: $-$$$ Thai: $$ Japanese: $$-$$$ Italian: $-$$$$ French: $$$-$$$$ Local: $$-$$$$

It seems that Asian is fairly set on low-mid, while European can go higher and still do well. Same with Japense and Chinese. Italian has been so integrated into the local cuisine that you have very cheap to very fancy. French is rare so more expensive. Japense also rare, though sushi train type places are becoming more popular (though still on the pricer side).

in LA, you can find excellent versions of every type of asian cuisine (thai, vietnamese, japanese, korean, filipino, indian, cambodian, bangladeshi, etc.), not to mention other cuisines like ethiopian, mexican, salvadorean, etc., for a range of prices. the affordable end is still often delicious, but requires a bit more trial and error to find the good places. european cuisines and “new american” tend to be pricier, but is still often yummy. this is why i think LA is the best food city in the country. you can often find the same (particularly asian) foods elsewhere, but either for more money, inferior quality, or both.

I speculate, but have no data, that most exercises carried out by tourism boards like advertising, cultural events, etc. barely move the needle on tourism because they're based on the usual drab formula of advertising and cultural events.

To really create interest in a country, one has to export a desirable mainstream cultural product like food or media. One has to tell a story, and good branding requires a compelling story.

I mean, if all there was were nice advertising of sandy beaches and temples in Thailand, etc. I'd probably not be motivated to visit. Nothing wrong with it, but there's no emotional connection because there's no narrative (sandy beaches are everywhere, and there are temples in most Asian countries -- there's nothing distinct about these things in themselves). But the tourism board of many countries stick to this formula because there's not much imagination on what else there is to be done.

On the other hand I've eaten Thai food regularly due to the ubiquity of Thai restaurants in North America, watched viral tearjerker Thai commercials on Youtube, watched Muay Thai (popularized by American movies like Kickboxer, and more recently by Tony Jaa's movies like Ong Bak), read stories about Bangkok's traffic jams where people have to pee in a cup (probably hyperbole), seen Thailand featured on travel shows like Bourdain's -- the result of which I now have a human connection to Thailand and made me want to visit. (I did a few years ago and really enjoyed it)

I can't say I have the same feelings about Indonesia for instance, even though it's the 4th largest country in the world and probably quite fascinating to visit. Australians frequent Bali because it's a nearby tropical destination, but I'd bet many people around the world couldn't tell you much about Indonesia if you asked them. Now imagine if Indonesia started exporting its food, which I can attest is quite good based on what I had in Amsterdam. That would start a whole new conversation about Indonesia.

In the marketing world, regional tourism is a dog. Municipalities and politicians dump money into billboards and magazine ads for basically no results, if they even bothered to measure anything half the time.

Here's a weird bit of trivia from the world of cycling: how an Italian bike got the not very Italian looking name of "Wilier":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilier_Triestina#History

Indeed that’s why I started with Hungary, though the French Revolution lit a fire (e.g. in early 19th century Germany)

The root of the word “Chai” is in fact the country of its origin —- which is not india.

There’s a chai/Tea plaiting the world’s languages. I have a parent from each side.

Well, in Greece we call a particular kind of coffee "Turkish coffee" [1] and that's definitely not for nationalistic reasons, we're supposed to be enemies with the Turks. In fact, some people do call Turkish coffee "Greek coffee" and that seems to have started for nationalistic reasons, but to my experience most people mix the two names freely.

The reason is really to tell that kind of coffee apart from e.g. Italian or French coffee styles (we call filter coffee "French" whereas we don't call anything in particular "Italian coffee" but of course there's lots of preparation styles that originate in Italy).

So sometimes maybe it's a bit of a mix? If you have a variety of something that's distinctly different from what your neighbours are using you might want to call it "my-style X" just to know what you're talking about. Of course then there's a bit of nationalistic pride that comes with it "this is how _we_ do it" etc.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_coffee

Not exactly... 'Burma' is a British colonial mispronunciation stemming from the same root source as 'Myanmar', though the latter tends to be associated with the military junta since they formalized it.

Is Pad thai designed? The article seems to have implied that the guy who decided it was a national standard was just a thing his housekeeper happened to make.

You'v no had haggis curry?

Salsa, cheese, sour cream and guacamole can make anything taste good. Is there a better combination out there? Only if guacamole wasn't so expensive.

> The lungs, heart, and liver of a sheep boiled, ground, seasoned, mixed with oatmeal and stuffed in its own rectum to be boiled

I will never.

> with salsa and cheese and served with sour cream and guacamole.

Oh, doesn't sound so bad. I'll give it a shot.

> The lungs, heart, and liver of a sheep boiled, ground, seasoned, mixed with oatmeal and stuffed in its own rectum

Hey we're no monsters. It's the heart, lungs & liver of a sheep stuffed into it's _stomach_ not it's rectum. (Though often these days it's in an artificial casing, the whole stomach thing seems to put people off).

Love Bike Thai Kitchen, around Cannonbury.

Or Portland. You can throw a rock and hit a decent Thai restaurant.

Not sure what you mean by this. This is the name in Thai and "ผัดไทย" ([pʰàt tʰāj] in IPA) is what is written on shops and carts where it's sold.

The vowel in "pad" is in between the two options given in the question above. Unlike English, where accents primarily change the vowels, vowels stay quite constant across accents in Thai.

Could be either, really. 21st century and all that. (Making some assumptions about a screen name beginning with “jimmy”)

[edit] oh missed the “she” so you’re right. Probably?

I bet McDonalds sells 50,000 burgers for each time that happens. In my experience most would choose a warmed sausage pack from the convenience store over what is sold as "pad thai" in Bangkok. Like okay, you absolutely need to eat something. They both taste the same but at least the sausage pack only cost 20 baht.

I live in Southeast Asia and have been to Thailand many times. Pad Thai is well known to every Thai person but it is not seen all that often on their plates (or in their plastic bags, where takeaway food is conveyed). And indeed a lot of Thai restaurant menus do not list Pad Thai, or if they do it's far down the list, like "chicken fingers" in an American restaurant.

In tourist hotspots (which abound in Thailand) you'll tend to see picture menus and Pad Thai will be on them. But there are much, much better dishes to be had outside these areas. One issue is they don't all have consistent names, e.g. when I asked for a recommendation and was given an absolutely amazing dry curry crab noodle dish with egg, I asked for its name in Thai and translated it was "curry crab" which would never get you a similar dish in another restaurant. Even the venerable Pad Kee Mao, which I think is always a noodle dish in America, is sometimes a totally different rice dish in Thailand.