How Thai food took over America (2019)
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splendidtable.org
Why There Are So Many Thai Restaurants in America - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17770707 - Aug 2018 (151 comments)
I have been told by a friend who has been back and forth between California and Thailand that the Thai food in California is better (his Thai wife agrees). Why? Fresher ingredients.
(Don't flame me, please, it's just what I had heard — it made sense to me though.)
When you see the episode, it's really astonishing. I never would have considered the idea that a professional chef would not be able to find anyone knowledgable about one's own ethnic cuisine in one own's country and would have to travel around the world to learn about one's own ethnic cuisine. REALLY interesting.
Speaking of baloney, I was raised on fried baloney sandwiches on Scwables and have never seen those....must be cultural imperialism? Naw. It's not the most compelling example mainly just because US home recipes are dead simple and Pho seems less so. But home food and restaurant suited food are still different.
The upper class citizens would find Western or Japanese food palatable so the market for really well made Thai food is limited. Because Nahm is owned by a westerner, who really dedicates himself perfecting the traditional Thai recipes (rumors say he went to study the old Thai recipes transcripted on leaf scrolls) is phenomenal. Only the elites of the society would be able to afford to eat there. It was possible for a guy of that profile, but would be really hard for a lay Thai person to have a business like that. To most Thai people, catering to students and the teenagers have proven far more profitable.
Really fascinating point that I’ll admit I think is very valuable beyond just the realm of cooking.
A traditional se asian kitchen is a wok and a rice cooker. Most thai dishes use a small number of techniques (curry pastes, deep frying, etc), but there is much skill in what ingredients the cook uses and what proportions. Change a few variables and you have yourself a whole new dish.
Western cooking delights in dishes that are technically unique, for example the dish ravioli refers not to any particular ingredient but to a technique. In this case, recipes are supremely important for preserving dishes.
For Thai food it is hard to reduce the skill and judgement of a cook down to a recipe.
It's a quite effortful dish to make. Ducks here are not easy to find and not fresh, usually frozen. After defrosting, they will have to properly roast it while in Thailand, you can source good roasted ducks from somewhere else. I also suspect that they use canned red curry instead of making it themselves.
If you have some expat Thai friends, they would sometimes make it. Befriend these people! Some good food would drop from time to time.
I can go get a Pad Thai at the shopping mall food court next to me for $1 and it tastes alright but the $12 Pad Thai in the US is likely going to taste better (but not guaranteed).
If I go to a fancy restaurant here and spend $12 on a Pad Thai it's going to be much better than what you get in the US (at that price here you'd likely get a few large prawns and a very generous portion of fresh noodles)
I regularly eat street food here for under $2 that I vastly prefer to any Thai food I had in America (and I had a lot)
There is also just a lot of food that is easy to get here that is hard to find in lots of places in the US. Like soft shell crab - I eat it regularly here and get a generous serving of crab but in the US it's hard to find and it expensive and in very small portions
I did hear that the government in early 2000s did try to promote Thai cultures, but I highly doubt it's still being continued as it was ousted in 2006 while many people from the cabinet were branded as evils/enemies.
About the ingredients, that's so true. One notably example is most if not all Thai basil dishes aren't actually cooked with Thai basil leaves; they're cooked with holy basil leaves (in Thai, Thai basil leaves aren't even called basil). Holy basil leaves are in fact considered a rare item to be found in the states as most Asian markets don't carry them. Some Thai restaurants would sell them at a really high price like $8 for what you would buy $1 Thai basil leaves at an Asian market.
As for restaurants, it's kind of a trend, sometimes a social status, for a person to have graduated in a developed country. While studying, they usually work at these Thai restaurants to earn pocket money and also socialize with the local Thai community. I would attribute the growth of Thai restaurants in the US to the fact that these students find it easier to earn much more money than having to work in the field they have studied for their whole life, or to a Thai housewife who finds a business opportunity - the same food they cook in Thailand can be sold for 6+ times more in the US (a papaya salad is sold at around $1 and the companion sticky rice is around 30 cents). Most dishes sold here are also considered easy dishes, meaning can be cooked quickly or without much effort. A larb dish is a quicky, but compare that to layered pandan desert... that takes hours while sold for 50 cents on the street in Bangkok.
A tip from me, if you want cheap authentic Thai food, go to your local Thai temple on the weekend. The cooks usually bring their fresh cooked Thai food as offerings to the monks at lunch time. It's kinda Thai thing. Once the monks take parts of the offerings, the remaining food will be shared. You're expected to donate or participate during the prayer, but after that, we're talking about good Thai buffet here lol. $10 or $15 is already considered a lot for donation. If you're new, just tell you're interested in the rituals. Most of them are friendly and will try to guide you all the way through. You'll likely be fed as they want you to try their home dish.
In Thai there are completely separate words for different types of basil. There's no word that just means basil, so holy basil and other varieties aren't called basil either.
When I lived in the near north side of Chicago there were easily a dozen Thai restaurants in the area bounded by the river, North Avenue and Wells Street, all of which had really nice decor, locations that couldn't possibly be cheap and menus at ridiculously low prices. I'm still not convinced that they weren't part of some sort of money laundering operation.
The big thing that I think Thai offers is that it feels light and satisfying and healthy and delicious all at once in a way that other ethnic cuisines generally don't. The Bohemian cuisine that I grew up with was satisfying and delicious but definitely neither light nor healthy.
Can agree but after spending some time learning thai dishes, there are a lot that are really not that healthy. There's a lot of sugar in dishes to offset the bitterness of fish sauce and other ingredients. Coconut creams, milk and oil add tons of calories.
As a Thai, I can confirm this. Not really to offset, but make the dish more flavorful. They sometimes use a lot of palm sugar, but... maybe that's a tad healthier than cane.
There are certainly other culinary traditions that look for balance but they may approach it across a multi course meal, and think of it in different terms. The balance of salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and fattiness in some Thai dishes is quite remarkable though.
To me Thai food has a tendency to be heavy, spicy and sugary. The way you describe Thai food doesn't resonate with me at all. If I didn't know you were referring to Thai food I would have assumed that you were referring to Vietnamese food because that's probably how I would describe that.
Disclaimer: My wife is Thai and sampled plenty of Thai food over the past decade.
I feel the exact same way for Viet cuisine.
My Thai teachers were asking me about how sweet it was, and I reported back "not very". They said - ah-ha - as if I confirmed something they were already sure of. They said that entire section of Bangkok is fake Thai food adopted to foreigners. Really Thai food would be much, much sweeter and it is common for foreigners to complain about it. In fact, the way my teachers describe it, it sounds like the goal is almost always to maximize every flavor attribute simultaneously, as bizarre as that sounds. So it would be delicious to a Thai if it were super spicy, sweet, and salty.
from what i heard, the goal is to balance these flavors (plus sour, iirc), not maximize them. that's why there's often the 4 spice jar set at each table, to adjust to taste.
I grew up in India so I would often try an Indian restaurant -- invariably it would be a white-tablecloth experience, not particularly pricey, have garish color schemes or artwork, be well-reviewed online, and mostly empty. Sometimes there would be a TV on playing a Bollywood dance scene at low or no volume.
Thai restaurants, on the other hand, had a far more pleasing aesthetic (lots of warm wood) with interesting art, did not often have white tablecloths, were similarly priced, didn't have TVs, and were absolutely packed.
I have never in my life had to wait to be seated at an Indian restaurant, and I have often been the only person in the restaurant. It was such a noticeable trend for me that I began wondering how Indian restaurants stay in business. I think they break even through takeout and deliveries.
Also, I think that while people claim to like Indian food, the spice-profile of Indian food is just not as palatable to global tastes as the spice-profile of Thai food.
Also, no one gives a *^&% about whether some food is "authentic" but everyone sure pretends to care. And another thing -- there is no such thing as "the best pizza" or "the best burger" in any city.
All the older first gen immigrants are like, it's not all authentic but it's pretty similar and tasty would eat it again. While the later gen kids are acting like its dog food.
China is 1 billion people over a large geographic area that has culturally exchanged for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years; at this point, the same dish can have many regional variations in preparation. The mapo tofu or kung pao chicken you find in its homeland of Chongqing is going to be very different from the versions of the dish served to locals in Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou. In that sense, American preparations of the same dish are adjusted to local taste and ingredient availability.
Most traditional recipes, if they were even standardized (and the aforementioned mapo tofu, as an example, is not at all) have only been like that in the last 100-150 years. In fact, I have seen people claim food that actually does come from China/Hong Kong as inauthentic. As an example, honey walnut shrimp is actually a dish from Hong Kong style western cuisine, which lost popularity in its homeland but is still made by the diaspora.
To fetishize the authenticity of food is to reject progress and innovation. Korean or Indian food is no less authentic with the addition of chilis, even though those are not native plants to those regions and were introduced from the New World.
If you conflate quality with authenticity I could see how "fetishizing" authenticity is tantamount to rejecting innovation. But I think they are distinct concepts, so I have to disagree. I also wouldn't characterize my stance as fetishization, more that authenticity is also something to appreciate, below more important factors like taste.
I think Nathan Myhrvold’s takes on the “authenticity” of food are nice.
https://www.npr.org/2015/09/18/441530790/how-the-desperate-n...
There's absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying non-authentic foods or being inspired to make variations/fusion dishes, but ignoring their origins is very insensitive IMO. I don't see what is so painful about acknowledging authenticity.
Edit: really it boils down to food being a huge part of culture. For example, when you say Pizza Hut is authentic Italian cuisine, you are saying something about Italian culture, and wanting to correct that is a perfectly normal thing to feel. We should not conflate authenticity with quality, but authenticity still matters.
as an example, a historic cooking show I watch got a fair amount of heat for making his Scottish-descended grandmother's Scottish shortbread recipe, which used rice flour. According to the authenticity experts, this was sacrilege because no true Scottish shortbread is made with rice flour, you use corn flour. And that may very well be true in 2021, but the show managed to pull a 1929 Scottish cookbook that used rice flour in their recipe; it turns out that corn flour is now common because corn flour became extremely cheap due to American corn production, but that is a fairly recent change. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnYltDdE8Cw
1: https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/uncle-roger-rice-food...
ps: The conversation here brought up a question inside me regarding English tea and tea preparation; never had a cup of English tea better than the shot of best Chinese tea I have had in my life. Shouldn't it be considered inauthentic then?
White kids would also talk about how bad say, Chiles or Applebee's is, for the same reason.
In the video in question, the young people's complaints were very much the latter.
The old people seemed to more correlate it vs food in their country, but rated the food on its merits.
Yes Kung Pao Chicken is very different from Cantonese dishes, but that's because Kung Pao Chicken is from a different part of China.
Feel free to serve authentic Thai and Chinese cuisine in the west. Surely it will be a successful venture.
Most of the Thai restaurants in West Germany are run by Turks, whilst our Dutch restaurants are run by Bulgarians. They were reacting fastest to the trends. Our Vietnamese are running Sushi side businesses for the clueless, but you can always order the original food.