Sawang is a decades-old bamee (wheat and egg noodles) joint virtually across the street from Bangkok’s Hualamphong Train Station. It’s easily located by its overabundance of florescent green lighting and the aged and rather grumpy owner who sits in a chair out front. Some aged promotional material inside desribes Sawang as “The most expensive bamee in Thailand.” Yet despite these ominous attributes, it’s now my favourite place in town to eat the dish.

Discovering Sawang — it was a tip-off from Jarrett — was well timed. Over the last few months I’ve been in something of a restaurant rut here in Bangkok. I’ve been making the effort to try places new to me, but most of those that I’ve been directed to have been mediocre, or worse. Sawang has the benefit of being both good and close to my home.

Several things about bamee stand out here. The roast pork is fatty and bacon-like and worlds away from the limp, lean, red-painted stuff you find at the vast majority of Bangkok’s bamee restaurants and stalls. The noodles are toothsome and tasty and lack the disturbing whiff of ammonia that lesser restaurants use as a leavening agent. And unlike most bamee places which tend to separate their liquids, the broth at Sawang is essentially the same water used to boil the noodles:

thus its cloudy appearance (see pic below). It’s also worth mentioning that they’re fairly liberal with the MSG here; on my first visit a thumb-wide trail of the white crystals ran down the side of my bowl.

The kiaw (wontons) here are simply shrimp encased in a thin dough wrapper:

They’re simple and tasty, but I prefer the heartier version at Mankorn Khao, in which the shrimp are surrounded by minced pork that’s been blended with an intense mixture of coriander root, garlic and white pepper. The bowl above was served with generous chunks of fresh crab claw meat, and at 100B (about US$3), is one of the more expensive around.

Sawang
336/3-4Thanon Phra Ram IV
02 236 1772
5-11pm Tues-Sun

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I’ve recently had the urge to buy a point-and-shoot digital camera. There are times, particularly when doing food-related pics or schlepping around places doing guidebook research that I’d rather have a camera that I can carry with one hand or simply stuff in my pocket. I’ve also been influenced by this article by Peter Hessler, in which he explains how a small digital camera proved helpful in the writing his excellent new book, Country Driving. In the piece he describes how looking at digital snapshots, sometimes several years after they were taken, helped to remind him of details he’d forgotten and contributed to the quality and accuracy of his writing.

I’ve played around with using my iPhone, but its images (an example of which, taken recently in Melbourne, Australia, is shown above) just don’t cut it. Any recs? Ideally I want something with a fast lens (f/2) and at least some degree of manual control. I was initially drawn to Leica’s digital point-and-shoots, largely because I’ve long wanted to own something with the Leica logo, but they’re expensive and generally don’t get very strong reviews. The Canon PowerShot S90 seems to get high ratings and is affordable. And apparently a particular model of Ricoh has garnered substantial praise from those who do lots of food-related photography.

Jay So originally comes from Yasothon, if I remember correctly, and opened her eponymous northeastern Thai restaurant in Bangkok’s Silom area more than a decade ago.  She’s cheeky and boisterous, and eating at her place, with the smell of plaa raa (fermented fish) and the sound of the northeastern Thai dialect being spoken, is probably not unlike eating at restaurant in her home province. I’ve been eating here for years, and despite not having been back in a long while, she still somehow remembered that I like my som tam without sugar.

Jay So’s dishes run the standard Isan (northeastern) repertoire, and with one exception, are solid, but not amazing. Of course she does several types of som tam (papaya salad), including som tam lao:

Lao-style som tam, made with fermented fish, salted crab, crispy eggplant and dried chilies. We also ordered som tam khai khem, a Thai-style som tam (ie made bottled fish sauce and including peanuts and dried ship) with salted egg:

There’s kai yaang:

grilled chicken, which is really just OK, and a not-so-subtle tom saep, a spicy/sour broth of pork bones:

But the real reason to eat at Jay So’s is the plaa duk yaang, grilled catfish:

It’s not the most photogenic dish in the world, but you’ll have to take my word for it. Before grilling, Jay So stuffs the necks of the fish with a coarse paste of lemongrass, garlic and salt, providing them a delicious herbal flavour. The skin is crispy and lightly seasoned as well, and on a good day, the meat is just a touch dry, like I prefer it.

So although Jay So’s standard menu and occasionally heavy-handed seasoning may fall short of an exceptional Isaan eating experience, it’s a welcoming and chaotically cozy place, and there’s always the catfish.

Jay So
146/1 Soi Phiphat 2
085 999 4225
10am-5.30pm Mon-Sat

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Despite having many of the same culinary resources and origins as neighbouring Thailand, the people of Laos subside on a markedly more basic diet. Considering Laos’s poverty and lack of both infrastructure and large-scale agriculture, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. But the monotony of the rural Lao diet can come as a shock if you’ve never encountered it personally. This post describes another blogger’s nine days of very basic meals in a particularly remote corner of northern Laos. I spent six days in the country on my most recent trip, only four of which were spent in the boondocks of central Laos, but I’d say we had a somewhat similar experience.

All of our meals were based around sticky rice. At a couple dinners this staple was accompanied by dishes such as sour soups with frog or fish, grilled chicken, and on one occasion, bamboo shoot soup (kaeng nor mai). Otherwise we ate sticky rice with tinned fish and a grilled chili dip, sticky rice with tiny grilled fish or chicken and a grilled chili dip, or instant noodles. None of it (other than the instant noodles) was bad, but it was pretty monotonous, and given the almost blanket absence of vegetables, not entirely nutritious. Yet despite this, I suspect that our meals had significantly more variety and nutrition than those of the people hosting us.

A notable exception to this diet came the day we explored Tham Lot Se Bang Fai, a 6.5km-long cave created by the flow of the Se Bang Fai. While we were busy inside the cave, a few of the villagers of Ban Nong Ping, our host village, had gathered the baby swifts and bats that had fallen to the cave floor or in the water. These were boiled and plucked:

and like most of our meals, were grilled:

And as if eating scavenged baby birds and bats wasn’t enough, the villagers had a particular way of preparing them that made already questionable (by our standards, at least) food even worse. Basically they charred the bats and birds, grilling them until they were unrecogniseable black shells. I suspect that this makes the bones, wings and skin easier to eat:

Luckily for us, the bats and birds were a special treat for the people who’d gathered them, and our meal was the reassuringly monotonous mix of grilled chicken, instant noodles, sticky rice and a grilled chili dip.

The tiny village of Ban Nong Ping (Leetch Lake Village) lies at the eastern edge of Laos’s Khammuan Province near the border with Vietnam. Its 200+ inhabitants are a mixture of lowland Lao and Salang who were ordered to moved here more than a decade ago, and who have yet to experience the joy of electricity (it’s meant to arrive in 2012). The village is the access point for Hin Namno NBCA and some of the more remote stretches of the former Ho Chi Minh Trail, as well as for the amazing Tham Lot Se Bang Fai, which is why we there there. After having explored the cave and stayed with the villagers, we had a bit of free time on our last day and I did some impromptu portraits. The images were taken with my D700, a 80-200mm f/2.8 VR and illuminated with two off-camera strobes, a SB-800 and an SB-900, both activated by the camera’s built-in flash. I didn’t have much time and the flashes were acting naughty, but at the least the images provide a bit of insight into the inhabitants of one of the most remote and poorest villages I’ve ever visited.

To commence a slideshow of 12 images, click on the image above and use keyboard arrows or hold your mouse above the images to navigate through them.

A three-pronged Auntie Anne’s pretzel topped with hearty sticks of imitation crab. Encountered on a Nok Air flight from Bangkok to Nakhon Phanom. Resemblance to airplane propeller moderate, but edibility negligible.

More to follow soon from my most recent trip to Laos.

As of about 8.30am this morning, and after several hours of early morning fighting, tanks have crossed the protesters’ tire and bamboo barricade near Lumphini Park to. This is significant, but it still remains to be seen what will happen, and I continue to hear gunshots and explosions as I write this.

As  mentioned previously, yesterday was generally quiet in the Silom area, at least until about 1am. Shortly after falling asleep I was awakened by the sound of several very large explosions and the pop of sniper rifle fire (as opposed the rattle of machine gun or the blasts of shotgun fire the previous nights) very close to my house. Wandering out this morning to survey the damage, it became clear exactly how close the sounds were: the Dusit Thani Hotel, which I can see clearly from my balcony, had been hit by a grenade (see pic above). Guests were apparently herded into the basement in the middle of the night, and as of today, the hotel has closed, its employees helping people evacuate from this area’s now empty streets:

The government has set a deadline of 3pm today for everybody to leave the protester’s main camp, which begins at Lumphini Park:

and stretches all the way to the shopping district at Rajprasong. It’s 2.30pm as I write this, and the recent death of influential red shirt supporter Seh Daeng, the sound of explosions, mysterious small planes passing overhead and ominously, dark clouds and thunder, contribute to a very dark, tense atmosphere.

Incidentally, if I’ve gained anything from this experience, it’s the knowledge that the seemingly useless internet application Twitter actually has a practical application. In the words of Bloomberg reporter Dan Ten Kate, ‘It’s like having sources all over town,’ and many journalists and observers use it via mobile phone to keep up to date on what’s becoming an ever-expanding conflict. I follow it compulsively from home, and if you also desire minute to minute updates on the situation here I can recommend feeds from Newley Purnell, Patrick Winn, Alastair Leithead, Andrew Marshall, bangkokpundit and Agnes Dherbys.

Yesterday was relatively quiet, at least in my area, but this was the scene five minutes’ walk away, along Rama IV. The smoke is from burning tires, and was accompanied by explosions (mostly harmless but very large rockets fired by the protesters) virtually every 20 seconds. A surreal and frightening scene.

I live just off of Thanon Silom, which in addition to being the area of Bangkok with arguably the most restaurants and street food, is also directly adjacent to the epicentre of the current conflict. As a result, the streets in this part of town feel particularly empty today:

Shops are closed, rubbish isn’t being collected, armed soldiers outnumber civilians, and the contents of my fridge are starting to run low. And what is normally an area with an overabundance of food has now been reduced to one stall, the lone noodle vendor pictured at the top of this post.

Stopping by for a bowl today at lunchtime, I had the following conversation with one of the ladies running the stall:

Wow, you’re open today. Aren’t you scared?
Yes it’s scary, but I have to earn money. We haven’t been able to open in five days!
How has it been today? Have you heard any gunshots or explosions?
Yes, but from way over there [points towards Lumphini Park].
You must be selling well since you’re the only place to eat at Sala Daeng. How late will you stay open?
We’re almost sold out now!

And indeed she was selling well, with the bulk her customers, not surprisingly, hungry journalists: