At Home With David Alan Harvey

At the closing party for the 9 Days... project I was fortunate enough to meet former National Geographic staff photographer and current Magnum Photos member David Alan Harvey for a brief moment. I was even more pleased when he revealed that he is also a fellow blogger. Check out his blog, At Home With David Alan Harvey, which currently features a few pics from his recent visit to Bangkok. If you're not familiar with the man's work, be sure to have a look at his online portolio at the Magnum website.

Phood in Phnom Penh

Shhh... Don't tell anybody, but Phnom Penh is a great place for food. Not only do you have the fascinating Khmer cuisine, but the city is literally studded with tiny French, Italian, English, and even Russian and North Korean restaurants. After decades of eating simply to live, the Khmers seem to have begun living to eat, and the excitement about food in the city is almost palpable. For local flavours, a good place to start is evening at the Psar Thmei, where every evening a few vendors sell some low-key street food, including the delicious looking grilled squid above, and some noodle dishes:

However my favourite market was the Psar O Russei, Phnom Penh's largest. There you'll find everything ranging from roast piglets:

to ladies specializing in ingredients specifically for the countless varieties of samlaw, Khmer-style sour soups:

And this being Cambodia, there is a truly mind-boggling variety of freshwater fish:

Inside the market building you'll find fresh(ish) meat:

dried fish:

and a dark but inviting food court that must be the greatest conglomeration of Khmer food in the world:

I would highly recommend these stalls to anybody visiting the city. The selection was great, the prices cheap, and the stalls were actually much more sanitary than their outdoor brethren.

There are several fun markets within the downtown area alone, some specializing in raw ingredients:

and others featuring prepared food, such as grilled snakehead fish:

and deep-fried treats:

The waterfront along the Tonle Sap is also a decent place to grab a snack:

Especially if you share the Cambodian love for eating deep-fried insects:

But food is more or less everywhere in Phnom Penh:

And one particularly ubiquitous eat is sugarcane:

The stuff is peeled:

then squeezed through a frightening looking machine to produce some of the most refreshing liquid known to man:

A few more food pics can be seen here, and more, generally less food-related photos can be seen here.

Sweet!

As mentioned previously I spent the previous week in Cambodia's lovely capital, Phnom Penh. The visit wouldn't have been half as fun if it wasn't for the help of the friendly bloke above, Phil of Phnomenon. He was kind enough to accompany me to countless restaurants, food stalls and markets, and taught me a lot about his host country's unknown and underrated cuisine. One of the places he took me to was the slightly upscale Khmer restaurant, Sweet Cafe. I let Phil handle the ordering, and we began with what is possibly Cambodia's most famous dish, amok:

This dish is typically a steamed mixture of fish, herbs and curry paste, and takes several forms, but Sweet's slightly soupy version fit my preconceived notion of what the dish would be like. It was also the most delicious of the several I consumed during the week.

This was followed by a delicious "salad" of slightly sour shredded mango and the smoked fish known in Thai as plaa krob ("crunchy fish"):

This dish was sour, but not unpleasantly so, and had a delicious smokey flavour courtesy of the fish. Phil explained that Khmer cooking often emphasizes one flavour per dish, rather than trying to reach a balance of sour/spicy/salty/sweet as many of its neighbouring cuisines do.

One of the more unusual dishes of the meal was this "omelet" of ground pork and a kind of dried fish called trei prama:

Much like the Thai nam phrik, this dish was served with a variety of fresh, crispy vegetables, and it provided the salty aspect of our meal.

And finally there was the obligatory sour soup, a style of cooking that Phil feels is the true soul of Khmer cooking, and a variety of dishes I really learned to love during my time in Phnom Penh:

The particular soup above is known as samlaw machou yuan, "Vietnamese sour soup", and took the form of a clear broth with huge hunks of freshwater fish and a variety of vegetables including pineapple and white radish. The soup was topped with a variety of fresh herbs and crispy fried garlic. It was, like much of the food I ate in Phnom Penh, simple but delicious.

More Phnom Penh pics to follow shortly...

Sweet Cafe & Restaurant
#21B, St. 294
Phnom Penh
+855 12 999 119

technorati tags: phnompenh, cambodian, food, khmer

LP at LP

I've currently got a photo feature on the food of Luang Prabang at the Lonely Planet website. The old place is a great destination for food and I'd recommend it highly to anybody currently in the 'hood.

I'm currently in Phnom Penh, also something of an interesting food destination. Phil of Phnomenon has been gracious enough to take me around to the city's best markets and restaurants and I've been having a great time. Will definitely post some pics and info when I get back to Bangkok at the end of the month.

10 Baht Khao Tom

I found myself in the Tha Phra Chan area this evening and came across a fun street stall. It sold khao tom, which literally means "boiled rice", but which usually refers to rice served with a variety of mostly Chinese-style stir-fried dishes. This khao tom stall was a bit unusual in that all the dishes were made in advance, and was also among the cheapest I've ever come across: each dish was 10 baht (28 cents). Other than being mad cheap, this khao tom stall was also mad stocked:

And when you have this many choices, choosing side dishes is a serious business:

I chose squid stuffed with ground pork, tofu fried with bean sprouts, and stir-fried eggplants. Total: 45 baht ($1.25). The food wasn't necessarily very good, but sometimes variety is better than quality. I think, anyway.

Abbas

This evening I was fortunate enough to meet the Magnum photojournalist Abbas. Abbas is one of the 50 photographers shooting for the Thailand: 9 Days in the Kingdom project, and is one of the minority of 23 who still insists on using film (as opposed to digital). Abbas usually shoots in black and white, but he will be shooting in colour for this book. He will be taking photos in Pattani, a province in Thailand's troubled, Muslim-dominated south.

Incidentally, a movie is also being made of the 9 Days... project that will document the photographers at work. The filmmakers asked each photographer if he or she would mind being filmed, and Abbas, feeling certain that this would cramp his style, wrote on the form that he is "unfriendly and difficult"!

For an amazing slide show of the events that Abbas has documented, click on the first mention of his name above.

Lang Suan Soi 6

Today was something of an informal Bangkok Bloggers Summit. I trekked all the way to the Lang Suan area to meet with Newley Purnell of www.newley.com fame. Newley has been blogging since 2001, an era when, I believe, the word blog had yet to be coined. What did they call it back then, Newley? Online Diarying? Internet Loggery? Pointless Frivolity?

Newley lives just minutes away from Lang Suan Soi 6, a tiny alley that, come lunchtime, is a virtual magnet for hungry Thai office staff of every stripe. We decided the partake in the madness and dove directly into the heart of the soi. More or less halfway down we came across a raan khao kaeng, rice and curry shop, that serves up some very interesting looking nosh, and our fate was sealed.

Newley made a beeline for the green curry with chicken:

I suspect many of you are familiar with this dish, however the stuff you get in Thailand is quite unlike the green curry with chicken you'll find at your local Thai Hut in Gresham, Oregon (or wherever you are). The "chicken" in this case referred to a colourful mixture of meaty joints, fatty skin, cubes of coagulated blood and chewy feet--I don't think a breast was involved anywhere. Thai green curry also tends to be quite watery, and the obligatory eggplants tend to be pretty mushy. But that's how we like it.

I ordered a plate of some very tasty looking battered and deep-fried mushrooms:

Served with the spicy/sour Thai seafood dipping sauce, they were an unusual but delicious dish.

I also took the opportunity to introduce Newley to that very central Thai of dishes, nam phrik kapi:

Served, as tradition dictates, with a chubby deep-fried mackerel and fresh and par-boiled veggies. I wasn't sure if Newley could handle the heat of the nam phrik, but he proved himself fully able.

Incidentally, it is at this very curry shop that Newley was previously laughed at by several Thai women.

After lunch we explored the street and came across some interesting things, including sai ua, the famous northern Thai sausage:

some interesting looking mee kathi, sweet noodles:

a yummy looking dessert of indiscriminate Chinese origin:

and some veggies, bagged up to go:

If you can identify all of these you know a fair bit about Thai food in my book. Any takers?

Yuan

Friend and South China Morning Post journalist Hal Lipper had been invited to the Millennium Hilton's Chinese restaurant, Yuan, to sample their new menu, and was kind enough to take me along. That's him above trying to convince the hotel's PR staff to give us the most expensive bottle on the wine list.

Yuan's chef, Chow Chun Chuen, is a native of Hong Kong and all the dishes we had were vaguely Cantonese in origin. One of the most unusual dishes of the meal was Braised fish maw steak with abalone sauce:

For those of you who don't know, fish maw=fish guts, but surprisingly this was one of the better dishes of the meal, and Hal's personal favourite.

I liked the Stir-fried beef with pineapple and rose apple:

The beef had been marinated beforehand and was very tender, and the rose apple, though unusual, added an interesting sweet flavour.

Another very unusual dish was Stir fried scallop and mango with fresh milk:

Upon reading the name of this dish I was certain I wouldn't like it, but the fresh milk took the form of very soft scrambled eggs or cheese and was actually quite nice.

There was also Baked river prawns in cheese and butter bulk (?) with E-Fu noodle:

which consisted of seemingly homemade but soggy noodles with a rich but nondescript sauce.

And finally, Deep-fried shin of beef with Thai chicken sauce:

The battered and deep-fried shin of beef was nice, in a tamale sort of way, but the "Thai chicken sauce", ostensibly the cheap bottled stuff that people normally serve with fried chicken, made the dish soggy and sweet.

We were also invited to try some of the restaurant's dim sum dishes, which mostly included the old standbys like steamed buns filled with barbecued pork:

the steamed morsels known in Thai as ha kao:

steamed noodle with shrimp:

and khanom jeep:

Bangkok-based dim sum fans should be aware that Yuan offers a dim sum lunch buffet every day for 500 baht.

Yuan
Millennium Hilton Bangkok
123 Charoennakorn Road

technorati tags: chinese, food, bangkok, restaurants, hilton, yuan

9 Days in the Kingdom

I'm fortunate enough to be involved in a very, very, very cool project. Remember those A Day in the Life... photo books back in the '80's? Well, they're still doing them, and the latest one will be about Thailand. The project, called Thailand: 9 Days in the Kingdom, involves 50 of the most famous photographers in the world, people like Steve McCurry, Abbas, Mike Yamashita, Raghu Rai, Bruno Barbey, James Nachtwey et al. These guys (and gals) will be documenting life in Thailand for a period of nine days starting on January 16th. I'll be working as an assistant to Eric Valli, the French photographer who's probably most well known for the photos he took of honey hunters in Nepal. He and I will be going down to Ko Phi Phi, where back in 1990 Eric did an article for National Geographic documenting the workers who gather the valuable swift nests in the caves near this island. So basically, I'll be spending a week on a tropical beach helping out a world famous photographer. Could it get any better? Oh yeah, and there will be southern Thai food.

Real Phat Thai

I have a post at the Lonely Planet Blog about Thailand's most famous dish. Take a look, leave a comment.

Boat Noodles

Inspired by noodlepie's mention of a Flickr noodlemap, today I hit the streets in search of a noodlelunch. My search led me to a neighbourhood restaurant selling kwaytiao reua, "boat noodles", possibly the second most popular form of noodle in Thailand. This is a dish associated with central Thailand, and is so called because it used to be sold from small boats along the canals and rivers. Today all of Bangkok's canals have been turned into streets, but the boats still survive:

That these noodles are normally served from a landlocked boat is not their only interesting attribute. Boat noodles are among the most intensely flavoured noodle dishes in Thailand, featuring a dark, somewhat sweet broth suggestive of spices such as cinnamon and clove, a hearty dose of pork blood, and crushed pork rinds and dried chilies in every bowl! The dish is normally made with pork or sometimes beef, and when you order, you choose the form of meat you desire, which can include meatballs, ground meat, stewed falling-apart meat or liver. Thankfully, dish also includes something green in the form of par-boiled morning glory (I asked for extra):

As with other Thai noodle dishes, you can also choose the type of noodles you want, although I think this dish is best with the thin rice noodles known in Thai as sen lek:

The bowls are tiny, and very cheap--only 10 baht each--and I can easily put down three or four. Rather than doing that though, I opted to try the only other dish this restaurant makes, khao khluk kapi:

This is rice cooked with shrimp paste and served with all the toppings you see there, including (on top of the rice) sour mango, a shredded omelet and muu waan, "sweet pork", as well as Chinese sausage, lime, thinly sliced green beans, thinly sliced shallots and thinly sliced chilies.

Expect to see more on boat noodles, as I'm planning on making a trip the canal behind the Victory Monument where there are several shops that specialize in this dish.

technorati tags: thai, food, bangkok, noodles

Christmas Dinner

No turkey, no fruitcake, no eggnog; this year's Christmas dinner was taken with friends at Paa Uap. Isaan food in plastic chairs by the side of the road--how less Christmas can you get?

Vongdeun ordered tam taeng, a dish identical som tam, but employing strips of crispy cucumber rather than the normal green papaya:

We ordered two.

Mr. B had a need for laap muu:

and I ordered yam naem, a salad of fermented pork with julienned ginger, peanuts and chilies:

But this is a freshwater fish restaurant, and the best dishes are of the piscine variety. We had tiny plaa nuea on deep-fried with copious garlic:

Which we ate bones and all. This was followed by plaa nin phao:

A Mekong River fish stuffed with lemongrass, coated with salt and grilled over coals. Delish.

And this being Christmas there was, of course, sticky rice:

technorati tags: christmas, thai, food, bangkok, fish

Chinatown at night

I've mentioned Chinatown here many a time, but still feel its worth touching on again. It used to be a nightmare to get to this part of town, but with the MRT terminating at Hua Lamphong now, it's a simple ten minute walk from the station. As I've said before, the food down here is great, and the atmosphere is really fun as well, with both locals and tourists.

The food more or less starts at the corner of Thanon Phadung Dao and Thanon Yaowarat. This corner is dominated street stalls that sell overpriced seafood to Asian tourists:

They really are quite fun though, and have a great selection:

The most popular of these is probably T & K, which has a virtual army of young employees from upcountry:

On a slightly smaller scale, farther down Thanong Phadung Dao, I came across one tiny stall that sold different steamed shellfish:

She sold cockles and mussels, which are served with the Thai seafood dipping sauce:

Getting back to Thanon Yaowarat, I crossed the road and stopped by the mangkorn khaao, 'white dragon' noodle shop:

This stall does the best bamii, Chinese-style wheat noodles, and wontons I've had in Bangkok. The wontons in particular:

are immense, and are filled with a mixture of a shrimp and ground pork ground up with black pepper, coriander roots and garlic. And the barbecued pork here is a world away from the red-painted meat you'll find all over Bangkok.

If this isn't enough (it wasn't), across the way is a popular stall that sells satay, skewers of grilled pork:

Continuing along Thanon Yaowarat, the next side street is Thanon Plaeng Naam, where this guy does stir-fries over amazingly hot charcoal stoves:

And at the end of the street are two shops that sell a huge variety of pre-cooked Chinese-style dishes:

Getting back to Thanon Yaowarat:

I stopped for a dish of mii phat hong kong, 'Hong Kong-style fried noodles':

A simple, but delicious dish of wheat noodles, shrimp, crab meat, dried mushrooms and sliced cabbage, that I've only really ever seen in Chinatown.

Along Thanon Yaowarat another common sight is guys roasting chestnuts in large woks filled with sand:

The end of the line, and probably the busiest spot is where Thanon Yaowarat intersects with the market known as talaat mai, at Charoen Krung 16. There's tons of food and people here, but much of the fuss is centered around one stall that sells kuay jap (a kind thick noodle soup):

This place is mad popular and has a constant line of people.

All over Chinatown you'll find kids selling garlands Burmese-style, from trays balanced on their heads:

Wandering to the end of the street, I discovered that someone was showing a movie:

technorati tags: bangkok, thai, food, thailand, chinatown

Natthaphorn Ice Cream

Thanks to the vigilance of devoted readers such as Austin from Bangkok (apparently I'm not the only one), I'm kept abreast of developments in the fast-moving world of the city's food scene. However today's entry is not even remotely fast moving. Natthaphorn, an unassuming street side ice cream shop in Olde Bangkok has been scooping for at least 60 years. I'd heard of it before, but hadn't yet visited, so today after an excellent lunch at the nearby Chotechitr, and with Austin's praise in mind, I finally made it to Natthaphorn's with friends Ron, Carla and Giovanna:

As the sign in the first pic indicates, they have three flavours: coconut, chocolate and coffee:

The maphrao on, or young coconut ice cream is the shop's most famous:

It contains no milk; only coconut cream and tender coconut meat, and like many Thai sweets that contain these ingredients, a very subtle salty flavour. The texture is slightly more "icy" than Western-style ice cream, but is still smooth, and the ice cream seems to take its sweetness from the coconut, rather than added sugar.

I think Ron liked it:

The chocolate:

and coffee varieties are made using milk, and are more or less similar to Western-style ice cream, but were also delicious.

The friendly third-generation owner says that she does other flavours on occasion, including "milk tea" and passion fruit, among others. Because Thai-style ice cream is often served with sticky rice, we suggested that she do a mango ice cream in an effort to capture the flavours of the famous Thai dessert, mango and sticky rice. She said she'd do it if we promised to come back. We'll be back.

Natthaphorn Ice Cream
94 Phraeng Phuthorn
02 221 3954

technorati tags: ice, cream, bangkok, restaurants, thai, food

A fat cheroot...

to celebrate one full year of RealThai! It's hard to believe that something with such humble origins would eventually become the acclaimed yet feared multi million dollar-grossing media empire that it is today. As CEO of RealThai™©® on this special day, I'd just like to say that, despite the lavish lifestyle and cheroot-smoking groupies that often accompany such fame, and regardless of the nasty rumours currently being spread on CNN, RealThai remains absolutely, and unequivocally independent. (To the nice people at Google: my email is austinbushphotography@gmail.com with an "i", not an "e". Still waiting to hear from you!)

There's still time!

To sweeten the Bangkok pot for Menu For Hope III I'm adding more to my offer. Thanks to the generous folks at Bed Supperclub:

(image courtesy of mihobsen)

I'm able to throw in a meal for two (Sun-Thurs) at the above, one of Bangkok's hottest tables. And yes, just in case you thought you misheard me, this is being offered along with a six-hour tour of Bangkok's foodiest sites:

including the above; a route custom-designed by myself. The code for both of these is AP44.

You have until the 22nd. Buy as many of the $10 tickets as you can afford here.

Thompson's next...

Had lunch at Muslim Restaurant with David Thompson today, the author of the austerely-titled but acclaimed, Thai Food. As I know quite a few readers own and love this book, I thought you might be interested to know that Mr Thompson is currently working hard on its successor, a tome on Thailand's street food that figures to be every bit as authoriative (and thick) as Thai Food. At this point Thompson has assembled 250 recipes and is "2/3 of the way done", but reckons the book probably won't be on the market until Christmas 2007. Right now he's struggling to finish the chapter on khanom jeen (9 pages, 1o-15 recipes!), and would appreciate help from anybody who can provide authoriative information as to the origin of this semi-fermented rice noodle!

Samui Food

It's like RealThai on a field trip. Go to the new Lonely Planet Travel Blog to see a post I did about the eats on Ko Samui. Get hungry. Leave a comment.

Thip Samai

In the course of doing an entry about phat thai for Lonely Planet's new travel blog, I found myself at Thip Samai, probably the most famous phat thai restaurant in Thailand (as well probably the only phat thai restaurant with a website). As illustrated by the interior:

it's also among the oldest phat thai shops in Thailand, and they've been frying up noodles since 1966.

In keeping with tradition, Thip Samai still makes its phat thai using old-skool charcoal-burning stoves. Controlled by electric fans, the cooks can increase the flames when necessary to provide an element of wok hei, or 'breath of the wok', a smoky essence that ideally should be present in all good wok-fried food:

Despite this, I was a bit disappointed to see that they don't do the phat thai to order here. Rather, they fry up a huge wok of the stuff and divide it among several plates. They only do phat thai here, although they do about five different kinds. I began with phat thai man kung kung sot:

This is phat thai where the noodles have been fried with man kung, shrimp fat, giving them the pinkish-orange hue. The dish had the savoury oiliness of the shrimp fat, but this being true Bangkok food, was slightly somewhat sweet.

I followed this with a dish of phat thai thammadaa, 'normal' phat thai employing the famous rice noodles from Chanthaburi:

Again, slightly sweet, with somewhat undercooked noodles.

All phat thai is served with a side dish of banana flower, Chinese chives, bean sprouts, sliced lime, and my favourite, bai bua bok, a green, slightly bitter herb also known as Asian pennywort:

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that, in my opinion, the phat thai at Thip Samai is good, but really no better than good phat thai I've eaten elsewhere. In my experience, phat thai is a dish that is either good or bad, but never great. On the other hand, I think that if they were to fry the phat thai to order (impossible, given the number of customers), each dish would be better-proportioned and have more of that wonderful wok hei, and could very well be the first great phat thai I've had.

Thip Samai is open from 17:30 to 1:30.

Thip Samai
313 Mahachai Rd
(just off Ratchadamnoen, near Phu Khao Thong)
02 221 6280

technorati tags: phat, thai, bangkok, thai, food, restaurants

Menu For Hope III

I'm slightly somewhat late here, but I'd like to help spread the word about Menu for Hope III. This is a program that raises money for the UN World Food Program. Last year's run was apparently the world's largest online food auction, and raised just over $17,000!

The idea is simple: we, the foodbloggers, offer cool prizes, and you, the readers bid on them. Hungry people receive the money. My contribution is a six-hour food tour of Bangkok (idea courtesy of Pim). This is a custom tour I've developed myself that takes in two of Bangkok's most vibrant markets, some well-respected restaurants and street stalls, as well as some other interesting, but non food-related sights. I'll fork out for all the transportation and meals, and provide lively conversation and insightful insight. The code for this prize is AP44.

As tempting as this sounds, there are other prizes as well, and to see a full list of what is being offered by Asia-Pacific bloggers have a look here. For the entire list, visit Pim. Once you've decided what you're interested in, break out the plastic, remember the code of the prize you want and buy as many $10 raffle tickets as you can afford at Firstgiving, the entity handling all the money.

The campaign is scheduled to run from now until Friday 22nd, 6PM PST. So buy your raffle tickets now!