Phat Thai Mae Am/ผัดไทแม่อัม

Tipped off by กินรอบกรุง 2 (Kin Rob Krung 2), a Thai-language food guide based on a television programme, I was recently pointed in the direct of Phat Thai Mae Am, a shophouse restaurant specialising in just two dishes: phat Thai and kuaytiaw khua kai.

It's exactly the kind of cozy, friendly, informal, tidy, longstanding, florescent-lit Thai restaurant I love the most:

And to top it off, Mae Am does what is probably one of the better dishes of phat Thai that I've encountered in Bangkok.

The noodles here are seasoned ahead of time with tamarind paste, palm sugar and fish sauce, giving them a pink colour; it's the old-school way of making phat Thai, I'm told. They're then fried to order in a small wok, one or two dishes at at a time, with no additional seasoning. This contrasts with most places, which tend to season the dish in the wok, sometimes doing several orders in one go.

Mae Am adds lots of crunchy salted radish, good-quality dried shrimp, fresh shrimp, and if you like, squid. She fries the egg on the side, letting the mixture ignite briefly over the charcoal fire before dishing it up:

The result feels almost delicate, and lacks the oily gloopiness of lesser versions of phat Thai - a result of that clever pre-seasoning, I suspect. As is the norm, the dish is served with a small pile of ground peanuts and the usual sides of Chinese chive, bean sprouts, banana flower, lime and pennywort.

Mae Am's kuaytiaw khua kai, wide rice noodles fried with chicken and egg, is also quite good:

It's slightly smokey - again, from that charcoal flame - and well-seasoned. My only gripe with this (and the phat Thai) would be that, unlike the version at Nay Hong, Mae Am uses vegetable oil, not lard, as her fat of choice.

Saturated fat aside, these are two solid reasons to take the MRT to Khlong Toei come mealtime.

Phat Tha Mae Am Th Rama IV, Bangkok 11am-10pm Mon-Fri, 2-10pm Sat & Sun

View Thai Eats in a larger map

Tang Kuang Khi Hiang/ตั้งกวงคี่เฮียง

Kun chiang (กุนเชียง) is a sweet, dried sausage of Chinese origin. I was never a fan of the stuff, finding it sweet in taste and waxy in texture, until I discovered Tang Kuang Khi Hiang, a shop in Bangkok's Chinatown.

The third-generation owners here claim to do a Hong Kong-style version of the sausage, which to me seems less sweet, slightly less fatty, and not waxy at all. The standard version is made from pork, but they also do a pork liver version and a duck version.

Kun chiang can be fried and used as a side along with Chinese-style kaeng karii, or as the owner suggested, fried and steamed with chicken and ginger. It's delicious when sliced and thrown into a pot of rice as it steams, or when fried with kai-lan and salt, a dish I had at Yung Kee in Hong Kong. Another popular use for the sausage in Thailand is khao phat kun chiang, rice fried with kun chiang, the video recipe for which can be seen here.

Tang Kuang Khi Hiang 352 Th Yaowarat, Bangkok 02 224 7065 9am-9pm

View Thai Eats in a larger map

24 Hours in Trang

There's not a whole lot to do in Trang, a sleepy town in southern Thailand, but this is made up for by the fact that it may very well be one of the country's best food towns. Seemingly confirming this is fellow blogger and University of Oregon alum Oh Sirin, who has written a guide to the city's restaurants called เขาว่ากันว่าร้านนี้อร่อยที่ ตรัง & ภูเก็ด (rough translation: They Say This Restaurant's Great in Trang & Phuket). Book in hand, I recently spent a huge chunk of my 24 hours in Trang eating at the city's excellent old-school Thai-Chinese, Muslim and southern Thai restaurants and stalls. Photographic evidence of this is below; click the button in the corner for full-screen mode and captions.

View Thai Eats in a larger map

Fish sandwiches in Istanbul

If I hadn't been reminded of it by a recent post at EatingAsia, this blog probably would have continued sitting in my Out box.

I spent fewer than 48 hours in Istanbul, but in this short time got the impression that eating takes a distinctly different form there.

Take, for example, the costume and showmanship associated with serving Turkish-style ice cream:

or tea:

Or the city's alleged signature dish, balık ekmek, a type of fish sandwich, which, of course, isn't just a sandwich, but a show performed on rocking boats:

The boats, which are moored by the foot of the Galata Bridge on Istanbul's European side, are floating kitchens where men griddle fillets of a mackerel-like fish and serve them in sandwiches. You pay on the pier and when the wave is right, the sandwich is handed over:

Served in a spongy roll with a bit of lettuce and onion, and seasoned with little more than salt and lemon juice, I have to admit that my first balık ekmek was, quite frankly, rather underwhelming as a sandwich.

But eaten at the waterfront, with the view of Asia across the way, and the New Mosque as a backdrop:

it seemed to embody that uniquely Istanbul intersection of ceremony and setting, where sometimes taste is only part of the experience.

Fish sandwich vendors Golden Horn, Istanbul

View Thai Eats in a larger map

Khao Karii Nang Loeng/ข้าวกะหรี่นางเลิ้ง

Kaeng karee (แกงกะหรี่) generally refers to a mild Chinese-style curry served with thin slices of tender pork or crunchy beef tendon. It's not nearly as complex or spicy as a typical Thai curry and is one of only a handful of Thai dishes that include bottled curry powder.

Ideal Map's Good Eats Rattanakosin map (see details here) led me to this open-air shophouse near Nang Loeng Market that turned out to do one of the better plates of kaeng karee I've come across in Bangkok.

The kaeng karee muu, pork curry (pictured above,) here is spicier than average, but as is the standard, comes served with slices of deep-fried kun chiang, Chinese-style pork sausage, a few slices of cucumber and sliced chilies.

They also do a similar satoo lin muu, a stew of pork tongue, served the same way.

For more places to eat kaeng karii, including a couple places that do the similarly-named but Muslim-influenced dish, check out this article I did for CNNGo.

Khao Karii Nang Loeng Th Suphaminit, Bangkok 02 282 3918 8am-2pm

View Thai Eats in a larger map

Save the date

If you're in New York City, that is. On October 5, Australian chef David Thompson will be doing a one-off khanom jeen dinner at Betel, featuring a little help from some of the guys at Portland's Pok Pok:

Suki Haeng Saphan Leuang/สุกี้แห้งสะพานเหลือง

I'm working on yet another piece about obscure Thai dishes for CNNGo's Bangkok pages. This week I'm eating suki haeng (สุกี้แห้ง), the wok-fried 'dry' version of the ubiquitous do-it-yourself hotpot sukiyaki that's found in just about every shopping centre in Thailand.

Of the handful of suki haeng restaurants I've been to so far, a list that includes the famous Elvis Suki, this tiny stall at the side of Thanon Rama IV stands out as my favourite. The proprietor claims to have been making the dish at this location for at least 30 years, and in this time he's arrived at the combination of flavours and textures that define an excellent version of the dish.

A pork or chicken order here comes with tender, marinated meat, while the seafood version includes squid and shrimp. A dish here is slightly smokey with some nice charred bits, and contains lots of vegetables and egg and a relative minimum of noodles. A squirt of oyster sauce provides the suki with a bit more meaty roundness, and his dipping sauce - the element that can make or break a good suki - is excellent, combining meaty and spicy flavours with lots of garlic.

It's a very simple dish, as this video illustrates:

He begins by heating oil over a high flame, adding to it egg and protein. These are just barely cooked before he adds the veggies (a combination of Napa cabbage, green onions and morning glory), a knot of bean thread, a pinch of sugar and MSG, and a squirt of oyster sauce. A few more turns to bring it all together and the dish is done in less than a minute.

It'd be an easy Thai dish to make at home, the only thing lacking being the nam jim suki (น้ำจิ้มสุกี้), the dipping sauce, which as this video (in Thai only) shows, is a much more complicated dish than I'd realised:

If you can't understand Thai but want to have a go at making the dipping sauce it yourself, the process is pretty self-explanatory, and the ingredients include, in the order she introduces them, water, bottled chili sauce, cilantro/coriander root, garlic, fresh chili, sugar, fish sauce, sesame oil, oyster sauce, salt, lime juice and roasted sesame.

Suki Haeng Saphan Leuang Thanon Rama IV, Bangkok 5-10pm

View Thai Eats in a larger map

Jib Kee/จิ๊บกี่

The area around Bangkok's Nang Loeng Market is home to lots of old-school restaurants that are ripe for investigation.

One of the oldest-school looking ones is Jib Kee, a restaurant that, for more than 50 years, has specialised in meaty Chinese-Thai dishes such as roast pork and duck:

On my first visit I tried their muu krob (หมูกรอบ; shown at the top of this post), roast pork belly, and immediately suspected that it might be one of the best I've encountered in Bangkok. The skin is crispy, without being too much so; the fatty bits literally melt away in your mouth; and amazingly, the meat is moist, tender and even perhaps a bit rare - surely an indicator of restraint and skill on their part. The dish is served with a dipping sauce that combines sliced chillies, dark soy and I think, a bit of vinegar.

The remainder of the restaurant's dishes revolve around duck, and include a decent pet tun (เป็ดตุ๋น), a slightly peppery broth of duck:

roast duck (เป็ดย่าง):

served over bitter greens in a light five spice-based sauce; and duck intestines (ใส้แก้ว):

the latter with little or no flavour of their own, but with a crunchy texture, and served in a slightly salty sauce that included fermented soybeans.

The duck dishes are probably above average, and I suspect they're what attract the high-ranking military generals who frequent the place every time I've been there (a sure-fire sign of a good restaurant in Thailand), but it's the pork belly that would draw me back here.

Here's a video from the Thai television programme, Aroy Rim Thaang ("Delicious Street Food") about Jib Kee:

Jib Kee Th Nakhon Sawan, Bangkok 02 281 1283 9am-3pm

View Thai Eats in a larger map

Granja Viader

In flipping through photos of my recent trip to Europe, quite possibly one of the most memorable things I consumed there was a cup of Spanish-style hot chocolate at Granja Viader, a more than century old cafe in Barcelona:

Luckily the pic at the top of this post does the bulk of the work, because the combination of that fat cloud of whipped cream and the puddle of hot, slightly bitter chocolate is something that can really only be experienced, not explained. In addition to a glass-like crust and a rich texture, the crema catalana had a unique spice flavour that I don't think any of us was able to identify.

Amazing stuff.

Granja Viader‎ C/ Xuclà, 4, Barcelona, Spain 933 183 486

View Larger Map

How to make: Khao phat nam liab/ข้าวผัดหนำเลี้ยบ

This is a fantastically simple but tasty dish you can make even if you have access to only the most rudimentary Asian ingredients. One of many Chinese-influenced fried rice dishes available in Thailand, khao phat nam liab revolves around nam liab, Chinese salted olive (Western-style olives are not a substitute), which gives the dish a distinct briny/umami flavour. I suspect that I first encountered the dish at Je Ngor, a Chinese-Thai seafood chain with several branches around Bangkok.

The amounts below are approximate, and like always, you should constantly be tasting the dish as you cook it to arrive at the flavour that your prefer. To my mind, this dish should have an assertively salty flavour that is balanced by the acidic sides.

And as written instructions aren't always enough, here's a video - in Thai only - of the dish being made:

Khao phat nam liab

Lime, 1, diced Ginger, 1 small piece, peeled and diced Fresh chili, to taste, sliced Cilantro, a couple sprigs Roasted cashews, a couple Tbsps

Oil, 2 Tbsp Minced pork, about 1/4 cup Garlic, 2-3 cloves, minced Nam liab (Chinese salted olive), about 4, seeded and chopped Cooked rice, about 2 cups*

White pepper, to taste Sugar, to taste Soy sauce, to taste

Prepare lime, ginger and chili as described above, and set aside along with cilantro and cashews.

In a wok over medium-high heat, heat oil and add pork. Saute until somewhat dry and crumbly, about four or five minutes. Add garlic and salted olive, saute a minute or two longer until ingredients are combined and garlic is no longer raw.

Add rice, stirring to combine all the ingredients and separate the grains. Season with white pepper to taste, sugar, if desired, and soy sauce, if rice isn't salty enough.

Serve with prepared sides as illustrated above.

*As suggested in Thompson's Thai Street Food, I use just cooked rice, still hot from the cooker, and find that it doesn't tend stick to the pan and maintains the right consistency. This contrasts with many other fried rice recipes, which suggest using cooked rice that's been chilled overnight.

Sor Naa Wang/ส.หน้าวัง

Mee phat krachet (หมี่ผัดกระเฉด) is a somewhat obscure dish that combines thin rice noodles, seafood and krachet, a type of crunchy aquatic vegetable. At Sor Naa Wang, a shophouse restaurant near Bangkok's City Hall, the noodles are seasoned with plenty of garlic and fresh chili, and come from the wok with lots of delicious singed bits. The dish is served with a somewhat unusual tart/salty dipping sauce that combines sliced fresh chili, sliced shallots, fish sauce and lotsa lime.

They also do a reputedly tasty sukii haeng that I'm keen to investigate, as well as several other fried noodle dishes, but I've yet to work my way past this one.

Sor Naa Wang 156/2 Th Din Sor, Bangkok 02 622 1525 10am-11.30pm

View Thai Eats in a larger map

Somsong Phochana/สมทรงโภชนา

A while back, I asked fellow Bangkok-based blogger and likewise graduate of the University of Oregon, Sirin, about her favourite places to eat in Bangkok. Without hesitation she mentioned Somsong Phochana, a shophouse restaurant in Bangkok's Banglamphu neighbourhood. I ate there for the first time not long after our chat, and after a few subsequent visits, suspect that Somsong may also be nudging its way onto my own favourites list.

Somsong is actually the name of the current owner's deceased mother, who started the restaurant more than 40 years ago. A native of Sukhothai, she began by selling curries and stir-fries, and later also sold the signature dish of her hometown, kuaytiaw Sukhothai, Sukhothai-style noodles. The dish is still available today:

and appears to be the reason most people visit Somsong. Kuaytiaw Sukhothai combines thin rice noodles, a sweet broth, thinly-sliced long bean, various cuts of pork, and a topping of deep-fried pork rind. The version here also includes - unusually - crunchy squares of salted radish and ground peanuts. But despite the accolades and fans, I found the dish (both the 'dry' and broth versions) overly sweet and one-dimensional, lacking the meatiness and oily richness of the versions I've encountered up in Sukhothai.

Instead, what brings me back to Somsong is the restaurant's excellent central Thai-style curries and spicy stir-fries. In particular, you're safe ordering just about anything that contains the restaurant's look chin plaa kraay, dumplings make from a type of freshwater fish. Tender and pleasantly fishy, they're some of the best I've encountered in Bangkok, and feature in several dishes including Somsong's excellent green curry (pictured at the top of this post). If you've only encountered green curry at Thai restaurants abroad or at places that predominately serve foreigners, you might initially be disappointed, as the curry itself is rather thin and watery and has little of the coconut milk creaminess that I suspect many have come to associate with the dish. Instead, the emphasis is on taste, not texture, and an effort is made towards a balance of sweet and savoury, with tender eggplants providing a slightly bitter kick. The curry above was served over khanom jeen noodles instead of rice, and as with many central Thai dishes that include fish or seafood, also included thin strips of krachaay (a root herb with a camphor-like flavour), which serve to counter any unpleasant fishy flavour.

On a previous visit I had a somewhat more traditional green curry with chicken, accompanied by a spicy stir-fry of frog:

And on my most recent visit there was a tempting kaeng matsaman, but as usual, I went for the green curry.

I've also been told that Somsong does excellent desserts, but I'm usually too full to investigate. For more descriptions of the dishes at Somsong, proceed to Sirin's write-up, here.

Somsong Phochana Soi Wat Sangwet, Bangkok 02 282 0972 9.30am-4pm

View Thai Eats in a larger map

Khao Man Kai Jao Kao/ข้าวมันไก่เจ้าเก่า

The Thai-language food guide Aroijang recently led me to Khao Man Kai Jao Kao, a restaurant in Bangkok's Chinatown known for its khao man kai, Hainanese chicken rice. According to the guide, the restaurant still does the dish the old-fashioned Hainanese way, using fat kai ton (castrated roosters) and cooking the rice over coals. This resulted in rice that was just about perfectly cooked, well seasoned and pleasantly fatty, but the chicken was unremarkable and lacked the tender, velvety texture that defines a truly remarkable version of this dish. Instead of the more common sides of cucumber slices and chicken soup, here the rice and chicken is served with a chunk of blood and garnish of coriander, as well as the usual fermented soy bean dipping sauce, which in addition to the usual ginger and chili, also included coarse chunks of garlic.

Almost certainly more interesting was the restaurant's tom lueat muu:

literally 'boiled pig blood', a soup that, in addition to its namesake, also includes lean slices of pork, crispy pork belly, spleen, stomach and intestine. The meat and offal was extremely tender and flavourful without being too porky. The broth is clear and garlicky and came served with a couple leaves of lettuce and a sprigs of a fresh herb not unlike Italian parsley. You can order the soup with rice noodles or a side of rice, and if you find the offal too overpowering, you can temper it with a spicy/sour dipping sauce that combines crushed fresh chilies and vinegar.

Khao Man Kai Jao Kao 36-42 Th Plaeng Nam, Bangkok 02 623 1200 8am-4.30pm

View Thai Eats in a larger map

From Pratu Chiang Mai to Portland

This previously-mentioned photo panorama taken in Chiang Mai (click here for a larger version):

has now been installed here:

inside Portland, Oregon restaurant, Pok Pok Noi. Has anybody in Portland been by to see it yet?

opposite

Much fine dining in Bangkok is relegated to hotel-based restaurants. This is fine for some people, and several of Bangkok's hotel kitchens are putting out some great food, but for most of us, hotel dining often lacks character and rarely feels like a good value.

Luckily, some clever folks have swooped in to provide us with an intriguing alternative.

Opposite, run by the people who started WTF, is a multi-purpose event space that has embarked on a series of pop-up dining events. Their most recent dinner (pictured above) was my first time experience with the concept, and took the form of a night of Roman cuisine as prepared by Italian chef Paolo Vitaletti. Dishes included Roman-style tripe, borlotti beans with prosciutto skin, deep-fried artichoke, and la porchetta, suckling pig stuffed with pork offal and fennel pollen that was easily the most delicious pork dish I've encountered in a while. There was tasty prosecco and wine, and real bread, flown in from Italy. In addition to enjoying dishes one won't find elsewhere in Bangkok, we were pouring our own wine, scooping second helpings from communal bowls and making friends. It was all a lot like eating at the home of a very talented home cook, and my take-home impression of the meal was that this is how dining should be: informal, communal and tasty. At 2500B (about US$80), it wasn't exactly cheap, but with good food, generous serves and virtually free-flow booze, I can't imagine that anybody would feel that that he didn't get his money's worth.

If this sounds like your thing, stay tuned to opposite's website or Twitter feed (@oppositebangkok) for their next pop-up.

opposite 27/1 Soi 51, Th Sukhumvit, Bangkok 02 662 6330

View Thai Eats in a larger map

Nay Hor Khao Tom/นายฮ้อข้าวต้ม

I'm finally back home and hope to do a couple more Euro posts in the near future, but for now am keen to jump back into the Thai stuff...

Khao tom (ข้าวต้ม) translates as 'boiled rice', but can be refer to a couple different rice-related food concepts. Many Thais associate the term with khao tom kui (ข้าวต้มกุ๊ย), a Chinese-style of dining that involves lots of small dishes, typically eaten with small bowls of watery rice. It can also describe a dish of rice served in broth with seafood. I first encountered the latter years ago at a cozy restaurant in my former neighbourhood in northern Bangkok. I have to admit that I wasn't initially impressed with khao tom - it's pretty bland when compared to just about any other Thai dish. But after subsequent and increasingly frequent visits over several years, I learned to like the dish, and also grew quite fond of the place that served it.

Since having moved downtown, I haven't eaten much khao tom, and with the old place in mind, have had my eye open for a new one. The Thai-language food guide Kin Rob Krung 2 and the English-language Famulous Eateries both recommend Nay Hor, a longstanding restaurant on Th Charoen Krung, so I investigated.

Nay Hor is unabashedly old-school Thai/Chinese (think overabundant florescent lighting and an aged owner/money collector slumped grumpily behind office furniture), and is easy to locate by some immense stuffed fish out front. These are generally both good signs, but I made the mistake of ordering the 'mixed' bowl, which included fish skin, fish eggs and what appeared to be pork intestines - items I don't really care for. Still, I thought the quality of the seafood was pretty good; I particularly enjoyed the oysters, fish and the bateng (cubes of marinated, deep-fried pork). The dipping sauce is, like at other khao tom restaurants, made from fermented soybeans, but here it lacks chili and has been blended, giving it the consistency and appearance of tahini. They also had bags of deep-fried tofu strips, which are great to crumble into to the broth or dip in the bean sauce, but unfortunately they appeared to have been fried long ago.

Would I make it my regular? Ideally not. But given the pricey bowls at Chiang Kii or the traffic nightmare involved in getting to my old place, I may very well be eating there again soon.

Nay Hor Khao Tom Cnr Th Charoen Krung & Th Chan 02 675 2598 6pm-midnight

View Thai Eats in a larger map

Portugal's café culture

I haven't been to France since I was a teenager and have never been to Italy, but I'm willing to wager that the café scenes of both of these countries pale in comparison to that of Portugal. The sheer amount of shops serving a combination of coffee, light snacks and pastries - known in Portuguese as pasterlarias - in Porto and Lisbon was frankly, quite ridiculous. Within a block of Porto's main market alone I can recall at least eight from memory. And not only were these pastelarias everywhere, but the the quality of both the coffee and sweets were quite high and the prices low (a galão - the Portuguese equivalent of a café au lait/latte - and a pastry, my usual breakfast in Portugal, typically cost around €2). I was particularly interested in Portugal's sweet snacks, as they possess quite a few culinary links with Asia. The most obvious example of this are the pasteis de nata, egg tarts, which are now a standard sweet in parts of East Asia. These are unavoidable (and profoundly delicious) in Portugal, and I reckon I had at least one or two every day, sprinkled with cinnamon and consumed with uma bica (espresso).  With a direct link to Southeast Asia are the various egg yolk-based desserts - ovos moles, fios de ovos - believed to have been introduced to Thailand via Portuguese traders during the 16th century. These were somewhat less common, and I mostly encountered them in the way of fillings or toppings for a variety of pastry-based treats and not eaten on their own, as they still are in Thailand.

For a taste of Portugal's café culture, click on the below to see a slide show of random images of pastelarias and sweets I encountered while there.

Tripe eaters

Reverence for food appears to run deep in Portugal. The residents of the northern city of Porto are known as Tripeiros, ‘tripe-eaters’, for their love of the local dish, tripas à modo do Porto, Porto-style tripe. The dish is apparently so important that locals are willing to deface one of their city's most famous landmarks:

in order to advertise that the dish be added to a list of world culinary heritage:

My first experience with tripas was also my first meal in Portugal. Taken at an informal café in the centre of Porto, the dish was served in a way that now strikes me as very Portuguese: on a stainless steel platter or bowl with an abundance of starch, in this case, rice:

The tripe was relatively minimal and instead the dish was dominated by a white beans, with salpicão, a type of salted beef, what appeared to be pork belly and a salty broth that had hints of cumin. The dish cost, if I remember correctly, 3 Euros, and I ate it at the dining counter with a mini-bottle of the house red.

My second experience with the dish was at a restaurant named, appropriately, Restaurant Tripeiro. This was a much more upmarket version of the dish, costing several times as much and being several times larger in volume, but containing roughly the same combination of beans, tripe, salted beef, and in this case, a variety of sliced sausages and a few slices of carrot. It was served in a slightly more upmarket stainless steel container (illustrated at the top of this post), in, as is seemingly the case in all restaurants in Portugal, cheap or expensive, a dining room dominated by a blaring television:

I ate it with a delicious red vinho verde and a dish of olives, and because I feel foolishly obligated to eat as much of my food as possible, I walked around Porto feeling extremely full for the next six hours.

Pedro Dos Frangos

Forgive my lack of blogging, but I’ve been on something of a whirlwind European Tour. Istanbul, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Barcelona; they've all been eye-opening and heaps of fun, and of course, have involved lots of amazing eats. For me, there was nothing more exotic than eating baklava in Istanbul or encountering real tapas for the first time in Barcelona, and I’ll try to post on some of those experiences soon. But to be honest, I’m most excited about eating in my current destination, Portugal, and want to try to blog about it while I'm here.

I’ve fantasized about visiting Portugal for a while now, and since my last trip to Macau, specifically, its food. I’ve been in Porto a couple days now and just as I suspected, the food hasn’t been as sophisticated as Spanish food or as exotic as Turkish, but somehow it feels just right.

Portuguese appears to be a real meat-and-potatoes kind of cuisine, as exemplified by one of my first meals, frango no churrasco, Portuguese-style grilled chicken. The restaurant, Pedro Dos Frangos, was recommended by the nice lady at the tourist information office, and was typical of most of the restaurants I’ve encountered here so far; delightfully old school, mostly masculine and with a buzzing dining counter (the man next to me ate his entire meal - chicken soup, a ginormous slice of pudim molotov and an espresso with a shot of booze - standing up).

I sat at the long stainless steel counter and ordered a half chicken, which was skewered and grilled over coals:

The bird was crispy and well seasoned, although I reckon it could have done with some brining (a must for chicken dishes, I’m now convinced – see here for details). The traditional accompaniment is deep-fried potatoes and the traditional topping is molho de piri-piri, olive oil steeped with dried chilies. It was a pleasure to finally get to sample these dishes on their home turf, particularly since I'd tried making them previously (I'd say we came pretty close). The meal was coupled with a couple glasses of cheap and very drinkable vinho regional, and dessert was chunks of soft, buttery queijo flamengo and marmelade, quince paste:

It was heaps of fun, and I found a lot in common with dining in Thailand: the lack of pretension, friendly restaurateurs, the full-flavouredness and the low prices.

Am looking forward to more meals in this country.

Pedro Dos Frangos Rua do Bonjardim, Porto 222 008 522 Lunch & dinner

View Thai Eats in a larger map

Pa Tong Go/ปาท่องโก๋

Pa Tong Go is a longstanding (open since 1933), open-air place in Bangkok's Banglamphu neighbourhood, a couple blocks away from Khao San Road.

The restaurant serves a pretty predictable repertoire of Chinese-Thai/Bangkok-style dishes, from noodles to rice topped with crispy pork belly (illustrated above). They're OK, but the restaurant's specialty, and the real reason to eat here, is the paa thong ko (ปาท่องโก๋ - the menu calls them "Grilled Chinese Donut") deep-fried bits of dough:

The difference here is after being deep-fried, the paa thong ko are briefly grilled, making them even crispier than freshly deep-fried paa thong ko. The sangkhayaa (they call this "coconut jam") is fragrant and not too sweet, and they also do a savoury version, well as a dish of paa thong ko served with ice cream.

And if you still haven't reached your paa thong ko limit, you're withing walking distance of Paa Thong Ko Sawoey.

Pa Tong Go Cnr Th Phra Sumen & Th Sip Sam Hang Lunch & dinner

View Thai Eats in a larger map