When I was younger, my grandmother would brave four lanes of Bangkok traffic chaos to buy duck noodle soup. I remember her—an old woman just over five feet—looking left and right midway in the street as motorcycles and pick-up trucks barely miss her. In her hands were rubberband-tied cellophane bags bulging with dark broth. She had to do it: No other duck noodle would have been good enough for her. Such is the devotion that Thais have to what we eat.
This is what one generation passes down to the next: Which grilled chicken near the Thai boxing ring is the real deal, which highway dessert stop in Petchaburi province still makes decent jah mongkhut, a rare crown-shaped confection topped with watermelon seeds and flecks of gold leaf. We employ constellations of tried-and-favored restaurants and food stands to help us figure out where we are. There’s the sense that if we know where good food is, we can never truly lose our bearings—and maybe even ourselves.
But now a New Yorker, I’m often lost when it comes to my native cuisine.
When I first arrived in the U.S. in the mid 80s, Thai restaurants were still a relative rarity outside of Los Angeles, the epicenter of Thai immigration. Near Tampa, Florida, where we lived, my family made do with a couple of places that grew out of the community of Vietnam War vets and their Thai spouses from MacDill Airforce Base. Their decor usually consisted of assorted handicrafts and framed tourism posters, which had the effect of making me feel even more distant from Thailand.
We went to these restaurants on occasion with American friends. Excited by the prospects of sampling exotic dishes from a country they often confused with Taiwan, our friends studied the picture menu and asked detailed questions about the curious dish called pad Thai. When the food came out, we acted as ambassadors for the cuisine: smiling, nodding, and concealing our disappointment. And we kept a happy face for the owners who came out to greet us. We didn’t necessarily blame them—many had never cooked seriously before they came over. They were simply making a living, getting away with what they could because few Americans knew what a green curry was supposed to taste like anyway.
Since then, pad Thai has since entered the common parlance of office workers deliberating lunchtime delivery choices. The Thai government’s Foreign Office estimates that there are now about 5,000 Thai restaurants in the U.S. That’s far fewer than the 40,000 Chinese restaurants across the country, but considering that Chinese restaurants first debuted here in the 1870s while Thai restaurants arrived about 100 years later, they’re not doing too badly.
But many Thai restaurants have learned an unfortunate lesson: that their audiences believe a Thai restaurant is a Thai restaurant is a Thai restaurant. All the impressive breadth and variety of possible dishes in Thailand have largely been reduced to a few found on nearly every menu, mostly Central Thailand food with a few items from the Northern region. The curries are uniformly watered down. The satays dry, stringy and barely marinated. In the depths of these kitchens, I imagine tubes of curry mechanically rotating into position and then squeezed into boiling vats of coconut milk. A robotic arm then dumps in the selected protein choice and a few slices of onion.
I didn’t adjust to eating at one of these places the way I had adjusted to everything else in the States. For many years, I turned my back from Thai food here almost entirely. My recipe folders bulged with torn-off magazine pages detailing how to cook pasta, roast lamb and other Mediterranean foods. When I ate out, I made rounds at French, Spanish, Korean, and Ghanain places; anything but Thai. It was too painful to pick up a spoonful of basil pork and find every bite so weirdly sweet. I had seen the example of Chinese American food and feared the same thing would be happening with Thai food here – dumb it down, sweeten it up, and try to cash in. I was nervous that if I were to eat these strange kinds of Thai dishes enough, I’d forget all about real Thai food, and maybe lose the part of me that remains Thai—lotus-eating in the least satisfying way.
Still, I kept hope alive. Online food blogs and boards are filled with posts promising new spots that serve khao soi as good as so-and-so remembered having eaten in Chiang Mai. I spent years investigating every rumor of the Great Authentic Thai Restaurant, every sighting of dishes you’d never expect to find here, and almost always, nothing was quite close enough.
And yet, one day, eating in an air-conditioned Thai restaurant in midtown Manhattan, I realized something: I wasn’t in a sweltering open-air storefront on Sukhumvit Road, street dogs begging for scraps. My food wasn’t cooked by a family that has perfected and sold this one dish for generations. And that’s the mistake I made: I was chasing after a projected fantasy of great Thai food on American soil.
Any dish I try here is Thai-conceived, but American-born. The curry pastes will be made with food processors not a mortar and pestle. Only certain kinds of meats and parts will be used. There won’t ever be enough fattiness. The spiciness rarely rises above a safe threshold. And there won’t be as much a risk of spectacular food poisoning.
It’s a hard reality to swallow, but I’ve learned to live with it, because being inauthentic is a fact of America. To become American means to have been, at some point, uprooted from an ancestral world and reinvented free-style. I sometimes find myself counting in Thai, but most of my thoughts now bubble out in English. I go back and forth between the Thai way of eating in tandem with fork and spoon and the American way of picking at foods with a lone fork. What love I have for fish sauce equally goes to butter. If I can feel neither wholly Thai nor wholly American, how can I ask the same of a bowl of duck green curry? Now, when I look at a Thai restaurant menu, I don’t fume and think in expletives as much. I just breathe in and out, and let the food be what it can be.
It’s true, now, that demand for authentic Thai has made sure that there are some Thai restaurants that get pretty close to the real deal. But even the less authentic Thai restaurants have come into my good graces. Sure, the pad Thai here usually tastes like a cup of sugar. There will barely be any eggs, and there won’t be the traditional pickled turnips or dried shrimp. More times than not, it’s inexplicably reddish and oily. But it’s pad Thai-American, and it’s oddly comforting. When I eat it, I know where I am.
Photos via snakphotography, euromagic and dasqfamily.
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