Eating in Thailand: Domestic Chain Restaurants

Shady — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 01:06:00 -0700

Thailand has, like any other country, a large variety of restaurants. You have the huge trans-national conglomerates like KFC, McDonalds, and Burger King of course, but you also have some local chains, or country wide chains that you won't find anywhere else. We'll cover the interesting changes the trans-nationals have made at a later date.

We're going to start with my second favorite of the local chains I've tried so far. I've been to this place 3 times since I came here. It's called MK Restaurant. It's Jibs favorite restaurant, and was my favorite until I discovered the restaurant I'm going to talk about below. MK restaurant is essentially chinese style hot pot. If you're not familiar with hot pot, it works like this: you have a hot plate at each table, on top of which is a pot filled with water. When you sit down, you can order from a huge variety of raw items, that you get to put into the hot water to cook. Of course you have sliced beef, pork and chicken, but you also get to choose from such delicious items as shrimp, fish tofu, squid, seasoned fish balls, pork balls, liver, and tripe. You also get some tasty vegetables to add to the mix. Nothing special here (lettuce, etc) with the exception of Morning Glory, which the Thais apparently consider to be a normal vegetable and eat all the time. I was skeptical at first, but it's actually really good. But I digress. So you put all your raw ingredients into the pot and wait for them to cook. You also get a brown sauce that is similar to hoisin sauce. You also get a small bowl of chopped chili and garlic that you can add to the sauce to adjust the taste to your liking. When everything is done cooking, you fish it out, put it into your bowl with some of the water that everything has been cooking in, as as much of the sauce as you want for flavor, and enjoy. It's tasty, healthy and surprisingly filling.

Although the focus of the MK Restaurant experience is the Hot Pot, they also have a nice selection of dim sum, and pre-cooked appetizers that you can munch on while waiting for your soup to finish. These appetizers come with signature green noodles. They're just regular old rice noodles, that have been turned green via food coloring. It's a strange gimmick and unnerving when you first try them, but they taste like plain old noodles. Another interesting gimmick is the receipt you get from MK contains a list of the nutrients your meal contained, and the percentage of your RDA that those nutrients made up.

Next up on the Thai chain restaurant list is my personal favorite: Bar B Q Plaza. Originally, MK was my favorite. I was only lured into trying BBQ plaza by on of their advertisments on TV. I like to think of myself as not the type who is swayed by advertising (don't we all), but this particular ad was just too good for me to not want to try the place out. The concept is similar to MK (communal cooking) the execution is different. Instead of a hot pot type cooking method (i.e. boiling) BBQ Plaza uses a thai style grill on top of the hot plate. For the details about thai barbecuing and the style of their grill, check out the pictures in the gallery here. You can also see a short video here. Essentially you have a hot metal cooking surface at the top, and around the sides you pour in water to catch the drippings and flavor of whatever you're grilling. You eat this soup along with the grilled items and fried or white rice.

Although you can order individual a la carté items such as ham, bacon, and squid, like at MK, the main focus is combination dishes. You pick a selection of dishes with names like beef economy pack and ultimate family pack, each of which contains slices of either a single type of meat (beef family pack) or a selection of multiple different kinds of meat (ultimate family pack). The ultimate family pack, for example, comes with beef, ham, bacon, sliced pork, chicken, squid, shrimp, narutomaki (japanese style spiral fish cakes), udon noodles, cabbage, baby corn and carrots. You dump the veggies in the water at the sides of the grill, slap the various meats at the top to cook, and wait. The end result is simlar to MK restaurant but you get the added flavor that comes from grilling the meat. After the first or second round of grilling, you have a nice brown crust on the top of the grill, that you can deglaze with the water to add incredible flavor to the soup at the sides.

Yum Saap (no website, sadly) is a restaurant that I think could only ever be created in south east Asia. That's not to say that it couldn't do well in, say, Hawaii or California, but the overall taste and menu items are geared specifically towards this geographic region. The focus of Yum Saap is the Thai style papaya salad, and its ilk: beef salad, pork salad, etc. The salads served at Yam Saap are quite spicy, in the tradition of a lot of Thai food. It's very good, if you're used to that sort of thing, but even the Thai people I ate with commented on how the papaya salad was "ped mak mak" (really spicy). Of course, simple papaya and other type of salads are not the only items available at Yum Saap. They have the usual variety of a al carté items available, but even these are geared more towards veggies and present a seemingly healthier option for consumers of fast food.

My Fellow Americans...

Shady — Sun, 27 May 2007 20:33:00 -0700

We have been royally gypped when it comes to chip flavors. In Thailand, the Lays company makes some of the most astounding flavors of potato chip possible. These include, but as far as I can tell may not be limited to:

Nori Seaweed
Spicy Seafood
Seafood Mayonnaise
Barbecue Sparerib
Bacon and Cheese
Cheese and Onion
Sweet Basil
Thai Chili Paste
Korean Pork Bulgogi

Okay, so, the first two I can understand not bringing stateside. But cheese and bacon? I mean, is there anything that americans love more then that combination? Maybe guns? I dunno.

We'll start with the flavors that don't disappoint:
Bacon and cheese tastes like, well, bacon. And cheese. Delicious, and nutritious. Well, at least as nutritious as bacon and cheese flavored potato chips are capable of being. The barbecue sparerib flavor is not, as I initially reckoned, the same as the barbecue flavor we have in the U.S. You can actually taste a hint of meat and barbecue in the chips, thus making them actually worthy of the name. The nori seaweed flavor (which I am eating as I write this) taste like a regular potato chip, with a hint of seaweed. Obvious, one might say. However, these chips are the pinnacle of seaweed-as-snack. I've tried the plain old seaweed strips, and they're okay but a bit over powering. Seaweed crackers are nice, but lack some of the punch of seaweed flavor. These chips strike the perfect balance. Seaweed flavor, and potato chip. In harmony. I wonder if I can ship these stateside in bulk...

Now, on to the flavors that, while delicious, really don't live up to their full potential:
Korean Pork Bulgogi tastes nothing like real bulgogi. It pretty much tastes like barbecue, with a hint of a spicy aftertaste. The same can be said of the Sweet Basil flavor; simply replace spicy aftertaste, with sweet aftertaste. Spicy seafood is an odd one. It's definitely different then the sweet basil and bulgogi flavors, but it's still not much different then a standard barbecue chip. Shrimp crackers taste more like seafood then spicy seafood chips do. They're not even particularly spicy.

I haven't had the chance to try the thai chili paste or seafood mayonnaise flavors yet, but I will be sure to record my observations on them for posterity.

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Eating in Thailand: Domestic Chain Restaurants

My Fellow Americans...