I’m on vacation in the US until the middle of September.  Restaurant reviews will pick up again after that.

Thanks and see you later!

Sukonta, down a driveway off of Huay Kaew road, near Central, is the biggest restaurant I’ve ever seen.  This empty warehouse building, without walls, is filled with unmatched tables and chairs which suggest that it’s been expanded several times.  Late Saturday night when we arrived, a single man played his acoustic guitar on the lighted stage and entertained diners when they looked up from stuffing meat into a boiling hot-pot or, later, into their mouths.

Sukonta is four times bigger than these pictures look:

Also I think you can buy car stereos there:

Each table has an aluminum pan sitting on a dish of smoldering coals in the center.  The pot has a dip around the edge filled with boiling broth, and the middle of the pan is raised and perforated so that you can choose between boiling or grilling your food.  For 139 baht, you (and everyone else in the barn circle) hover around huge tables filled with pounds of raw strips of meat, seafood, raw vegetables, and a huge variety of processed meat and fish balls (crab sticks? sausages shaped like pandas?  both.).  If you’ve got something other than boiled meat in mind, there’s a steam tray full of Chinese filled buns and Thai and Western desserts — and ice cream.  Everyone at our table quickly grabbed a plateful of shrimp and started cooking.

Warming up the hot pot

Piles of food

To be honest, it’s loud and a little gross inside this place.  The meat tasted old by the time we got there (around 9.30) and there were no cakes left.  But it’s worth going just because it’s amazing to see that many people being fed at one time.  With a couple of hours to kill, a few rounds of beer, and a lot of friends with empty stomachs, Sukonta could be a great evening.

These piles of shrimp shells are nothing compared to the piles on other people's tables

]]> http://howisthetaste.wordpress.com/2010/07/18/sukonta-giant-barbeque-barn/feed/ 1 howisthetaste IMG_0505 IMG_0509 IMG_0510 IMG_0507 IMG_0512 IMG_0514 IMG_0515 http://howisthetaste.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/pun-pun/ http://howisthetaste.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/pun-pun/#comments Wed, 14 Jul 2010 01:00:25 +0000 howisthetaste http://howisthetaste.wordpress.com/?p=417 ]]> I’d heard about Pun Pun, behind the Monk Chat building in Wat Suan Dok, for months before I actually went there.  It was only open for lunch, kindof far from where I lived, just too much trouble… if you’ve thought the same thing, get over it and go to Pun Pun for lunch today.  Pun Pun is small, with about eight outdoor tables and a lot of monks.

Pun Pun Vegetarian Restaurant is part of the Pun Pun Centre for Self Reliance which their website explains is “a small organic farm, seed-saving center, and sustainable living and learning center” (http://www.punpunthailand.org).  If you’re interested in vegetarian cooking, sustainable agriculture, meditation, and conscious living, check out their website for their Chiang Mai projects.  Pun Pun restaurant does not necessarily serve produce from their organic farm outside of Chiang Mai, but they do buy and serve heirloom varieties of organic vegetables from around the region.

Massaman curry with brown rice and ginger-cinnamon tea

More importantly for your lunchtime concerns — their food is delicious and their prices are low.  They serve a wide variety of Thai and Asian noodles, fried-rice dishes, and curries, along with Western-style fresh salads and interesting blends of teas and juices, from 30-55 baht.  I haven’t found this quality at this price anywhere in Chiang Mai.

One disclaimer — Thai food never tastes exactly the same if it is vegetarian, and while the flavors at Pun Pun are well-balanced, you can’t replicate the flavor of shrimp paste or fish sauce in curries and fried dishes.  Losing the meat flavors, though, makes Thai vegetarian food taste lighter, fresher, and often less greasy.  Most dishes substitute tofu and several varieties of tofu for the meat components.

The fried spring rolls, with a single kaffir lime leaf visible through the crisp fried wrapper, are a stand-out dish and it seems like every table orders them.  They also run out early.  In fact, show up around 11am if you want to pick from their entire menu, as a lot of food runs out after the lunch rush.

There’s a lot going on at the Thai Freedom House (http://thaifreedomhouse.org/).  Their website has information about their educational programs, but only walking around the Free Bird Cafe you can find volunteer opportunities, a laundry service, old clothes, new jewelery, and spa products for sale, along with some of Chiang Mai’s very limited supply of vegan cheese:

The Free Bird Cafe, in a small and crowded garden on Moon Muang soi 7, benefits the Thai Freedom House with their coffee and breakfasts along with Western, Thai, and Burmese vegetarian food.  Prices are not cheap (around 50baht for Thai/Burmese food) and 80+ for Western food like bruschetta and hummus, but coffee is a good value and quality is high.  I had a spinach and cream cheese quiche (80 baht):

The texture of this quiche was more like a soufflé, but the crust was crunchy and tasted homemade.  I tasted far more spinach than cheese, (and more nutmeg than anything else), but it was a satisfying lunch.  A little pricey for me to eat there often, but the decorations and the food felt like I’d been invited to a friend’s house.

I think we would never have found Hmwe, down a Suthep Road Soi and then an alley, without a tip-off from a Burmese friend.  The first time we showed up the mostly-Burmese staff and customers were surprised to see the sudden group of six farang.  Luckily the menu was in English as well as Burmese and Thai.

I’d only had Burmese food once before, at a small place on Nimanheiman, and after eating at Hmwe I’m impressed with both Burmese food and Hmwe in particular.  From my limited knowledge, Burmese food seems to be prepared a lot like Thai food, but with more astringent herbs and vegetables.  Compared to Thai food the seasoning is not as strong and the curries not as spicy, which lets the flavors of the ingredients come through more cleanly.

Hmwe serves average portions for around 30-40baht for a salad or curry — some meats and fish cost more like 60-70 baht.  Beer is cheap and a group of us always orders a table full of food and walks out paying less than we think we should.

The photo at the top of the page is Green Tea Leaf Salad — (since the lights are low, all of the food looks more orange than usual).  Made of boiled green tea leaves, fresh shallots and chilies, and roasted peanuts, this salad is chewy and crunchy with a lime juice and fish sauce tang.  The flavor is strong enough to enjoy on its own, and the tannins from the tea leaves make it a good palate-cleanser between richer dishes like:

Fried fish with garlic and a pork and pumpkin curry.  The fish (dunno what kind) is covered in slivers of deep-fried shallots with a lime-chili dipping sauce.  The curry is think, with tender and fatty chunks of pork mixed with pumpkin that, with the low light, was hard to distinguish by appearance from the pork.  The curry is sweet and mildly spiced.

Every time we go we run out of this:

Samosa Salad is exactly what it sounds like.  Flaky deep-fried pastries filled with curried potato, chopped up and tossed with peanuts and fresh herbs, in a dressing that’s tart with lime and a bit of nose-curling raw fish sauce.  The flavors are not particularly balanced, which makes this salty-sour-crunchy salad hard to stop eating.  In a group, we’ll usually need to order two or three plates of this.

Fried Cauliflower.  Not the most exciting dish, but the cauliflower is tender without being overcooked, with an eggy sauce.   They did not have the Sweet and Sour Cucumber this time, but that is a perfect homemade pickle of cucumber and peppers.

This is the most exciting dish:

Pan-fried dumplings, only available stuffed with pork and green onion.   The dumplings do taste a little frozen, but after mixing up your own sauce from the supplied soy sauce, black vinegar, pepper flakes, and sesame oil, it really doesn’t matter if they are not totally fresh.  (I could also be wrong about the freezing, because their shapes are too irregular to be machine-made).  The wrapper is tender, the green onions add vibrancy and crunch to the pork filling, and the bottoms are crisped up from a quick oil-frying.  One portion of 12 is a light one-person serving.

Next month this restaurant will move to the nearby Chiang Mai Lodge.

Don't be fooled by the grill and the lame sign ...

... because it looks like this inside.

From the “Northern Specialties” menu, we ordered the Burmese-style curry and the Fried Coconut Flower with Beef and Chilies.  The menu was heavy on the frog but the prices were not rustic, starting around 70 baht and going to 100+ baht.  We were really hungry so there is only this one picture:

The overall flavor of the Burmese-style pork curry on the right was sweet and slightly hot, with a bright note from the strips of galangal floating in the broth.  Though cooked in Burmese-style, Geang Hanglay is a traditional dish in Northern Thailand, especially for celebrations.  The two-inch cubes of pork were completely infused with the flavor of the curry — it was still chewy but tender enough, with a strong taste of lemongrass throughout the meat.  The chunks of meat were about 50% fat, which I don’t personally like (literally, 2-inch cubes of only fat), but which is certainly authentic.  Boiled peanuts floated at the top, coated in red peppery oil.

I’m not sure what a coconut flower is, or where it showed up in this dish, but the Fried Coconut Flower with Beef and Chilies was a great texture and flavor balance to the curry.  Crunchy crinkle-cut chunks of coconut meat stir-fried with chewy beef, in a thin, salty sauce from the pan.  Strips of kaffir lime leaves lightened the flavor, which might otherwise have tasted a little too musty from the gamey beef.

English/Thai menu, medium-range prices, and fresh, interesting food.  Tong is a good choice for a fancier meal and the chance to taste something a little different.

The panda is an easy way to recognize this restaurant

The menu is in Thai and English, so Huan Phen’s food is accessible if you don’t speak Thai.  If you don’t know what to expect from Northern Thai food, begin by guessing that it will be less spicy and have much less coconut.  Overall, what we ordered at Huan Phen was rich, meaty, and a little bland — tasty, but very different from the food at most Thai restaurants.  Dishes 30-60 baht.

This dish, called “Northern-Style curry sauce with kao ngew” was a thin pork curry with congealed blood, pickled vegetables on the side.    Satisfying as a soup and a sauce for dipping sticky rice, with red oil floating on the top.  Not spicy, with a taste and texture that reminded me a little of Hungarian goulash or a thin beef stew.  45 baht.

This “fried dried pork” was overall my least favorite dish.  Though my first impression was that the meat tasted a little putrid, that impression had gone away by the second bite.  Dried, slightly salty, pork-jerky.  Not exciting but probably good to much on with beer.  50 baht.

The Northern-Style Minced Pork with Red Chili Paste was my favorite dish, and I will probably come back to Huan Phen to eat this again.  Tender pork stewed with cherry tomatoes and spices, satisfying with the steamed vegetables or sticky rice.  It did, though, closely resemble an excellent, very thick, pasta sauce, and my friend observed “You could just put this on pasta, no questions asked.  Maybe leave out the fish sauce.” 30 baht.

So overall: food at Huan Phen is not your average Thai food, and it’s quite tasty.  The few dishes that we ordered were surprisingly similar to familiar Western foods.  This was strange to me, but the place was packed with Thais grabbing a quick lunch alone or an extended meal with the entire family.  Check out Huan Phen if you want to try a different, but authentic, kind of Thai food.

*Totally unsubstantiated rumor has it that Huan Phen turns on the a/c, raises prices, and dumbs-down the food at night, when it fills up with tourists — though, as I’ve just discussed, I’m not sure what they would change about the food to make it better suit Western tastes.  Anyway, if you don’t want to risk it, go at lunchtime.

Stuck at the bus station?  Eat some duck noodles!

After a defining duck-eating experience with Beijing duck in Beijing, I now order duck everywhere I see it.  Clearly not every duck can be a Beijing duck, with tender gamey meat and wafer-like skin that crunches into a rich fat that coats your lips and tongue.  Even knowing not to expect a perfect duck, though, I am usually disappointed.  When duck is bad, the meat is impossible to chew, without much flavor and a little oily, with a thick layer of cold fat underneath its red skin.

I was not disappointed by the duck noodles from this restaurant, near the Arcade Bus Station and Prince Royal’s College:

They also sell food that is not duck-based.

This is a medium-sized Thai/Chinese restaurant, and it sells every kind of noodle soup, stir-fried dish, and curry over rice, along with some very tasty, sugary juices.  Most dishes are 25-45 baht.  I haven’t tasted any of those, though, because I have only ordered these:

Duck noodles

Compared to the average dish of streetside roasted duck noodles (ก๋วยเตี๋ยวเป็ด), this duck is more tender and the skin even has a little bit of crispness.  The fresh wheat noodles are soaked with duck oil and a sweet brown sauce, with a few boiled greens.  I like the noodles dry rather than in a soup, as the sauces keep a stronger flavor and the skin doesn’t get soaked.  The fresh green onions balance out the oil, and MSG visibly sprinkled on these noodles must also help.  An average-sized bowl is 40baht.

Note- I always want to go to sleep after eating these noodles.  Maybe it’s all of the oil, I’m not sure, but keep this side-effect in mind.

Honestly, if you have not been in Thailand very long, or have not eaten a lot of Thai food, you will probably not like this.  Green mango and sweet fish sauce, น้ำปลาหวาน, mixes a lot of things that make foreigners say “ick,” or at least that confuse them.  Green mangos are sour enough to pucker your mouth and are fairly unpalatable alone, and the sauce is pounded out of fish sauce, dried shrimp, fresh shallots, chili peppers, and, mysteriously, palm sugar.  It’s salty and fishy-tasting, hot, sweet and very sticky.  The first time I ate it, I thought it was revolting, like rotted fish candy.  After I was force-fed it a few times, though, I couldn’t get enough of it — the flavors are all so strong that they don’t exactly balance each other, instead you taste them each separately in a sequence of salty and fishy, sweet, the clean mango sourness, and a growing chili heat, rounded off by crunchy, slightly insectile, dried shrimp.  This is the only food in which I’ve actually found the chili burn a little addictive, and I can go through a bag of it alone very quickly, sweating the entire time.

You can find this at stands selling chopped green mango and a bag full of different kinds of fish-based dipping sauce (think the sweet sauce is easy?  Try the one made from shrimp paste) for around 15-20 baht.  Sweet fish sauce is also available in jars from every supermarket and 7-11.