Text 17605, 93 rader
Skriven 2014-10-02 10:26:00 av NANCY BACKUS (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av MICHAEL LOO
Ärende: Re: nationality 20
==========================
-=> Quoting Michael Loo to Nancy Backus on 09-30-14  07:10 <=-

 NB>>> recent case in point was a Thai restaurant in Potsdam (NY) that my
 NB>>> son had found...
 ML>> Were there Thai cooking in the back or just well-trained
 ML>> Farang? 
 NB>> Possibly just the latter...  I didn't see any evidence of Thai, what I
 NB>> saw of the cook staff seemed to be black (not all that common in the
 NB>> area, either) or white.  Certainly no Asian in front...  

 ML> Out here most of the cooks are Central Americans, mostly
 ML> Salvadoran. 

And where might "out here" be...?
 
 ML> I've no major quibble with that, as some of
 ML> them cook better than I do, and anyhow my own most
 ML> comfortable styles are French and Italian, not Chinese
 ML> at all. And anyone with a few years' experience cooking
 ML> and a copy of Jennifer Brennan's Thai cookbook can do as
 ML> well as one needs to.

As long as what one fixes is close enough, and tasty, that's probably
sufficient, especially for home cooking...  ;)  And if one truly has
mastered the cuisine, it doesn't matter who cooks it for the
restaurant...  :)   But I do expect that what I get there would teach
what it should be, as opposed to what I'm likely to fix at home.. ;)

 ML>> Some of the best Thai food I've had in the US has
 ML>> been at my friend Carl and Ellen's tenant Chuckie's place
 ML>> in arid godforsaken nowhere Arizona, but then Chuckie and
 ML>> his wife are Issan Thai. The restaurant gets wildly
 ML>> variable reviews on the Web, partially because the food
 ML>> doesn't pull any punches.
 NB>> So people expecting the unauthentic dumbed-down Thai would pan it,
 NB>> while those who knew good Thai would praise it, I'd guess...  :)  
 ML> And it's hard to come upon authentic Thai, partly or largely
 ML> because of different styles of eating. Asians eat a greater
 ML> proportion of rice (or other starch) to flavoring, so an
 ML> Asian meal would have near a pint of rice and maybe half a
 ML> cup to a cup of main dish - so that will have to be relatively
 ML> overseasoned to deal with all that white stuff. The first time

Our favorite local Thai place, we've learned to ask for extra rice...
they beam upon us, as having understood the cuisine... of course we also
ask for the spice not to be dumbed down...  (G)  Leftovers go home,
often with a bit more rice to soak up the yummy sauces. 

 ML> I had real real Thai food was somewhere in the hinterlands of
 ML> the US, cooked by new immigrants who hadn't learned to cook to
 ML> American standards. There were impossible quantities of galanga,
 ML> lemongrass, basil, and coriander root and relatively small
 ML> amounts of meat and coconut. It took me a while to get used to
 ML> that kind of cooking. In Thailand the food tasted much more
 ML> like that than like the sweet, delicious coconut-rich stuff we
 ML> get here.

One thinks of the differences in, say, pizza... between American and
Italian versions...  ;)
 
 NB>>> I'll grant you that...  But we've also usually had our worst humdinger
 NB>>> experiences where the cook didn't match the cuisine... and either
 NB>>> didn't have a good recipe, or couldn't follow it worth beans...  ;)
 ML>> Cooking isn't rocket science, but it is science.
 NB>> With a healthy dump of sense and sensiblitity...  ;)
 ML> There is still some overlap between science and art.

And that often makes the difference.   :)

 NB>> The list is lengthening...  ;)   Don't know if you caught it in my
 NB>> message to CT Ruth, but there won't be a repeat visit to Blue Water
 NB>> (the steak place), since they've already gone under...
 ML> They shouldn't have opened without a booze licence, or at
 ML> least they shouldn't have put up the advertising for stuff
 ML> they weren't able to offer. And the decor just didn't work.

The first is impossible... there's some sort of reg here that one has to
open for business in order to apply... Fu's run into that one, too... he
decided to only go for wine and beer, since it's more problematic to get
the full booze...  So far he's still waiting... but he doesn't raise
expectations by advertising the stuff in the window...  ;)  I'll agree
with you on the decor for Blue Water....  I suspect that another factor
might have been what you remarked upon, with the quantity of food and
options for the cost, not being maintainable...  :)   As we never got
back there, I can't report on whether that had changed over time...

ttyl         neb

... Been there, done that, tripped alarm, came here.

___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.20
--- Platinum Xpress/Win/WINServer v3.0pr5
 * Origin: Check Out Doc's QWK Mail  Via Web BBS > DocsPlace.org  (1:123/140)