Drunken noodles and other Thai foods

Cafe Society
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I have had Thai food twice in the last two weeks, and loved it. Growing up, I never got to try Thai food since nobody in my family liked it, nor did my friends. I finally have friends who like it and a city with a few decent Thai places, so at least it’s a rare and wonderful treat. Thai restaurants are a lot harder to find than your standard storefront Chinese places, and typically much more expensive. Most of the time they’re a little bit on the pricey side, but I love the stuff, and I want to get some recommendations.

Last week I had this delicious red curry, but it really messed my stomach up. I fare very badly whenever I eat anything with coconut (unfortunate, because I love the stuff). I might not have it again, but it was awesome the one time. I wonder what the differences are between red and green curries.

Tonight I had one of the most delicious dishes I’ve ever had: Drunken noodles, aka pad kee mao. Wonderful flat rice noodles tossed in a spicy sauce with shrimp, scallops, squid, green bell pepper, tomato, garlic, onions, basil leaves, and more. It had a good amount of heat, but not overpowering – I’ve learned I can handle a lot more heat from Mexican food, salsas, jalapeno peppers, and the like than I can from unfamiliar Thai and Indian food, but I did okay tonight. I’ve glanced over a few recipes for this online, but I think I’ll leave it to the professionals for now.

Of course I love pad thai as well, and Thai iced tea goes perfect with every meal. What should I try next?

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Drunken noodles should be overpowering. The name of the dish comes from the idea that you have to drink a lot of beer with it just to tolerate the spiciness.

Thai cuisine has a lot of spicy salads. A salad with the word “yum” in its name has a dressing made from fish sauce, lime juice, sugar and hot chilies. Green papaya salad is made with unripe shredded papaya mixed with things like dried shrimp and chopped peanuts and a spicy dressing. A larb is a salad with ground toasted rice uncooked rice sprinkled on it, which gives and interesting flavor and texture.

Thai hot and sour soup is quite different from Chinese hot and sour. The broth is thinner and is flavored with lemongrass.

Have fun exploring Thai cuisine!

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Big Bad Voodoo Lou writes:

> Thai restaurants are a lot harder to find than your standard storefront Chinese
> places, and typically much more expensive.

Perhaps they are much more expensive than Chinese places where you live, but I don’t think that’s true in general. Thai places aren’t any more expensive than Chinese where I live (as long as the location and “atmosphere” of the restaurant are equal). Are all the Chinese places where you live just take-out places with no seating?

If the Thai food you’re trying is a little too spicy for you, try asking the server if you can have your food a step lower in spiciness. Some places will do that if you ask. Incidentally, my favorite dish is chicken with sweet basil and chili peppers.

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If you like curries but not real hot curries, try Mussaman sometime. It’s a gentle peanuty curry with chunks of potatoes (ideally, not cooked to mush, but still a little crunchy), peanuts, and chicken or shrimp. It’s served with both rice and crunchy noodles, I assume for serving over the rice and topped with the noddles, but I could be doing it all wrong. :wink:

I also love the beef salad which has that “yum” sauce and thin slices of beef with a bunch of veggies. It’s served cold, and cold beef was something I had to wrap my brain around at first, but it’s very, very good.

Don’t forget the appetizers! Treasure bags and khanom jeep are my favorites. Most places have spring rolls, which are good, but one place near here (now closed) had “Summer rolls” as well, which were even better (served with a plum sauce, I believe.)

And Tom Yum soup. Ahhh, nothing better. I loooove Tom Yum soup. And I have been utterly incapable of making a good one at home, despite having all the right ingredients. It’s worth ordering, for me.

I know what I’m having for lunch!

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Drunken noodle = pad khee mao?!!

Halleleujah! I love pad khee mao but don’t find it that often on the menus of ubiquitous Thai restaurants 'round these parts, but I do see Drunken Noodle from time to time. If they really are synonymous, I now have more places to get Pad khee mao. Yay!

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Brief Thai food primer off the top of my head. The absolutely fundamental key ingredients are:

Cilantro
Lemongrass
Chilli
Fish sauce (smells gross on its own but adds tons of subtle authenticity)
Lime juice

Common extras:

Galang galang (a form of ginger)
Crushed nuts (usually cashew and peanut)
Coconut milk
Rice wine
Garlic
Onion
Sugar

Every Thai dish you taste in the west will contain a combination of the key ingredients.

The red and green curries differ on the fact that the vegetable bulk of the curry is made up of different colored chillies, in addition to the other vegetable ingredients.

The bad news for you is that almost every Thai curry you will taste will contain coconut milk: it provides most of the liquid portion of the sauce - “kari” is Malay for “soup” - and Thai curries are most authentically made very runny, with coconut milk.

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Sometimes on the menu they’ll have a curry listed as “jungle style”-I think these are from the northern parts of the country. It’s essentially red or green curry base but they leave out the coconut milk and make it with just broth. It’s quite tasty, though it doesn’t have that velvety-fatty taste of the richer coconut milk curries.

I also like the papaya salad and around here they have Thai BBQ chicken. Not sure if that’s offered where you are (we have our own little mini-Thai Town in Los Angeles). There’s also the thai version of sweet and sour [insert meat], which is usually made with a lot of tomatoes…I used to make it at home pretty well actually. It has fish sauce in it (like most dishes) and is runnier and spicier than Chinese sweet and sour whatever (also I don’t remember thai restaurants ever deep frying the meat).

Panang curry is my absolute favourite but that’s out for you on account of the coconut.

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Ooh yes, panang curry is also my absolute favourite too. I have a pot of the paste in my fridge, together with some fish sauce, and think I know what I’m going to have to eat tonight…

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[QUOTE=Wendell Wagner]
Big Bad Voodoo Lou writes:

> Thai restaurants are a lot harder to find than your standard storefront Chinese
> places, and typically much more expensive.

Perhaps they are much more expensive than Chinese places where you live, but I don’t think that’s true in general. Thai places aren’t any more expensive than Chinese where I live (as long as the location and “atmosphere” of the restaurant are equal). Are all the Chinese places where you live just take-out places with no seating?
[/QUOTE]

Orlando is weird. Everyone says we don’t have any truly GOOD Chinese restaurants, but we have plenty of the ubiquitous take-out places and buffets. I grew up eating take-out and buffet Chinese since my dad loved it, and I admit I just got sick of it over the years. We are lucky to have a Vietnamese neighborhood full of authentic Vietnamese restaurants that kick ass, ranging from super-casual to a little more upscale (but almost always priced cheaper than Thai places). We just don’t have any tiny, cheap Thai places – all of them are sit-down restaurants with nice tablecloths, etc.

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I LOVE Thai food and am happy to live just a couple of miles from a great place.
I love pad woon sen, pad Thai, ba mee, and tom kar koung (sp?) soup the best.
The chicken satay is also lovely.

This is making me hungry.

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It’s too bad you don’t like coconut, because one of my favorite foods is a Thai soup called Tom Kha Kai (sp?) – it’s a coconut broth with chicken and mushrooms. Mmmmm.

It’s not authentic Thai, but in the best tradition of fusion, I encourage you to try to make your own Thai Pizza. Just use that recipe as a starter, and throw in whatever you like – red and green peppers, green onions, lots of cilantro, etc. It’s great!

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[QUOTE=Rodgers01]
It’s too bad you don’t like coconut, because one of my favorite foods is a Thai soup called Tom Kha Kai (sp?) – it’s a coconut broth with chicken and mushrooms. Mmmmm.

[/QUOTE]

I LOVE coconut and anything coconut-flavored, but it turns me inside out – more literal than I wish was true. I don’t fare well with mushrooms or nuts of any kind either. I saw a photo of the Tom Kha Kai on a placemat, and it looked awesome, though.

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Oh. . .Trunk talk Thai. Trunk talk Thai very well.

Some might disagree, but I think Baltimore is a good Thai food town.

Drunken Noodles is definitely one of my faves, and if I haven’t been in a while, that’s what I’ll get. If the menu goes to 3 stars, I’ll ask for 4. I pay for it the next day (belly and anus), but I just love it, and they seem to enjoy seeing me sweaty and smiley as the endorphins are released.

There’s usually some good duck choices on the menu. They typically do nice crispy duck well.

They do whole crispy fish.

The last time I went to a place I like they had veal osso buco but in coconut milk. I wanted to try it, but we were just out for something light.

Lots of nice salads, with chili flakes, sugar, lime dressings. There’s one I like with green papaya. Thai food is always a really nice blending of sweet/tangy/spicy/acidic/fruity. I think it’s excellent cuisine.

Thai places seem like good places to establish yourself. Lots of exploration to do.

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Trunk: Spill. I want to know where your favourite places are. I’ve been making fake-ass panang chicken and pad thai at home.

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[QUOTE=Trunk]
Drunken Noodles is definitely one of my faves, and if I haven’t been in a while, that’s what I’ll get. If the menu goes to 3 stars, I’ll ask for 4. I pay for it the next day (belly and anus), but I just love it, and they seem to enjoy seeing me sweaty and smiley as the endorphins are released.

[/QUOTE]

This place had two stars for spiciness (out of four) for the Drunken Noodles, which is how I was able to handle them okay going down. I wasn’t drinking beer with them, which probably would have made the entire experience more pleasant. On a daring day, I might try for three stars, but wouldn’t dare go for four – I’d worry the heat would overpower the taste of the food and make me too sick to enjoy it. Despite all that, I missed ten minutes of the movie I went to after dinner (Nightmare Before Christmas in 3D) due to an emergency bathroom break. All was well, but even two stars of unfamiliar spices wreaked havoc for me.

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[QUOTE=Big Bad Voodoo Lou]
Orlando is weird.
[/QUOTE]
Come to Seattle. Our Pacific Rim location means an abundance of Asian restaurants of all conceivable varieties, from hole-in-the-wall Thai to gourmet Vietnamese, and vice versa. I don’t know if I could live in any city that didn’t have this embarrassment of culinary riches.

Of course, take any given city, and you’ll find them spoiled by what they have and take for granted due to available resources and geographic proximity. I love Caribbean food, for example, especially Cuban, but it’s almost impossible to find here in Seattle. In the last year, two places that offered it have closed down. To my knowledge, three good options remain.

Compare that to the dozens of Thai places within half an hour of my house, and you see the discrepancy.

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Oh, I hear you on the pad thai. It is impossible for me to master and I’ve been trying for about 10 years now. I’ve officially given up.

I can actually pull out an authentic tom yum soup (but mostly because my parents grow all all those crazy herbs) and a panang curry. But on the later, let me warn you…the only time it tasted “like the restaurant” was when I added a TON of oil and lots of full-fat coconut milk. It’s only after that I realised how bloody fattening it must be at the restaurant. Generally when we eat it at home now we make the jungle curries or cut the coconut milk (and we use light) by well over a half.

If you have a TJ’s nearby…their tuna panang in the little packets is actually really really good. They have a yellow curry as well but my favourite is the panang. I also recently tried the 2 minute pad thai noodles in the little takeout box thingie and those were also really tasty after adding a copious amount of crushed chili garlic rooster sauce, squooshings of lemon and a splash of fish sauce.

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[QUOTE=GingerOfTheNorth]
Trunk: Spill. I want to know where your favourite places are. I’ve been making fake-ass panang chicken and pad thai at home.
[/QUOTE]

Well, most folks seem to think Thai Landing in Mount Vernon is quality, but I think it’s overpriced, and average.

However, Thai Arroy in Federal Hill is delicious. They’ve changed the menu, but they used to have a dish that was E. 18 on the menu. It’s like crispy, bread fried shrimp in a garlicky honey lime sauce sauce that was out standing. You can still get it, but they’ve changed the menu so that you need to pick like a meat, and a sauce, and a style.

Also, last time I went (several months ago), it was BYOB, which saves money.

They have some good duck options, and the drunken noodles are excellent.

However, the place that is always solid is just called “Thai Restaurant” and it’s on Greenmount just north of 33rd street. Not the best 'hood in the city, but you can park in the back if you snake down a couple alleys. They’re nice, and polite. Their curries are excellent. My wife likes the massaman. I bet MHendo has been there. It’s kind of a fave of Hopkin’s folks.

Also, good drunken noodles. Good “pick paw” fried rice. They sometimes have the green papaya salad. They have teh “Thom Gum” (something like that) soup with chicken & mushrooms, and they also have crazy specials all the time.

I got a pumpkin-coconut soup last time I went with big chunks of pumpkin.

Both “Thai Restaurant” and “Thai Arroy” regularly have an Asian contingent eating there, so that’s a good sign, I guess.

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It always makes me happy to hear someone has discovered thai cuisine and loves it.

Here in Chicago it almost seems like we have more Thai places than Chinese. I am sure that’s not the case, but it feels like you can’t go more than two blocks on the northside without seeing a Thai restaurant.

Yeah try a larb salad or nam sod (ground pork, peanuts, ginger). Cucumber salad is a staple for me, refreshing and can help cool down as you eat the spicy dishes. Néua tàet dìaw (like beef jerky that’s fried and served with spicy chile sauce) is fantastic! Sometimes I just order this along with some rice and peanut sauce. That’s comfort food to me.

I am a fan of the Tom Kha Kai soup. IMO, the best here is at Spoon Thai, so wonderfully aromatic! I love lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves!!!

Don’t forget to try some batter fried bananas for dessert!

Also if you are feeling adventurous, ask at your local Thai place if they have another menu with more traditional thai dishes. Some do and reserve them for Thais or other “people in the know”. That’s where you’ll find the more “exotic” dishes.

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Not too adventurous though: when travelling in Thailand I’ve been offered fried bees - and cockroaches.