You need to watch Netflix's Chef's Table, specifically the episode about Bo Songvisava and her restaurant Bo.lan. It's really interesting. She said that before she started Bo.lan, no Thai people who went out for dinner ate at Thai restaurants because there weren't really any high-quality Thai restaurants. Thai food was considered cheap street food or stuff you made at home. If you go out for dinner, you go to a nice classy western restaurant or something like that. So apparently, she was working at a western restaurant and wanted to learn how to make Thai food, but nobody could teach her because everyone had forgotten how to make it. All the pastes and whatnot were made in factories at the time. She actually had to travel all the way to the UK to learn how to make Thai food in a high-class Thai restaurant (David Thompson's Nahm). Then she eventually made her way back to Thailand and opened up Bo.lan, making everything the traditional way from scratch with natural fresh ingredients.

When you see the episode, it's really astonishing. I never would have considered the idea that a professional chef would not be able to find anyone knowledgable about one's own ethnic cuisine in one own's country and would have to travel around the world to learn about one's own ethnic cuisine. REALLY interesting.

That's because 98% of Thai restaurants in Thailand are not artisanal like Japanese or Italian. Most Thai restaurants there are family style, mass-produced ones. There is no even a formal recipe for a Thai dish. The most popular ones among people are more like taverns than classy restaurants, which are common elsewhere in the world.

The upper class citizens would find Western or Japanese food palatable so the market for really well made Thai food is limited. Because Nahm is owned by a westerner, who really dedicates himself perfecting the traditional Thai recipes (rumors say he went to study the old Thai recipes transcripted on leaf scrolls) is phenomenal. Only the elites of the society would be able to afford to eat there. It was possible for a guy of that profile, but would be really hard for a lay Thai person to have a business like that. To most Thai people, catering to students and the teenagers have proven far more profitable.

These are all good points. But it's still astonishing to me that she could not find someone INSIDE of Thailand who knew or studied the old Thai recipes. I would have figured there would be SOMEONE. Nobody could recommend anybody to her who would have been able to help her. Mind you, I have no idea how big her social and professional network was at the time, only that she went around asking Thai chefs and found nobody.

It's really nobody. That's the sad part. Also, like most Asian cultures, some recipes are kept secret and only passed down in the family, if ever at all. Knowledge like this is a competitive advantage, sometimes even in the same family.

I'm a big fan of David Thompson, but one difference between western food and Thai (and Southeast Asian) food is that western food is more technique based whereas Thai food is more skill based.

A traditional se asian kitchen is a wok and a rice cooker. Most thai dishes use a small number of techniques (curry pastes, deep frying, etc), but there is much skill in what ingredients the cook uses and what proportions. Change a few variables and you have yourself a whole new dish.

Western cooking delights in dishes that are technically unique, for example the dish ravioli refers not to any particular ingredient but to a technique. In this case, recipes are supremely important for preserving dishes.

For Thai food it is hard to reduce the skill and judgement of a cook down to a recipe.

I grew up in SEA and I have dishes that were only shown to me. Not that we still care about secrets or even have any. But that’s what was done so that’s how I learned it. My attempts at writing these down all failed. Never quite right.

I wonder if telling the story of the recipe, both it’s context, your account of learning it be it as it may, and a description of the experience of preparing the dish itself may be more efficient than writing the recipe down as a series of facts? What do you think?

Really fascinating point that I’ll admit I think is very valuable beyond just the realm of cooking.

I wouldn’t say so. I learned these by watching it get made and helping countless times. There’s nothing hard about them. They could be recipes if a more skilled cook was involved.

To be honest it doesn't really strike me as that surprising. It's a facet of cultural imperialism from prosperous nations protruding into the social strata of the less developed. We all want to try this fancy and exotic brick oven pizza because back home everyone's mom knows how to make Pho. "It's not world class, but why would you want that anyway?" is probably a common thought.

Your thought kind of ignores the common case when there may be two classes of food within one society. I once asked a friend to find out from his Japanese coworkers the best place in Tokyo to go to a fancy place for more high end versions of my favorites curry and gyudon. They were a bit baffled, the reason is that these are the "boring" baloney sandwiches everyone makes at home. It is not the focus of chefs who make fancy restaurants.

Speaking of baloney, I was raised on fried baloney sandwiches on Scwables and have never seen those....must be cultural imperialism? Naw. It's not the most compelling example mainly just because US home recipes are dead simple and Pho seems less so. But home food and restaurant suited food are still different.

If you're interested in some of the better Japanese curry and other such b-grade gourmet types, feel free to dm me. That particular type of food has been one of my favourites for some time. Not so much on the high end though.

Bo.lan closed a few months ago due to covid, real shame because it was phenomenal food, used to walk there a couple times a month.

I'm from the US and I'm living in Bangkok right now and I'd say... It depends how much you spend. If you compare "average" Thai food in California and "average" Thai food in Thailand you would be paying 10x more in California.

I can go get a Pad Thai at the shopping mall food court next to me for $1 and it tastes alright but the $12 Pad Thai in the US is likely going to taste better (but not guaranteed).

If I go to a fancy restaurant here and spend $12 on a Pad Thai it's going to be much better than what you get in the US (at that price here you'd likely get a few large prawns and a very generous portion of fresh noodles)

I regularly eat street food here for under $2 that I vastly prefer to any Thai food I had in America (and I had a lot)

There is also just a lot of food that is easy to get here that is hard to find in lots of places in the US. Like soft shell crab - I eat it regularly here and get a generous serving of crab but in the US it's hard to find and it expensive and in very small portions

The Thai food you get in Thailand is very different from what you get in most American Thai restaurants. Think much stronger fish smells and a lot of parts of animals Americans don't eat.

in my experience (going back to ~1998), the best thai food is in thailand, though you can get comparably good thai food in cali (sapp and jitlada in LA!). when i visited thailand, most thai food was sold on the street and out of 'garages', with seating that straddled inside and the sidewalk. sit-down restaurants were relatively rare and mostly catered to westerners and rich asians (the food generally wasn't any better, but it was pricier). ingredients in thailand were super-fresh (especially the veges and fruit), so i can't see how that's a real advantage of american thai food.

The owner and head chef of one of Sydney’s best Thai restaurants told me the same thing.

Same here in South Africa. Thai food tastes better here than in Thailand.

the one thing i've never been able to find in california is a roasted duck in red curry as good as the one i had in bangkok. not sure what the difference is, but the one in bangkok was seriously one of the best thai curries i've ever had and the local versions are just okay, even in restaurants that make other things really well.

Did you mean this https://youtu.be/WrJs0pZtKBU ?

It's a quite effortful dish to make. Ducks here are not easy to find and not fresh, usually frozen. After defrosting, they will have to properly roast it while in Thailand, you can source good roasted ducks from somewhere else. I also suspect that they use canned red curry instead of making it themselves.

If you have some expat Thai friends, they would sometimes make it. Befriend these people! Some good food would drop from time to time.

yes, that one! i even tried making it myself a couple of times (from bottled curry paste) but as you say it's quite an effort and i wasn't really satisfied with the results. i'll have to try making the curry paste from scratch at least once and see how it goes.