I was in Thailand on a short stop en route to Hanoi a few years ago, and none of the ATMs accepted my debit card. So to pay for my hotel, I had to make a late-night run to Lonely Planet central, Khao San Road, to find a currency exchange office that would accept traveler's checks.
Garrett Mukai
Plate of pleasantness at Jamjuree.
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Khao San Road was terrifying—overtanned Europeans leaned out the hostel windows overhead, and the streets were hip to hip with tchotchke sellers and sweating, staggering drunks in drawstring pants. After arguing for 10 minutes with the exchange-window teller who thought my two signatures didn't look enough alike, I spied a pad thai stall across the street. At last, compensation for my troubles: pad thai off the street! But my styrofoam plate came mounded with oily, dark brown, slightly garlicky, broken noodles. It was as wretched as my surroundings.
Many of us—including me, for the first few decades of my life—think of pad thai as the country's national dish, when it's really an import. "I don't really know how pad thai became the most famous of Thai foods in America," writes cooking teacher Kasma Loha-unchit on her Web site, thaifoodandtravel.com. "I always find it amusing when restaurant reviewers judge the quality of a Thai restaurant by the quality of its pad thai, as noodles can hardly take claim as lying at the heart of my country's cuisine." In fact, she credits the ethnic Chinese with bringing rice noodles to Thailand in the 20th century, and the national government for popularizing them in the poverty-stricken 1940s and 1950s. Loha-unchit argues that the name, which means "Thai-style noodles," is proof that the dish is as traditional as "American chop suey" is authentically Chinese.
I first encountered the dish in junior high. My family and I drove from small-town Indiana to Chicago to pick up the son of a family friend. At 8, Christian was the most urbane kid I knew—he listened to classical music, he lived part-time in a Hyde Park condo with two dads, and his favorite cuisine was Thai. So with Christian directing us, we ate at this tiny restaurant near the U. of Chicago campus, where the red and green curries we ordered came in two-cup pots. The thrill that hit me when their lids were removed—the fragrance of the lemongrass and kaffir-lime leaf, the shock of the piece of galangal I bit into, the chiles hot enough to make me weep sweatily—still hasn't dissipated, 20-some years on. The third dish we were served was pad thai. Sweet noodles with peanuts? Hated it.
By the early 1990s, when every other meal out with friends involved peanut sauce and prik king, I grew fond of pad thai—for the quiet sweetness it offered between bites of chile and garlic, the comfort of the scrambled eggs, the clean crunch of the bean sprouts. Not that I told anyone whose opinions I valued, of course. Pad thai was something to pick up on my way home from the office, or drunk food that I'd publicly spike with lots of toasted chile flakes, as though using yeah-brahs and fist pumps to create an ironic detachment from my love for the dish's sweet simplicity.
Love fades, of course, doomed by too many encounters with oversugared, sticky rice noodles. I've probably eaten pad thai only a few times over the past five years, passing it over in favor of larbs and spicy tom sums, jungle curries and even pad see iew.
Love fades, but pad thai endures. The dish remains extremely popular—and a perennial subject of argument among urban diners around the country over whose is the best. A few weeks ago—on a whim, actually—I thought I'd see about getting a good plate of pad thai. I looked over the blogs and discussion forums and Googled "best pad thai" (as well as its alternate spellings, phad thai and pud thai). The search confirmed my suspicion: There appeared to be 80 best pad thais in Seattle.
So there I was, at Chaiyo in Pinehurst (11749 15th Ave. N.E., 361-8888), a neighborhood restaurant decorated, like most others, in a style I'd call suburban serene, sitting with a plate of pale-orange noodles covered in scallions and ground peanuts, served to me by a woman I'd trust with my most fragile keepsakes. I'd chosen Chaiyo because a Yelper said the noodles were "authentically" presented in an omelet—a good omen, perhaps? There was no omelet, in fact, only the standard rivulets of scrambled egg, but the aroma of fish sauce was strong and the noodles lightly tinged with dark wok breath. I stirred in the toppings and bean sprouts and took a bite. The funk faded away, replaced by the flavor of caramel. I took three more, and the butterscotch intensified. My Diet Coke was suddenly the most savory thing on the table. I boxed up the remaining five-sixths of the plate and moved on.
To Thai Tom (4543 University Way N.E., 548-9548), in fact, a U District cult favorite since the early '90s. With the counter packed, as usual, with students lit by the wok flames, I sat on a rickety stool outside until the waitress handed me a takeout box. I opened it in the car, took a bite. A complete recreation of my Khao San Road noodles, to a whiff.
