There are restaurants that are like narrowing funnels of options, and there are restaurants that are like widening cones of potential experience. At the former, the chef, the crew, or the kitchen is known for doing one or two things really well, and once you have those things, the remainder of the menu is nothing but a wasteland of burgers, chili, and flan--nothing worth walking across the street for, let alone driving anywhere. I have eaten at plenty of restaurants where I was bored before the appetizers were off the table; several where the amuse-bouche was the highlight of my night; a few where I crumpled the minute I walked through the door--just folding up and wanting only to curl up under a nice barstool and go to sleep for a thousand years (or at least until everyone in the restaurant world quits with the truffle fries and roasted half-chickens with pan jus).
Peter Mumford
Only a fool would order pad Thai at Bai Tong.
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Bai Tong Restaurant 16876 Southcenter Pkwy., Tukwila, baitongrestaurant.com, 575-3366. Open daily, lunch and dinner.
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The latter are the bottomless yin to the former's yang—restaurants where every dish leads you to the next, where the simplest, stupidest question can open an entire line of culinary reasoning previously untapped; where plain foods (chicken, garlic, ground pork, ketchup) act as gateway drugs to worlds of gustatory pleasure and debasement that really ought to be used in television PSAs to warn impressionable children away from overindulgence.
This is your brain.
This is your brain on moo dade deaw.
Any questions?
It is Saturday afternoon and I just can't stop eating.
"I want this every day," I say to my wife, Laura. "Whenever I get hungry at night, I want this delivered to me. I want a car service at my sole disposal—an army of guys just waiting around to go and pick this up and bring it to me wherever I am."
"What is it called again?" she asks, poking at a strip of dark-brown meat lying like a shriveled strip of tree bark on a bed of lettuce.
"I haven't the foggiest fucking idea. I just pointed and said 'Bring me this.' And they did."
Moo dade deaw—that's what it was. I don't even try to pronounce it. What it is is thin strips of pork, marinated for what tastes like a week in a slurry of cane sugar, carrots, burning tires, wet pretzels, soy sauce, peat, Pixy Stix, and salt. I'm guessing the meat was then lifted from the marinade, beaten with a hammer, lost by the cook tasked with its keeping, left to air-dry for a few months like a fine salami, found again, trimmed of excess fat, delicately floured, and then fried to order in a hot wok filled with rendered heroin tar. It is the very first thing listed on the menu at Bai Tong Restaurant in Tukwila. And I love it so much it hurts.
No, seriously: hurts. Having already polished off a welcoming plate of meang-kum (delicate little lettuce cups filled with ginger, lime, shallots, toasted coconut meat, peanuts, and little splinters of red chile that go off like explosive Pop Rocks in my mouth), half an order of 10 ground-pork-and-glass-noodle spring rolls with plum sauce, and some chicken satay, the moo dade deaw was a late addition to the lineup.
I'm full already without ever having gotten past the appetizers.
Moo dade deaw tastes, at first blush, oddly of Philadelphia soft pretzels just out of the oven—fresh and yeasty and salty and warm all at the same time. But that flavor fades fast, evaporating behind the taste of sugar and salt, of char and chiles. There is a crunch to the first bite that gives way to chewiness, like pork chewing gum or jerky improperly dried. And on top of all this is a sauce that tastes like nothing so much as a 50/50 mix of cheap, generic ketchup and Vietnamese sriracha: a perfect shot of sweetness and heat to complement the sweetness and salt of the fried pig bits.
I finish another bite and push the plate away. Laura looks for a waitress to flag down for our check. As soon as her head is turned, I shove another bite in my mouth. When she looks at me and frowns, I slowly reach for another bite—my hand moving under her line of sight, my eyes locked on hers.
"I'll stab you," she says, never looking away.
I grab another bite anyway. Smiling with a mouthful of pig, I chew.
"Hopeless," she says.
And she's right.
I don't like pad Thai. And though I fully accept the remote possibility of whiplash culinary conversion (I've had it happen before), I don't think I ever will. I've eaten pad Thai maybe 50 times, from nearly as many restaurants. I have eaten what is alleged to be the best pad Thai in four different cities, and have come close to loving it, but ultimately fell short in my ardor.
Over time, I decided I would simply not eat pad Thai anymore. I've made—and broken—this sort of blanket pronouncement before. Flan. Crème brûlée. Lobster. Anything from McDonald's. There are plenty of dishes I've declared terra inconcessus in my life, because I'd become either sick to death of seeing them done poorly (lobster) or of seeing them done at all (flan).
