Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [56]
The next day, Vithi picks us up early to visit another market. The historic center of Chiang Mai remains a walled city, and vendors set up in the morning just outside each of the old gates. Our destination is the White Elephant market on the north wall, held like most of its urban kin in a covered, open-sided permanent site. On the way, Bill asks, “How does this compare with the Warowot market, the only one mentioned in most English-language guidebooks?”
“We’re going to a true food market. Warowot is like a giant grocery store, with most of the food prepackaged.”
The variety amazes us again: heaps of brown tamarind pods, mushrooms, and greens; fermented fish and buffalo jerky; banana hearts and yellow-and-maroon banana blossoms; eggplants the size of capers and field crabs even smaller; bamboo worms and freshwater river seaweed; rough-surfaced cylinders of “long” black pepper and Thai white peppercorns; wing beans that look like caterpillars and huge cousins almost as large as baseball bats; curry pastes of all hues and dozens of different nam priks. Tallying time on her fingers, Cheryl says, “In seven waking hours in Chiang Mai, we’ve seen more bounty and diversity in markets than we’ve encountered in a week anywhere else.”
Vithi leaves us to wander on our own while he attends a meeting at the university, but we get together again for lunch at Hong Tauw Inn, a simple, away-from-the-crowds café that Vithi likes for northern Thai fare. Along with the menus, the waitress brings us a platter of various nam priks, with flavors such as dried shrimp, dried mackerel, mango, tamarind, and salted eggs. The base of each is a pounded paste made with chile, garlic, palm sugar, lime juice, fish sauce, and finely sliced eggplant. Vithi goes over the Thai-script menu with us and we pick a couple of things to try, but ask him to choose the rest.
The waitress delivers the food family style, allowing each of us to serve ourselves. First comes a green mango salad, with shredded fruit, greens, tiny eggplants, and slices of white turmeric root that look like ginger. Wing beans show up next, cut in cross sections so that the ridges form starburst shapes. Slightly crisp and cooked in a sweet-sour tamarind chile sauce, they become an instant favorite of ours. For soups, we get a spicy broth with jungle leaves, rice vermicelli, and tomatoes, and another with a coconut-milk base containing freshwater shellfish resembling snails in tang and texture. A fried whole freshwater fish wraps up the meal, accompanied by spicy pickled shallots, sliced cucumbers, and tomatoes, and for seasoning, nam pla prik (chile in fish sauce). Not everything is equally enjoyable to us, but the kitchen produces a dazzling array of tastes, a dynamic illustration of the key Thai principle of balancing salty, sweet, sour, and bitter flavors.
During lunch, the three of us talk about Chiang Mai and Thai food. Vithi tells us, “The town has changed radically in the last decade, mushrooming from a small provincial city and cultural capital to an enormous metropolis stacked high with residential towers and packed tightly with tacky tourist businesses.” He complains about increasing internationalism, citing as an example the way that university students flock to fast-food franchises of Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken. On the other hand, he says, they don’t have lots of choices. As in Bangkok and other cities, “People eat Thai food at home and want something different when they go out for a major meal, leaving us with a glut of foreign restaurants and a shortage of good local options.” In a sentiment we hear several times, Vithi claims that virtually every middle-class to upscale Thai restaurant in the country caters primarily to tourists and dumbs down the food accordingly, convinced