All this may be true, but part of the reason is still that Thai food is yummy and delicious! Speaking for myself, I could eat Thai pretty much every day. And luckily enough, I feel like we have an embarrassment of riches in terms of good Thai food here in the Triangle area. You've got:
YumYum in Cary
Thai Villa in Cary
Thai Cafe in Durham
Thaiphoon in Raleigh
Champa in Raleigh
Thai Palace in Chapel Hill
etc., etc. So sure, thank you Thai government, for sending all this yummy goodness our way!
Love all the Thai restaurants in the Triangle! We moved from North Raleigh down to Apex a few years back and at nearly the same time a new Thai restaurant opened up less than a mile from our house that's really great. Working at home and having the ability to quickly grab Thai food right down the street is both convenient and dangerous for my diet :)
Something I just realized is the group that owns Sawasdee Glenwood doesn't own the Capital location. I would have sworn that when the Glenwood location opened it had stuff in the restaurant (e.g. on the menu) that talked about both locations...
Regardless, Sawasdee on Glenwood is good. Like most restaurants, it was really good when it first opened and went through a low (food was super inconsistent, and sometimes terrible) for a while, but over the last year it looks like they've updated menus and the people working there have changed. Maybe a change in ownership? My experiences have been good.
Yelp long ago stopped being a venue for amateur critics and reviewers and turned into a space for entitled, angry consumers to vent their frustrations about the world failing to cater to their whims.
> I feel like we have an embarrassment of riches in terms of good Thai food here in the Triangle area
Ditto for North Texas. Some of my favorites include:
Banana Leaf in Far North Dallas
Thai Spice in Far North Dallas (they live up to their name!)
Best Thai Signature in Far North Dallas
Legends Thai Cuisine in Plano
SaWaDiKa in Richardson
And there are so many others around I haven't tried... TBH, I mostly go to a handful because the ones near me are so excellent I don't see a need to shop around.
I agree. If the food wasn't great, it wouldn't matter how hard they marketed it. There's far too many great options out there to end up with 10x the market share per capita of other cuisines if it isn't also great.
Thai Cafe in Durham is the same owners as Thai Cafe in Wake Forest. If you ever get out this way, let's grab lunch there - I always need an excuse to get to Thai Cafe :)
I spent a few weeks in Bangkok for work back in 2016, and I remember loving the food at first, but after a week the constant flavour profile of sweet+sour+salty+spicy (e.g. sugar + lime juice + fish sauce + peppers) started grating on me. I really tried to test different things, and was invited out regularly by local colleagues. But maybe that's just one part of Thailand?
Maybe they say the same thing about "classical French" (i.e. Lyon/Paris) cuisine's reliance on cream, shallots and bacon :)
I would argue that the largest direct attack by one major power against another major power since WWII was Russia hacking/interfering in US elections, and that's an example of soft power.
I'd honestly rather have sabre rattling, because at least it's in the open and subject to popular scrutiny.
One interesting thing I have noticed is that Thai food in Sweden (or at least Gothenburg) tastes almost nothing like Thai food in London. I wonder how much 'foreign' cuisines adapt to match local expectations.
The worst is Vietnamese food in Stockholm, it taste nothing like Vietnamese and tries to imitate local thai tastes. And that makes me so sad because I love Pho but I have yet to find a good one in Stockholm.
I also wonder why people buy sushis in a thai restaurant here, they are usually much worse than in real sushi restaurants and equally expensive. Maybe it's because the different persons at the tables disagreed on which food to buy but still, what's the next step? Selling pizza and Kebab in chinese restaurants?
As with nearly all foreign cuisines, London tends to have some of the best 'authentic' examples of Thai food and some of the most heavily adapted examples...
It's the same with Indian (some excellent restaurants and some very British, cream-filled takeaways), Italian, Mexican and definitely Chinese food.
I assume it's at least partly down to many of these more exotic cuisines having been introduced to Britain earlier than much of mainland Europe, resulting in them being more heavily adapted to local tastes.
The best way to build a bridge between peoples is through culture, and food is an important part of culture.
The next step in bridge building is sharing meals with people of other cultures. Starting or strengthening friendships around food is a great way to lessen the power of prejudices, and put aside our national identities for the benefit of sharing a common bond as humans through our cultural identities.
Edit: even though the stated reason in the article has a political motive, I still think it helps at a human level.
> Starting or strengthening friendships around food is a great way to lessen the power of prejudices, and put aside our national identities for the benefit of sharing a common bond as humans through our cultural identities.
I agree, and I have a theory/dream that this same principle can be extended and to all identities, including gender, sexual, and political (which are all subset of culture, of course). The value of having these discussions over a meal may be in part that there are certain expectations of social behavior in play, so people tend to be on better than normal behavior, and everyone knows they're going to be there for a while anyways so might as well make the best of it. As a result, it facilitates an environment where people actually listen to what other people are actually saying, rather than relying almost entirely on subconscious, preconceived notions, as is what routinely happens on internet forums. This extra time and dialogue helps bring people's perceptions of reality, in this case their understanding of the beliefs/culture of others, more closely inline with reality itself.
In a sense, discussions over a meal forces good behavior on people, and the result of that is that people realize their preconceptions were off the mark. Absent a meal and the social structure and expectations/rules that come with it, and particularly in the case of internet discussions where there is no physical presence and often no strongly enforced behavioral expectations at all, we're left to rely on rationality, conscious awareness and personal discipline, things that aren't really taught or practiced in certain cultures. I'm a big believer that this is one of the key enablers of the increasing polarization we are witnessing in our societies, Western societies in particular.
I love the Thai food in the US, so much that it has made me consider visiting Thailand. I wonder if it actually nets tourism dollars? I guess it doesn’t need to because Thai restaurants could also be a relatively safe investment if more people love them as much as I do.
I've been to Thailand twice and I find the Thai food in the USA to be much better. When I asked my Thai friends about this they said it could be that the ingredients are of higher quality in the US...
That wasn't my experience as a whole. Certainly, I experienced both bad and good. But the good Thai I had in Thailand was far superior to the good Thai I can find locally in the US. I'll keep looking :-)
I have to assume when you say national identity it means the same thing to you as racial identity because our national identity is mutable and transcends race. I can't move to Thailand and become Thai. I can't move to China and become Chinese. But they can move here and become American. They can move here and live the American Dream.
Isn't that what's so amazing about the USA? That it is open to "anyone"( well you get what I mean)?
People come from different nations, a country that allows different nations to exist in the same physical space is a great way to bridge that gap and food seems like a good starting point. Anyone can probably gain some appreciation for some culture if the food is good( like, this culture actually has something worthwhile to show). I think it works in a subconscious level. Also given the lack of worldwide history education it's also an interesting way to get people in a first contact with a different culture.
Smart plan, and works on many levels--both product and service industries included (in terms of creating demand), but of course cultural and diplomatic ones as well, with network effects.
I had always assumed that many Asian themed restaurants added Thai menu items because it was trendy/popular. It's common to see sushi at Chinese, Korean, or pan-Asian restaurants.
Also, where I live, many specific Latin American restaurants (Peruvian, Costa Rican, etc) have started offering burritos and hot salsa, even though it's not typical of their cuisine.
I have been to Thailand about 5 times since 2006. In fact, I'm writing this from the airport returning from Bangkok this evening.
One thing I've noticed over the past decade is that the diversity of tourists has changed dramatically over the years. The first time I went to Thailand I saw mostly Americans, Australians, and Europeans. Nowadays its common to see people from all over the middle-east, Africa, South America, and of course the rest of Asia (China and Japan in particular). I was even surprised to see a Vietnamese tour group at Suvarnabhumi today (interesting to see Vietnamese with the disposal income to travel and the interest to travel to their next door neighbor). Just goes to show everyone loves Thailand.
Gastro-diplomacy appears to have paid off! What a great investment!
> I was even surprised to see a Vietnamese tour group at Suvarnabhumi today (interesting to see Vietnamese with the disposal income to travel and the interest to travel to their next door neighbor).
I live in Vietnam. Virtually every middle class Vietnamese I know has been to Thailand. For two simple reasons: it is one of the few places on Earth a Vietnamese can travel visa-free and it is relatively cheap. (Especially compared to, say, Singapore, which also allows visa-free travel.)
I guess it depends on what you count as "relatively new". Vietnamese have been traveling internationally, since the early 1990s after Đổi Mới in 1986. It is 4 hours from Saigon to Cambodia by bus. It is 12 hours from Hanoi to China by bus. I think Hanoi to Laos is also 12 hours or so by bus.
That's three countries within a pretty easy bus ride, making international travel relatively common.
As far back as 2007 (the oldest numbers I could find quickly), Cambodia was seeing over 125,000 Vietnamese tourists a year.
There's a reason there are massive casinos in Cambodia all along the border. (Vietnamese aren't allowed to gamble in Vietnam, so they go to Cambodia to do it.)
Vietnamese have been traveling throughout Southeast Asia for a while now. It is just that their numbers have finally caught up to (and in many cases surpassed) Japanese & South Koreans so you can notice them.
More disposable income certainly helps. But so do things like the increase in the formal economy (it is impossible to get a visa anywhere unless you have a bank account, a labor contract, etc). So do things like the spread of "Western" work hours (even now, the typical non-office job is 6 days a week, usually 10 hour shifts, which doesn't exactly leave much time or energy for travel; so travel most often happens in between jobs).
Indonesian food are delicious and the country population are huge but yet relatively unknown outside Indonesia. So yeah the power of marketing and deliberate smart plan can't be underestimated.
I will briefly add that Indonesian food is massively popular in the Netherlands ("East Indies" being a former colony). Rijstaffel [1] -- literally, "rice table" -- is a national specialty that is celebrated by the Dutch, although I will admit that the history of the meal is rooted in that former colonialism.
Well, Netherlands is a special case, of course. But relatively unknown compare to korea/thai/japan. These country population is much smaller than indonesia yet their cuisine is everywhere.
Indonesian food is definitely popular in Australia as well.
My pet theory: foreign cuisines do better when there are clear boundaries. There's sort of a continuum between Indonesian, Malaysian and Singaporean cuisines, which then overlap somewhat with Cantonese. This makes it harder for foreigners to find the cuisine memorable. The boundaries get blurred further because in many places, it makes sense for an Indonesian or Malaysian family to just call their restaurant Chinese or "Asian", and then offer a mix of the most popular dishes.
Thai cuisine overlaps with Laotian and I guess probably Burmese cuisine a bit, but it's otherwise very distinctive --- and it's not like there are many Laotian or Burmese restaurants around.
This one is pretty easy to see the reason for if you go to a random tourist restaurant in each country.
In Thailand, you get four pages of Thai food, going way deeper in variety than you ever see exported. Enough that you could eat there every day and not feel the need to flip to that last page full of Pizzas and spaghetti bolognese.
In Indonesia, though, you get Nasi Goreng, Mee Goreng, and if you're really lucky a single curry, before learning about their wood-fired pizzas and other western junk.
So you can go there for a month and come back having eaten a lifetime's worth of salty noodles, but not really learning anything about all the other good food you can get there.
It's pretty rare that I choose Indonesian over Thai, when I have the choice.
> And many more of them are run by Chinese who haven't learned to prepare Japanese food, unfortunately.
It's variable. There are some I'd avoid, but there are also some good Chinese-run Japanese restaurants.
> By the way, are you the dataflow guy?
Yes. I've had to move my pages (now at http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/FMJ.html ). I've recently made major changes to the numeric type system, which now has a built-in Prolog interpreter and supports units and numeric ranges. I'm planning to add dependent types at some point but not soon. The system's still not ready for release.
Interesting. I'd like to try to use a dataflow system like that for an industrial application (despite my name, not for uranium enrichment centrifuges, I promise). I'll keep my eye on it. Will it be released as open source or a proprietary product?
Also, have you looked at the static checking of units of measure in F#? I find myself wishing I had something like that since I work with a lot of physical measurements.
I intend to release it as shared source, i.e. charge only for commercial use.
Units of measure in Full Metal Jacket are SI, similar to those in F#, but it also supports prefixes, e.g. 2.3mg expands to 2.3e-6 kg. The types and units are checked while the program is constructed in the IDE. At present there's no fully working compiler.
As I skimmed through the first N paragraphs in search of the buried lede of this article, as I seem to need to do for most articles these days, I am reminded yet again that HN needs an abstract service (aka tl;dr). Commenters should submit an abstract which is voted up or down, hopefully based on accuracy and compactness. Reader could then skim through abstract and make a more informed decision about whether it's worth the time to read, just like is done with academic articles.
(People who are going to comment without reading the article will do this regardless of whether you have an abstract.)
“Apparently, the government had been training chefs at its culinary training facilities to send abroad for the previous decade, but this project formalized and enhanced these efforts significantly.”
Very interesting. I wish there were more, "authentic" Thai places around. I'm in Chicago and by far the best Thai place I've ever eaten at was a small shop in Vermont. The owner is Thai and it's only open for lunch in the summers. No other Thai I've ever had compares. My brother who has spent some time in Thailand said it's because most Thai places are serving Americanized Thai food.
Authentic Thai Food is also a difficult thing to search for.
Are you referring to Wilaiwan's in Montpelier? Excellent place that's only open for weekday lunch, and Saturday lunch when the Farmer's Market is running in the summer.
They usually cook large batches of three dishes, and are open 11 AM to 2 PM or whenever they run out, whichever is sooner; and they do seem to frequently run out, I've found that going at 1:45 is not a good plan.
Yes. Absolutely. It's incredible. The best Thai food I've ever had. I used to go in high school and I recently was back in New England and drove all the way just to go to Wilaiwan's. I got all three options and cleaned all three dishes. A near heavenly experience.
> I got all three options and cleaned all three dishes. A near heavenly experience.
Wow! That's a lot of food!
However, you inspired me to hit them up for lunch again. Work from home and usually eat lunch at home, but went out and had Wilaiwan's today. Excellent as always; I ought to do that more often.
I'm in Chicago and by far the best Thai place I've ever eaten at was a small shop in Vermont.
Have you tried Star of Siam? It's on, err.. I think maybe Illinois? Sorry, haven't been there in a while, but it's just north of the river, and a couple of blocks over from Clark Street.
Edit: this is the place. It's probably my favorite Thai restaurant in Chicago.
If you are ever in NYC there’s a cluster of Thai restaurants in a neighborhood called Jackson Heights, not far from LGA airport, that caters to a Thai enclave that lives there.
Ayada Thai is my favorite, but there are several good ones. Just keep in mind that ‘Thai hot’ is really really spicy.
I'm in Chicago, and good Thai food is indeed hard to come by around here. I've been to Bangkok and good food is everywhere, even in mall food courts (Siam Paragon in Bangkok has surprisingly excellent food -- I think it's because most Thai people tend to hang out a lot in malls due to the hot weather).
Most of the places that non-Thai people recommend in the Chicago Loop are mostly of the Americanized variety (because restaurant economics -- these places need broad appeal to turn a profit given the high rents).
Don't get me wrong, I'm ok with non-authentic cuisine as long as they are good, but Loop Thai restaurants are mostly only "passable". The better Thai places are in locales with cheaper rent, e.g. JJ Thai Street Food in West Town, and Aroy Thai in Ravenswood (Aroy was recommended to me by a Thai person). These serve dishes that are much closer to what you would find in Thailand (i.e. spicier, more fish-sauce punch), but the downside of this authenticity is that folks with milder palates might be put off -- you probably wouldn't be able to bring any Olive-Garden-loving relatives to these places.
My personal barometer of how good a Thai place is the sweetness. The sweeter the pad thai, the less authentic the place.
Tyler Cowen, the economist, has this to say about Thai food in the United States: [1]
"Thai food in the United States is becoming bad. It’s getting sweeter—with excessive use of refined sugar—and the other flavors are growing weaker and less reliable. In absolute numbers, more excellent Thai restaurants exist than ever before, but I wouldn’t want to vouch for the average quality of Thai food in America these days.
One problem is that many Thai people have such a wonderful service ethic. I don’t think I have ever once been treated poorly in a Thai restaurant. That has made courting wide audiences relatively easy. Thai food also looks healthy and has beautiful colors—all those greens, reds, yellows, and oranges.
As a result, Thai food has become cool. I first saw this trend in California, in the 1980s, when young people in black started turning up in large numbers at Thai restaurants in Hollywood. It spread. Americans eating in a Thai restaurant are likely more hip than those eating in a Chinese restaurant. Yet hip people do not always have superb taste in food.
As Thai restaurants have become more popular, they have become unreliable. It is so easy to make the food too sweet, appealing to lowest-common-denominator tastes or masking deficiencies in the food’s preparation. The best sweet Thai dishes mix sweet with tart, but there’s been too much abuse on the sweet side and not enough use of fish sauce or fermented shrimp paste or ground white pepper. The most-reliable indicators of bad Thai restaurants are a large bar and sushi on the menu. Those are both signs that the restaurant isn’t that serious about food. Stay away."
I like Andy's Thai Kitchen a lot. They've managed to treat my friends and I really well even during peak times. Also, you get a lot of food with your order. (Downside: Cash only)
I'll check those recommendations out. If you ask me the occasional pineapple and lemon should be the only sweet things in my Thai food. Bring on the chilies.
Thai is pretty terrible compared to Vietnamese and Indonesian cuisines. Such a shame the latter two have made so little of an impact on most of the west, France and the Netherlands, respectively, excluded.
Kabuli Pulau is fantastic. I used to live down the street from a kebab shop that had the best kebab and pulau, all cooked on outdoor grills in front of it. Fantastic food, and I wish there were more good Afghan places in the U.S. I'm in the midwest, and the closest Afghan place I know of (that serves Afghan food, not just owned by Afghans) is in Chicago.
Incredible, I love it :) Hicksville NY has a decently large diaspora, we are a bit spoiled here. I taught myself how to cook their way, here's what I do:
Buy onions by the 50lb sack, chop them up, put them in the food processor, cook them once then freeze them into smaller containers. Whenever I want to cook a quick meal in 10 mins, grab the onion puree from the freezer, throw it into a pan with garlic and oil and paprika, fry it up and serve over some bread :)
Honestly, the Vietnamese cuisine in France is quite bad (outside of certain spots in Paris) - Just like pizzas have become synonymous with low-effort fast food, Vietnamese cuisine has become synonymous with dodgy buffets of bland taste and questionable hygiene. I find far better Vietnamese food in London than I do in the south of France
I'm sorry to hear that. My experience in France and the Netherlands comes from being invited by people with a history in the colonies, they would obviously be better equipped to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Interesting. I've been surprised by the number of Thai restaurants that have opened (and often, quickly closed) here in upstate SC, a relatively rural area that, so far as I know, doesn't have a large Thai community. So I guess this at least somewhat explains it.
I've also noticed that Thai restaurants tend to be a little more hit-or-miss than other ethnic food places. I imagine the Thai gov't pushing to encourage Thai-Americans who are on the fence about whether they should open a restaurant would explain that as well.
While this play by the Thai government is a pretty indisputable home run in terms of mutual goodwill, what would be the reaction if [controversial foreign power of your choice] launched a similar effort at a greater scale?
To be fair, it matters very much who is making the gesture. The gorilla in the room behaves very differently from the underdog. Everybody expects that.
There are also plenty of Thai restaurants in Reykjavík (and Iceland in general), probably for a different reason then the article states since Iceland has a significant Thai population.
Living in Seattle for the past year, and loving Thai food, I noticed that there is a general overall difference in the type of restaurant a Thai place is between Reykjavík and Seattle.
Thai places in Seattle seem a lot fancier then in Reykjavík. In Seattle you most likely have to order a table, or at the very least have a waiter show you to your table. In Reykjavík, on the other hand, Thai places tend to range all over the place, all the way down to having only 4 bar-like seats by the window.
The menu is also way more diverse in Reykjavík. In Seattle, you can pretty much guess the entire menu before you walk into a Thai place. While in Reykjavík a Thai place might only have three types of pad thai on the menu, or only sell soup, or even sell have 3 or 4 pages of stuff on the menu, including non-thai cuisine.
Generally, I like the Thai places in Reykjavík better then in Seattle.
In general though, if you want good Thai food I mostly recommend in North Thailand or Laos. Sometimes I would go to the same place and order the same thing, but get a completely different thing (for example, deep fried noodles instead of steamed; a fresh set veggies, etc), but either time be blown away by tastyness.
One of the things I found interesting is that in Thailand there seemed to be a big difference in the food at the Thai restaurants for tourists (which were similar to the food in the Thai restaurants abroad) and the Thai restaurants for Thai people.
> Starting or strengthening friendships around food is a great way to lessen the power of prejudices, and put aside our national identities for the benefit of sharing a common bond as humans through our cultural identities.
I will remember that the next time the Muslims decide to put fire to hundreds of cars here in Sweden. I will just offer some Swedish meatballs and offer a dance around the pole. Because hey, we are all humans...we can get along right?
That was sarcasm, because... It gets tiresome to see people believe a hug is all that is needed to make people bond.
Depending on where you live, the reason also could be because there is a refugee population that has been resettled in that city.
Omaha, where I live, has a growing local chain of Thai restaurants (Salween, if you live here) that are owned and run by Karen refugees who have been resettled here. Their food is very, very good, the restaurants are very popular around town, and they greatly assist their community.
If you want to help refugees and other people groups, patronizing businesses owned by them is a fantastic way to do so.
Not mentioned is that probably half of Thai restaurants in the US are run by Chinese people. A good chunk of Japanese, Vietnamese and even some non-Asian restaurants are run by Chinese also. One of the top Thai restaurants in my area is run by a white guy. And there's a sushi place run by Thai folks. Good cooking doesn't care where you're from.
If only they were all "good cooking". I'd say maybe 1/10 Asian (Chinese/Japanese/Thai/Vietnamese etc) restaurants are actually tasty- the rest are barely adequate, and their continued success relies on the fact that most American diners don't have developed palates.
I'll be downvoted for this too. Visited some friends in Memphis. Was told this restaurant was amazing, it's famous, that restaurant was amazing, it's famous, so on. Tried them all. Wasn't impressed. They were OK, but they didn't live up to expectations. Realized that Memphis is actually not a big city, so there isn't a huge amount of competition to motivate restaurants to up their game. Don't get me wrong, the restaurants were OK. But they didn't deserve to be called famous outside of Memphis. And I realized that a lot of American cities are probably similar size and probably face a similar situation. Hence no wonder why many Americans don't get to know what actually good ethnic food tastes like, or even good "American" food, for that matter. Can't blame them for not having developed palates.
I experienced this when I moved to Houston, and I've commented about it before. People told me everywhere that the abundance of restaurants was incredible, that I had to try X restaurant and Y cafe, etc. After trying them all, I've found them to be pretty bland. There's not a lot of complex flavor, food is inconsistently cooked, stored, etc. The weird thing is that the meals look incredible, like they're visually stunning but boring to eat.
I only really noticed this after I started copying some Gordon Ramsey videos I was watching online. Preparing easy, simple meals the way that he prepares them (taking care to select produce and quality dairy, using fresh herbs, etc.) yields food that's better than I've eaten in 90% of restaurants. These aren't the really long "how to cook like a Michelin chef with a blowtorch and truffles" videos, either, these are like the "quick and easy broccoli soup with goat cheese and walnuts" videos.
I mean, principle of charity- we're talking about ethnic meaning ethnic non-American.
Regardless, I've also been to Memphis, and I had some really good BBQ there, and I had a lot of really average BBQ. I think another problem is that a lot of regions coast on the reputation of their "regional" food, and there's a lot of people that aren't great chefs or aren't dedicated to the art of food that ride the coattails of the region's reputation.
The really charitable thing to do would be to recognize that there are indigenous, albeit relatively young compared to the old world, American ethnic groups with their own culture and cuisine. This is a consequence of demographic change. Historical Americans are just another set of ethnic groups now, equal with any other.
Another big reason for the decline in the quality of these cuisines is that the old people who know how to make them are retiring and dying and their descendants aren't interested in maintaining their own culture.
You can't call local specialty foods ethnic food. That's not what the phrase means.
Yeah, the BBQ was good, but I didn't get the "best in the world" effect in my mouth. I once ate meat cooked by a Texan at a house party, I was seriously impressed and blown away after the first bite. This guy told me that he caters BBQ parties in Texas as a hobby. He told me about his marinade process, it bordered on science. His skill was legit.
It's possible that the my Memphis friends directed me to the wrong restaurants. But if I can't trust the locals to tell me which are the best restaurants in their city, who can I trust? Plus, their opinions matched up with what I saw on Tripadvisor.
I'm sorry if I've offended anyone. But I've also anecdotally found that some people who brag about their food haven't tasted food around the world, so their frame of reference is a bit limited. For example, I'll never say I've tasted really good Italian food because I've never been to Italy, and my gosh, the descriptions I hear about real Italian food blow my mind (and I think I've been to a few good Italian restaurants in North America). It's just like my high school friend once recommended a bunch of us go to the best sushi restaurant he ever tasted on the last day of school; as we ate there, the rest of us realized he had just unfortunately never been to an actually good sushi restaurant in our city. Either that, or his tongue actually couldn't tell the difference the way a tone-deaf person is incapable of hitting the right notes.
I'm not trying to be condescending when I say certain people lack a good frame of reference. It's not their fault. It is what it is. I'm sorry for not being able to figure out a different way to say it.
Interestingly, the best meat I've ever eaten was also cooked by a Texan who caters house parties as a hobby and has his marinade process down to a science. (It was 18-hour marinaded pulled pork with a spicy mustard coating, and upon taking a a bite it was chewy for about two seconds and then melted away like butter.)
If your guy was also a short silver-haired ex-Soviet guy who tells a lot of questionable jokes and works for NASA, that's a heck of a coincidence.
Honestly supply chains for food are pretty bad in most of the county. Access to fresh, consistently good produce is difficult to get at the scale and price that a restaurant would need.
That and most of these family owned restaurants just don't have the headroom to try challenging their clientele, so they stick to what's tried and true with their local diners. They have to keep the prices low and the food broadly palatable to unadventurous eaters.
Well how much is developed palates, and how much is just different palates/different expectations? It's widely known that American Chinese food is different from traditional Chinese food. Do Japanese/Korean/Thai/Vietnamese also change their dishes?
That's a good distinction to make, but I'm definitely talking about actually developed palates. I think that there are many delicious "American Chinese" dishes that can be prepared in a very flavorful and delicate way- but I think most of the time, they aren't. How well do flavors blend, how subtly are the spices added, what's the freshness and texture of the meats, sauces, and carbs- this is the quality that I say 9/10 Asian restaurants are lacking. Really, it's more like 9/10 American restaurants are lacking it, and the numbers might be worse than that.
Where I went to University in upstate New York, there was a Taiwanese tea house run by a Korean family, a Japanese sushi restaurant owned by a Taiwanese family, and a Korean restaurant managed by a Japanese woman.
When I go to a Thai restaurant, I also frequently hear the cooks speaking Mandarin Chinese (I'm conversant in the language).
Back in El Campo, TX in the early 80s, a Korean family moved into the tiny town to take over the local Chinese restaurant. I’m guessing whoever was running the Chinese restaurant at any given time would have been the only Asian family in town.
In NYC, Derek Lucci (white guy) is possibly the best thai chef, and he taught himself to cook while working as an Apple genius. (Although he now also spends a few months a year in Thailand learning from local chefs in various regions.)
Best guess would be Lers Ros, though Sai Jai Thai around the corner is more understated and has some solid dishes too (e.g. they offer khao kluk kapi, which is near-impossible to find outside of Thailand.)
Worth mentioning too is Saap Ver, around the Design District. Super legit, focus on Northeastern (Isan) cuisine.
I have a friend that lived in India for a year or so. At the end of his stay and american chain restaurant opened up TGI Friday I believe). He said that was one of the worst meals he had while there. Nothing tasted "right."
Thing is: they do not cater for the natives, but for the locals.
Prime example (for me) is "Chinese food". Found all over the world, yet nowhere it is the same, let alone something a Chinese would call Chinese.
Better even, there is one particular Chinese dish that inspired a documentary about all its different implementations. The Search For General Tso. Check it out if you like.
FWIW, I've had "natives" recommend restaurants that weren't actually that great. I have a friend born and raised in Taiwan who thinks greasy American Chinese food is the best. Trust your own palate. De gustibus non est disputandam.
The primary middleman ethnicity for restaurants where I live (Southern California) is Korean. There's lots of Korean-run places for the following non-Korean cuisines (in descending order for the quantity I've seen): Japanese (sushi & ramen), Americanized Chinese (distinct from Korean-Chinese cuisine, e.g. Jajangmyeon), Vietnamese, Mexican, Thai, Middle Eastern. There's some Korean fried chicken places, but I think that's kind of its own style, and is still advertised/branded as Korean. All of the aforementioned places don't make any mention of it being Korean-run. Though some of them will have things on the menu you wouldn't find at a non-Korean-run place, like kimchi.
There's a lot of overlap between Korean and Japanese cuisine. Koreans eat sushi, although not as voraciously. They both use the dark sesame and soy sauce. Ramen/ramyun and soba/naengmyun are the same things. Yakiniku is a cuisine that is basically Japanese-style Korean BBQ. I've also seen places in SoCal that just advertised as being Korean-style Vietnamese. I have enjoyed them all when done right :)
It's likely that people outside the Northeast believe that their local pizza is, in fact, good, even if it's not made to satisfy Northeastern ideas about how pizza should be.
Regardless of cuisine, most kitchen staff in Houston are Hispanic and we have some damn good food including Thai. Is it authentic enough to pass muster with a native? Not sure about that. But it's good enough to be popular. :-)
Having said that my favorite Thai place is still Morningside Thai and I'm pretty sure it's native run.
Except when it does. Attention to detail and skills matter. Clientele demographic and competitive pressure matter too.
In most survivalist/subsistence businesses, the owner typically optimizes for volume and profit rather than quality. He/she will typically do just enough to appeal to a broad clientele and keep costs low. There is no culture of craftsmanship or perfectionism -- it's just business. The owner is merely trying to feed his/her family... there is a nobility in this, but it doesn't always make for good food.
Many suburban sushi joints in the U.S. run by non-Japanese people fall into this category. Good enough to satisfy an American clientele, but not really done to the level of a craft (e.g. the rice in the nigiri falls apart as soon as you pick it up, the vinegar is left out altogether, etc.) Sushi is a craft that takes years to perfect and commands a premium.
Truly good places are run by people who know the essence of the cuisine they are serving, and make an effort to be true to it. They don't necessarily have to belong to the culture of origin, but they have to be serious about getting the details right. Such places are typically not run as survivalist businesses.
Pretty much! They are mostly over-sweetened versions of some southeast asian food. Once I had a curry chicken in a supposingly high end Thai restaurant. The curry sauce was so sweet that it tasted like dessert. Most Thai restaurants in North America are like that. I guess to most people sugar==taste good. This rule applies to many other ethnic cuisines that target "mainstream" in NA as well.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadYumYum in Cary
Thai Villa in Cary
Thai Cafe in Durham
Thaiphoon in Raleigh
Champa in Raleigh
Thai Palace in Chapel Hill
etc., etc. So sure, thank you Thai government, for sending all this yummy goodness our way!
Something I just realized is the group that owns Sawasdee Glenwood doesn't own the Capital location. I would have sworn that when the Glenwood location opened it had stuff in the restaurant (e.g. on the menu) that talked about both locations...
A quick google shows something fishy definitely happened with the Capital location - https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/crime/article8702121...
Regardless, Sawasdee on Glenwood is good. Like most restaurants, it was really good when it first opened and went through a low (food was super inconsistent, and sometimes terrible) for a while, but over the last year it looks like they've updated menus and the people working there have changed. Maybe a change in ownership? My experiences have been good.
Can we get a Triangle Food thread going?
In no particular order or connection, some of my favorites:
* Relish, by Crabtree
* Salt & Lime Cabo Grill, by North Raleigh
* Fiction Kitchen, Downtown Raleigh
* Remedy Diner, Downtown Raleigh
* Beer Garden, by Glenwood (The pretzels <3)
* Trophy Pizza & Brewing
* Orient Garden in Cary (our favorite Chinese takeout place)
* Himalayan Nepali Cuisine, Cary (watch out for that spicy scale)
* Coffee & Crepes, Cary
* Mac House, Durham
* Mura Sushi, North Hills
- Buck Jones Road, Cary
- Leesville & Strickland, Raleigh
Beyu Cafe, Durham
Taberna Tapas, Durham
Mateo, Durham
Rasa, Chapel Hill
Tylers, Durham
Q-Shack, Durham
Nanataco, Durham
Los Palmas, Raleigh
Cosmic Cantina, Durham
Irregardless Cafe, Raleigh
Please, no.
Yelp is a thing. This is not what HN is for.
Yelp long ago stopped being a venue for amateur critics and reviewers and turned into a space for entitled, angry consumers to vent their frustrations about the world failing to cater to their whims.
* C&T Wok in Morrisville (amazing authentic Chinese) * Backyard Barbecue, Durham (Eastern NC BBQ) * Kokyu Na'Mean, Durham (Korean sandwiches) * Sushioki, Durham (Sushi burritos--yes, really) * New Hope Market, Chapel Hill (local farm-to-table food)
Ditto for North Texas. Some of my favorites include:
Banana Leaf in Far North Dallas
Thai Spice in Far North Dallas (they live up to their name!)
Best Thai Signature in Far North Dallas
Legends Thai Cuisine in Plano
SaWaDiKa in Richardson
And there are so many others around I haven't tried... TBH, I mostly go to a handful because the ones near me are so excellent I don't see a need to shop around.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Thai+Lanna+Restaurant/@35....
It's very good.
Edit: It's still there, but I'm not.
Maybe they say the same thing about "classical French" (i.e. Lyon/Paris) cuisine's reliance on cream, shallots and bacon :)
My Indian family often complains about Western cuisine's penchant for slathering butter, cream, and cheese on absolutely everything.
Even most of the cheap Indian food served in America is way, way too loaded with cream for most Indians' palates.
I'd honestly rather have sabre rattling, because at least it's in the open and subject to popular scrutiny.
Also, as I alluded above, sabre-rattling hasn't resulted in armed conflict between superpowers since nuclearization.
I also wonder why people buy sushis in a thai restaurant here, they are usually much worse than in real sushi restaurants and equally expensive. Maybe it's because the different persons at the tables disagreed on which food to buy but still, what's the next step? Selling pizza and Kebab in chinese restaurants?
As with nearly all foreign cuisines, London tends to have some of the best 'authentic' examples of Thai food and some of the most heavily adapted examples...
It's the same with Indian (some excellent restaurants and some very British, cream-filled takeaways), Italian, Mexican and definitely Chinese food.
I assume it's at least partly down to many of these more exotic cuisines having been introduced to Britain earlier than much of mainland Europe, resulting in them being more heavily adapted to local tastes.
Someday, we'll just call it "food".
Help I'm being oppressed!
epic fail. Should be "Someday, we'll just call it 'Good Eats'" cue AB.
The best way to build a bridge between peoples is through culture, and food is an important part of culture.
The next step in bridge building is sharing meals with people of other cultures. Starting or strengthening friendships around food is a great way to lessen the power of prejudices, and put aside our national identities for the benefit of sharing a common bond as humans through our cultural identities.
Edit: even though the stated reason in the article has a political motive, I still think it helps at a human level.
I agree, and I have a theory/dream that this same principle can be extended and to all identities, including gender, sexual, and political (which are all subset of culture, of course). The value of having these discussions over a meal may be in part that there are certain expectations of social behavior in play, so people tend to be on better than normal behavior, and everyone knows they're going to be there for a while anyways so might as well make the best of it. As a result, it facilitates an environment where people actually listen to what other people are actually saying, rather than relying almost entirely on subconscious, preconceived notions, as is what routinely happens on internet forums. This extra time and dialogue helps bring people's perceptions of reality, in this case their understanding of the beliefs/culture of others, more closely inline with reality itself.
In a sense, discussions over a meal forces good behavior on people, and the result of that is that people realize their preconceptions were off the mark. Absent a meal and the social structure and expectations/rules that come with it, and particularly in the case of internet discussions where there is no physical presence and often no strongly enforced behavioral expectations at all, we're left to rely on rationality, conscious awareness and personal discipline, things that aren't really taught or practiced in certain cultures. I'm a big believer that this is one of the key enablers of the increasing polarization we are witnessing in our societies, Western societies in particular.
People come from different nations, a country that allows different nations to exist in the same physical space is a great way to bridge that gap and food seems like a good starting point. Anyone can probably gain some appreciation for some culture if the food is good( like, this culture actually has something worthwhile to show). I think it works in a subconscious level. Also given the lack of worldwide history education it's also an interesting way to get people in a first contact with a different culture.
Also, where I live, many specific Latin American restaurants (Peruvian, Costa Rican, etc) have started offering burritos and hot salsa, even though it's not typical of their cuisine.
One thing I've noticed over the past decade is that the diversity of tourists has changed dramatically over the years. The first time I went to Thailand I saw mostly Americans, Australians, and Europeans. Nowadays its common to see people from all over the middle-east, Africa, South America, and of course the rest of Asia (China and Japan in particular). I was even surprised to see a Vietnamese tour group at Suvarnabhumi today (interesting to see Vietnamese with the disposal income to travel and the interest to travel to their next door neighbor). Just goes to show everyone loves Thailand.
Gastro-diplomacy appears to have paid off! What a great investment!
I live in Vietnam. Virtually every middle class Vietnamese I know has been to Thailand. For two simple reasons: it is one of the few places on Earth a Vietnamese can travel visa-free and it is relatively cheap. (Especially compared to, say, Singapore, which also allows visa-free travel.)
That's three countries within a pretty easy bus ride, making international travel relatively common.
As far back as 2007 (the oldest numbers I could find quickly), Cambodia was seeing over 125,000 Vietnamese tourists a year.
There's a reason there are massive casinos in Cambodia all along the border. (Vietnamese aren't allowed to gamble in Vietnam, so they go to Cambodia to do it.)
Vietnamese have been traveling throughout Southeast Asia for a while now. It is just that their numbers have finally caught up to (and in many cases surpassed) Japanese & South Koreans so you can notice them.
More disposable income certainly helps. But so do things like the increase in the formal economy (it is impossible to get a visa anywhere unless you have a bank account, a labor contract, etc). So do things like the spread of "Western" work hours (even now, the typical non-office job is 6 days a week, usually 10 hour shifts, which doesn't exactly leave much time or energy for travel; so travel most often happens in between jobs).
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rijsttafel
My pet theory: foreign cuisines do better when there are clear boundaries. There's sort of a continuum between Indonesian, Malaysian and Singaporean cuisines, which then overlap somewhat with Cantonese. This makes it harder for foreigners to find the cuisine memorable. The boundaries get blurred further because in many places, it makes sense for an Indonesian or Malaysian family to just call their restaurant Chinese or "Asian", and then offer a mix of the most popular dishes.
Thai cuisine overlaps with Laotian and I guess probably Burmese cuisine a bit, but it's otherwise very distinctive --- and it's not like there are many Laotian or Burmese restaurants around.
In Thailand, you get four pages of Thai food, going way deeper in variety than you ever see exported. Enough that you could eat there every day and not feel the need to flip to that last page full of Pizzas and spaghetti bolognese.
In Indonesia, though, you get Nasi Goreng, Mee Goreng, and if you're really lucky a single curry, before learning about their wood-fired pizzas and other western junk.
So you can go there for a month and come back having eaten a lifetime's worth of salty noodles, but not really learning anything about all the other good food you can get there.
It's pretty rare that I choose Indonesian over Thai, when I have the choice.
There are also plenty of Japanese restaurants, yet very few Japanese. Many of them are run by Chinese who have learned to prepare Japanese food.
By the way, are you the dataflow guy?
It's variable. There are some I'd avoid, but there are also some good Chinese-run Japanese restaurants.
> By the way, are you the dataflow guy?
Yes. I've had to move my pages (now at http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/FMJ.html ). I've recently made major changes to the numeric type system, which now has a built-in Prolog interpreter and supports units and numeric ranges. I'm planning to add dependent types at some point but not soon. The system's still not ready for release.
Also, have you looked at the static checking of units of measure in F#? I find myself wishing I had something like that since I work with a lot of physical measurements.
Units of measure in Full Metal Jacket are SI, similar to those in F#, but it also supports prefixes, e.g. 2.3mg expands to 2.3e-6 kg. The types and units are checked while the program is constructed in the IDE. At present there's no fully working compiler.
(People who are going to comment without reading the article will do this regardless of whether you have an abstract.)
Authentic Thai Food is also a difficult thing to search for.
They usually cook large batches of three dishes, and are open 11 AM to 2 PM or whenever they run out, whichever is sooner; and they do seem to frequently run out, I've found that going at 1:45 is not a good plan.
Wow! That's a lot of food!
However, you inspired me to hit them up for lunch again. Work from home and usually eat lunch at home, but went out and had Wilaiwan's today. Excellent as always; I ought to do that more often.
Have you tried Star of Siam? It's on, err.. I think maybe Illinois? Sorry, haven't been there in a while, but it's just north of the river, and a couple of blocks over from Clark Street.
Edit: this is the place. It's probably my favorite Thai restaurant in Chicago.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Star+of+Siam/@41.8906454,-...
Ayada Thai is my favorite, but there are several good ones. Just keep in mind that ‘Thai hot’ is really really spicy.
Most of the places that non-Thai people recommend in the Chicago Loop are mostly of the Americanized variety (because restaurant economics -- these places need broad appeal to turn a profit given the high rents).
Don't get me wrong, I'm ok with non-authentic cuisine as long as they are good, but Loop Thai restaurants are mostly only "passable". The better Thai places are in locales with cheaper rent, e.g. JJ Thai Street Food in West Town, and Aroy Thai in Ravenswood (Aroy was recommended to me by a Thai person). These serve dishes that are much closer to what you would find in Thailand (i.e. spicier, more fish-sauce punch), but the downside of this authenticity is that folks with milder palates might be put off -- you probably wouldn't be able to bring any Olive-Garden-loving relatives to these places.
My personal barometer of how good a Thai place is the sweetness. The sweeter the pad thai, the less authentic the place.
Tyler Cowen, the economist, has this to say about Thai food in the United States: [1]
"Thai food in the United States is becoming bad. It’s getting sweeter—with excessive use of refined sugar—and the other flavors are growing weaker and less reliable. In absolute numbers, more excellent Thai restaurants exist than ever before, but I wouldn’t want to vouch for the average quality of Thai food in America these days.
One problem is that many Thai people have such a wonderful service ethic. I don’t think I have ever once been treated poorly in a Thai restaurant. That has made courting wide audiences relatively easy. Thai food also looks healthy and has beautiful colors—all those greens, reds, yellows, and oranges.
As a result, Thai food has become cool. I first saw this trend in California, in the 1980s, when young people in black started turning up in large numbers at Thai restaurants in Hollywood. It spread. Americans eating in a Thai restaurant are likely more hip than those eating in a Chinese restaurant. Yet hip people do not always have superb taste in food.
As Thai restaurants have become more popular, they have become unreliable. It is so easy to make the food too sweet, appealing to lowest-common-denominator tastes or masking deficiencies in the food’s preparation. The best sweet Thai dishes mix sweet with tart, but there’s been too much abuse on the sweet side and not enough use of fish sauce or fermented shrimp paste or ground white pepper. The most-reliable indicators of bad Thai restaurants are a large bar and sushi on the menu. Those are both signs that the restaurant isn’t that serious about food. Stay away."
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/six-rul...
I like Andy's Thai Kitchen a lot. They've managed to treat my friends and I really well even during peak times. Also, you get a lot of food with your order. (Downside: Cash only)
Ocha in Bucktown is good.
For what it's worth, I prefer Afghan cuisine, but all food is a fusion of earlier ideas anyway.
Buy onions by the 50lb sack, chop them up, put them in the food processor, cook them once then freeze them into smaller containers. Whenever I want to cook a quick meal in 10 mins, grab the onion puree from the freezer, throw it into a pan with garlic and oil and paprika, fry it up and serve over some bread :)
I've also noticed that Thai restaurants tend to be a little more hit-or-miss than other ethnic food places. I imagine the Thai gov't pushing to encourage Thai-Americans who are on the fence about whether they should open a restaurant would explain that as well.
Living in Seattle for the past year, and loving Thai food, I noticed that there is a general overall difference in the type of restaurant a Thai place is between Reykjavík and Seattle.
Thai places in Seattle seem a lot fancier then in Reykjavík. In Seattle you most likely have to order a table, or at the very least have a waiter show you to your table. In Reykjavík, on the other hand, Thai places tend to range all over the place, all the way down to having only 4 bar-like seats by the window.
The menu is also way more diverse in Reykjavík. In Seattle, you can pretty much guess the entire menu before you walk into a Thai place. While in Reykjavík a Thai place might only have three types of pad thai on the menu, or only sell soup, or even sell have 3 or 4 pages of stuff on the menu, including non-thai cuisine.
Generally, I like the Thai places in Reykjavík better then in Seattle.
I will remember that the next time the Muslims decide to put fire to hundreds of cars here in Sweden. I will just offer some Swedish meatballs and offer a dance around the pole. Because hey, we are all humans...we can get along right?
That was sarcasm, because... It gets tiresome to see people believe a hug is all that is needed to make people bond.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Omaha, where I live, has a growing local chain of Thai restaurants (Salween, if you live here) that are owned and run by Karen refugees who have been resettled here. Their food is very, very good, the restaurants are very popular around town, and they greatly assist their community.
If you want to help refugees and other people groups, patronizing businesses owned by them is a fantastic way to do so.
https://www.eater.com/2017/3/7/14839472/irish-pub-design
I only really noticed this after I started copying some Gordon Ramsey videos I was watching online. Preparing easy, simple meals the way that he prepares them (taking care to select produce and quality dairy, using fresh herbs, etc.) yields food that's better than I've eaten in 90% of restaurants. These aren't the really long "how to cook like a Michelin chef with a blowtorch and truffles" videos, either, these are like the "quick and easy broccoli soup with goat cheese and walnuts" videos.
I can get better ingredients mailed to me than what I can purchase locally, and the meals taste better than the area restaurants.
Consistency is key, but seems hard to implement in practice.
Regardless, I've also been to Memphis, and I had some really good BBQ there, and I had a lot of really average BBQ. I think another problem is that a lot of regions coast on the reputation of their "regional" food, and there's a lot of people that aren't great chefs or aren't dedicated to the art of food that ride the coattails of the region's reputation.
Another big reason for the decline in the quality of these cuisines is that the old people who know how to make them are retiring and dying and their descendants aren't interested in maintaining their own culture.
Yeah, the BBQ was good, but I didn't get the "best in the world" effect in my mouth. I once ate meat cooked by a Texan at a house party, I was seriously impressed and blown away after the first bite. This guy told me that he caters BBQ parties in Texas as a hobby. He told me about his marinade process, it bordered on science. His skill was legit.
It's possible that the my Memphis friends directed me to the wrong restaurants. But if I can't trust the locals to tell me which are the best restaurants in their city, who can I trust? Plus, their opinions matched up with what I saw on Tripadvisor.
I'm sorry if I've offended anyone. But I've also anecdotally found that some people who brag about their food haven't tasted food around the world, so their frame of reference is a bit limited. For example, I'll never say I've tasted really good Italian food because I've never been to Italy, and my gosh, the descriptions I hear about real Italian food blow my mind (and I think I've been to a few good Italian restaurants in North America). It's just like my high school friend once recommended a bunch of us go to the best sushi restaurant he ever tasted on the last day of school; as we ate there, the rest of us realized he had just unfortunately never been to an actually good sushi restaurant in our city. Either that, or his tongue actually couldn't tell the difference the way a tone-deaf person is incapable of hitting the right notes.
I'm not trying to be condescending when I say certain people lack a good frame of reference. It's not their fault. It is what it is. I'm sorry for not being able to figure out a different way to say it.
If your guy was also a short silver-haired ex-Soviet guy who tells a lot of questionable jokes and works for NASA, that's a heck of a coincidence.
That and most of these family owned restaurants just don't have the headroom to try challenging their clientele, so they stick to what's tried and true with their local diners. They have to keep the prices low and the food broadly palatable to unadventurous eaters.
When I go to a Thai restaurant, I also frequently hear the cooks speaking Mandarin Chinese (I'm conversant in the language).
https://www.instagram.com/makebistro
As an enthusiast of Thai cuisine, I am grateful for the link.
Exception is San Francisco. There's a place in Little Saigon that is run by Thai people and she said the food there is exactly the same as home.
Here in Toronto we recommend Si Lom Thai Bistro. Which is good but not perfect.
Edit: Lots of Thai places in Little Saigon. Pak Nam Thai Noodle Bar, Zen Yai Thai Restaurant, Lers Ros....
Best guess would be Lers Ros, though Sai Jai Thai around the corner is more understated and has some solid dishes too (e.g. they offer khao kluk kapi, which is near-impossible to find outside of Thailand.)
Worth mentioning too is Saap Ver, around the Design District. Super legit, focus on Northeastern (Isan) cuisine.
Prime example (for me) is "Chinese food". Found all over the world, yet nowhere it is the same, let alone something a Chinese would call Chinese.
Better even, there is one particular Chinese dish that inspired a documentary about all its different implementations. The Search For General Tso. Check it out if you like.
> Good cooking doesn't care where you're from.
Except for some reason it's hard to find good pizza outside the Northeast. What's with that!?!
Well, it's not true for one thing.
Having said that my favorite Thai place is still Morningside Thai and I'm pretty sure it's native run.
Except when it does. Attention to detail and skills matter. Clientele demographic and competitive pressure matter too.
In most survivalist/subsistence businesses, the owner typically optimizes for volume and profit rather than quality. He/she will typically do just enough to appeal to a broad clientele and keep costs low. There is no culture of craftsmanship or perfectionism -- it's just business. The owner is merely trying to feed his/her family... there is a nobility in this, but it doesn't always make for good food.
Many suburban sushi joints in the U.S. run by non-Japanese people fall into this category. Good enough to satisfy an American clientele, but not really done to the level of a craft (e.g. the rice in the nigiri falls apart as soon as you pick it up, the vinegar is left out altogether, etc.) Sushi is a craft that takes years to perfect and commands a premium.
Truly good places are run by people who know the essence of the cuisine they are serving, and make an effort to be true to it. They don't necessarily have to belong to the culture of origin, but they have to be serious about getting the details right. Such places are typically not run as survivalist businesses.
Regardless I think this is a brilliant idea by the Thai government. I'd love to see other regions / governments do a similar thing!