Laurie and I went to New Orleans a few years ago. I was only there for a couple of days, long enough to decide that, unlike in most of the US, the average quality of food was very good (even at touristy places). The exception to this rule is vegetables, which aside from okra do not seem to be part of Louisiana cooking at all.

The disdain with which vegetables are treated in New Orleans became apparent our first night, when we had dinner at Susan Spicer’s restaurant, Herbsaint. I had something delicious with duck confit, and ordered a side of the vegetable of the day, which was broccoli. This turned out to be plain steamed broccoli on a white plate, exactly the same stuff you receive alongside your General Tso’s chicken.

It was easy to forgive the broccoli, though, especially after I tasted Laurie’s dinner, which was shrimp and green chile grits cakes with tasso cream sauce. Herbsaint was one of the first restaurants to reopen after Katrina, selling out its first night back. Presumably the shrimp and grits had something to do with it.

Later, Laurie had some even better shrimp at [Uglesich’s](http://www.uglesichs.com/). I had already gone back to Seattle. I don’t remember why I had to leave early; probably to teach a class or something else that in retrospect was obviously not worth missing Paul’s Fantasy at Uglesich’s (trout topped with grilled shrimp).

The idea of shrimp and grits has stuck with me since that trip. It’s one of those perfect combinations like pork and cabbage or osso buco and risotto milanese. I say the idea has stuck with me because I hadn’t actually eaten shrimp and grits again until last night.

In my previous shrimp post, I mentioned that nearly all shrimp in the US are frozen at sea or at the shrimp farm, and if you buy unfrozen shrimp, they’ve been defrosted. In the Gulf region, that’s not necessarily true, nor is it necessarily true at [Mutual Fish](http://www.mutualfish.com/), Seattle’s best fish market. A couple years ago I went into Mutual and found wild gulf shrimp that had never been frozen. It turns out they get these in fairly regularly, and at $13/pound they’re priced about the same as the equivalent size of frozen shrimp.

But I couldn’t serve these awesome shrimp with instant grits from a box. So I mail-ordered artisan grits from [Anson Mills](http://www.ansonmills.com/). They call their grits “antebellum,” which is really not the way a northern liberal wants to hear his southern agricultural product described. I think the word they’re going for is “old-school.” Their web site is also kind of antebellum. You have to order by email. So I sent my credit card number off into the ether and a week later received a priority mail envelope stuffed with four bags of corn products. (In addition to the stone-ground grits, I got Anson’s quick-cooking grits and their polenta.)

Anson grits are so coarse-ground that they basically look like gravel. The directions warn you to stir the grits into water, let them sit, then skim the chaff off with a tea strainer. I did my best, but I ended up missing a fair amount of chaff. Cooking these grits takes time and practice. They cook for about two hours, and they’re still pretty chunky, but the flavor is unbeatable. Like the time I ordered hardtack from Vermont, ordering the Anson grits made me feel a little weird, since this is a product people used to eat because they had nothing else to eat, and now it’s a gourmet treat.

So we invited some friends over and made shrimp and grits from the recipe that came with the bag of grits. Kale was also served. I didn’t get a great sear on the shrimp, and I mentioned the chaff issue, but overall, the ingredients were so good that they resisted my attempts to screw them up. Shrimp freeze very well, of course, but you can’t beat the texture of fresh shrimp, which have the platonic shrimp crunch. For a sauce, you make shrimp stock with the shrimp shells and some vegetables, and then thicken it with beurre manié.

I was hoping to have some leftover grits for making grits cakes, but we ate them all. Particularly Iris, who requested seconds.

Iris has long enjoyed the book Yum Yum Dim Sum, by Amy Wilson Sanger. It’s part of the World Snack series, and its collage art portrays many of the most popular dim sum items: har gau, shu mai, sesame balls, sticky rice, and so on.

We’ve taken Iris to dim sum once before, but it was at a progressive sort of place where you ordered unusual items off a menu. Today was her first classic dim sum experience. Because it’s for a review meal, I can’t tell you where it was, except that it was on the Eastside, but you’ll find out soon enough.

Anyway, basically everything in the book appeared within two minutes after we sat down. Iris could not have been more impressed if the Cat in the Hat came to life. She ate a little of everything and pronounced the sticky rice her favorite.

I thought I was too old to experience this childlike sense of wonder other than vicariously (not that vicariously isn’t great), but then I remembered something that happened to me a few years ago.

It was our first trip to Thailand, in 2000, and I came armed with Joe Cummings’s book World Food: Thailand, where I had read this:

> Any vendor or restaurant that offers kai yaang will also offer somtam, in which grated green papaya is pounded in a large earthen mortar with lime juice, garlic, fish sauce, fresh chillies and a number of other ingredients depending on the recipe or the customer’s request. The resulting salad is slightly soupy, although the unripe papaya remains crisp.

I’d never eaten this before and didn’t know if it was even available in the US (it is), but I already knew it was going to be great. And then on our first morning in Bangkok, right on the same street as our hotel, I saw a street cart with a pile of shredded green papaya. Two minutes later I had a plastic bag of som tam, which was even better than I’d anticipated.

Thai food in the US is where Italian or French food were half a century ago: a varied and highly regional cuisine seen as a monolith represented by a few stereotypical dishes.

The vast majority of Thai-American restaurants are owned and operated by immigrants from Bangkok or its surroundings, and they serve mostly central Thai food. There’s nothing wrong with this: phad thai and the various coconut milk curries are central Thai dishes, and you can have those when you pry them from my chile-addled tastebuds. But some of the most interesting and spicy food in Thailand comes from the northeast (also knows as Isaan) and northern parts of the country.

Some of these dishes appear regularly on Thai-American menus. Larb gai (minced chicken salad) is an Isaan dish. So is *som tam,* green papaya salad, but it’s rarely worth ordering here. Som tam, notes Austin Bush of the awesome blog RealThai, is probably the most popular dish in all of Thailand. Even though it originated in the northeast, it’s available on every street corner in Bangkok, and when in Bangkok I’ve been known to stop on the way to lunch to get some som tam.

Som tam starts with shredded green (unripe) papaya, pounded in a clay mortar (or “pok pok,” presumably an onomatopoeia) with tomatoes, dried shrimp, garlic, lime juice, palm sugar, fresh chiles, fish sauce, and sometimes other ingredients like long beans or black crab. I am not down with the crab, but throw all the rest together and you’ve got one of the most delicious things I can possibly imagine. When you order som tam on the streets of Bangkok, you can specify how many chiles you want. I want a lot.

But som tam in America is a bad scene. This is one of those dishes that takes practice to get the balance of flavors right, and generally when I order it here it’s too sweet and not spicy enough. Sometimes it’s not even pounded in a mortar, so the ingredients never quite come together. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I went to Portland and had one of the best som tams of my life, at a little place called Pok Pok.

—–

When I got to Portland, my mother-in-law handed me a printout of a restaurant review from Portlandfoodanddrink.com. As I read it, I started to go a wee bit loopy, because it was describing the exact kind of restaurant I’ve long dreamed about stumbling upon in the US: a little northern/northeastern Thai restaurant:

> The papaya salad is marvelously refreshing; incredibly complex and yet perfectly balanced between sweet, spicy, salty and astringent. Little chopped peanuts and longbeans give a distinctive crunch; tamarind and palm sugar work together in perfect balance.

I was practically in the car before I finished reading. Pok Pok, it turns out, is a little shack. The owner, as you might guess, isn’t from Bangkok. You might not guess that his name is Andy Ricker and he isn’t from Thailand at all. A former sous-chef at the defunct and lamented Zefiro, Ricker is crazy for Thai food. As he told me by email:

> I went to thailand in 1988 for the backpacker experience,
loved it, returned when a friend moved there a few years later. was
introduced to the local chiang mai food by him and his wife, and have
been going back yearly for 2-3 months at a time since then. spend
much of my time in CM studying the food with their family and
friends, eating the food, learning the language (rudimentary
conversational). CM is a food mecca!

Aside from the som tam, Pok Pok serves a delicious grilled chicken (gai yang). Ricker imported the rotisserie from Bangkok, and uses Cornish game hens. I enjoyed the lemongrass-marinated chicken and its spicy dipping sauce. The weird thing about it was that in Thailand, chickens tend to be flavorful but tough and scrawny; this chicken was juicy. I also had a bowl of kao soi (curry noodle soup, hugely popular in Chiang Mai) and some pork satay. The satay is the best I’ve had anywhere, unbelievably tender and juicy.

There was also sticky rice. Basically, I ordered 90 percent of the menu.

Ricker lives in the house next door to Pok Pok, and he’s converting part of the house into a sit-down restaurant with an expanded menu. Here’s a hint of what it might include:

> dishes that are ubiquitous in
thailand (ie: khao kha muu, kwaytieo naam, kwaytieo reua, plaa ping,
plaa neung manao, muu yaang, kai teun, etc.) never seem to make it on
to menus here, and the stuff that does is almost always watered down
or homogenized for the american palate.

What the hell is he talking about? I can help you out. **Khao kha muu** is stewed pork leg on rice. **Kwaytieo naam** is noodle soup with meat and vegetables. **Kuaytieo ruea** (“boat noodles”) is noodles in dark broth with beef. **Plaa ping** is grilled fish. **Plaa neung manao** is steamed fish with lime. **Muu yaang** is marinated grilled pork. And **kei teun**, well, I had to ask:

> Kai teun is stewed chicken with herbs often served in a claypot with noodles–chinese in origin.

Stepping across the border, he’s also planning to feature a famous Hanoi fish dish. “Basically anything that goes well with beer and whisky,” Ricker said.

Pok Pok is already one of the most intriguing Thai restaurants in the US. With its impending expansion, it will almost certainly become one of the best.

**Pok Pok**
3226 SE Division
Portland OR 97202
(503) 232-1387
Mon-Sat: Lunch 11:30am-3:30pm, Dinner 4:30pm-8pm