18th
Catfish Custard: Or How I Stop Worrying and Learned to Love Spoon Thai
From yelp.com
As much as I trust the people on chow.com and lthforums with my tender tastebuds, I was more than a little doubtful around the infamous haw mak or Catfish Custard at Spoon Thai. I imagined a severed catfish head, whiskers and all, peering up at me from a pastry shell—I grimaced, this was the stuff of nightmares or that Saturday Night Live Iron Chef skit, featuring “shark head pizza bagel.”
During one of the beer festivals in Lincoln Square, I was finally within geographic proximity to the “translation menu” at Spoon Thai. By the time I had finished lurking on various food forums, this menu had taken on epic proportions in my mind. Way back in 2006, voracious foodies had to seek out the help of language experts, as documented here, before they could even dream the phrase “authentic Thai.” This menu had no prices, only a simple description with the curlicue Thai writing that made the laminated pages look like a magic potions list. During the first time around, we went with dishes that sounded solidly tasty: crispy pork with chinese broccoli and seafood soup.
When the crispy pork arrived on dark greens, it was apparent that “crispy” also meant fried, HARD. The pork was a pure nugget of fried flavor, with a crunchy outer skin and small morsel of meat on the inside. I was totally in love with the Chinese broccoli since they had managed to infuse the veggies with garlic, but the stems still snapped apart in my mouth like it had barely skipped through the flames. I will never understand southern cooking because crisp vegetables to me are next to godliness.
The second time around at Spoon Thai, I took the plunge with the Catfish Custard and Banana Blossom Salad. It helps to think outside the definition of custard when approaching the hàw mòk plaa dùk (tham eng)—the appetizer was snugly sitting in a banana leaf cup and and looked deceptively pedestrian. After the first bite, I pronounced the place pure genius. Hàw mòk tastes like, in no particular order, fish, coconut, lemongrass, basil—how the hell do these flavors go together? While my dining companion enjoyed the Banana Blossom Salad, I wasn’t nearly as shocked by the flavors, it was sour and used that definite pungent Thai fish sauce I used to smell in my old apartment. Even with a waitress that could rival my mother in pushiness, I’m still dying to go back and hit single curly line on the Spoon Thai’s menu.
