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Field Review 1 - Night + Market Song

In Thai, “song” means “two.” As such, Night + Market Song describes nothing more than a second iteration of Night + Market, Kris Yenambroong’s Thai street food venture in West Hollywood. Taken literally, what would that look like? The restaurant in West Hollywood is filled with family-style wooden tables and intimate two tops. Dim lights barely illuminate the large plants separating diners from each other. Celebrities mill in and out alongside groups of young professionals. The ambiance fits into the surrounding WeHo neighborhood (money + youth + style). It could be overwhelming, if the food weren’t so good.

The thing is, Yenambroong isn’t in the business of duplication. Night + Market Song looks nothing like its parent restaurant. Most of the chairs are foldable and bright oilcloth covers every table. Both a topless Cindy Crawford and Our Lady of Guadalupe look down from the candy-colored walls; the servers wear snapbacks and work out of a 4x4 bar in the back of the cramped space. There’s a huge couch in the entrance to accommodate the ever-present wait for a seat and the areas are separated by bead curtains straight out of any 8-year-old girl’s bedroom. The Silverlake location is obvious: an ambiance with a little less money, a lot more youth, and an aggressively defiant style. It would also most definitely be overwhelming, if the food weren’t even better than its predecessor.

Spicy larbs of crispy rice and charred pork scream for fingers to scoop up bites alongside a healthy portion of coconut sticky rice. Chewy yet soft rice noodles provide a delicious bed for chicken and young octopus. A calm and subtle pad thai ignores preconceived notions of the dish. And, of course, it all goes down great alongside Southeast Asian beer. The American folk tradition of picnics and beer comes alive, but here a massive fried chicken sandwich is more a vehicle for papaya salad than any sort of American iconography. The food fits under the banner of “aharn glam lao,” a Thai phrase that means something similar to “food to facilitate drinking.” It’s Yenambroong’s mission to create an ideal environment for eating and drinking with friends, and Night + Market Song is his Platonic version.

Yenambroong grew up in his family’s Thai restaurant and studied film in college. He came back to his hometown to open his restaurants, with Night + Market opening up adjacent to his parents’ old restaurant space on Sunset. This multi-generational Thai family of cooks fits easily into LA’s robust history of Thai food and incredibly vibrant Thai Town. Despite this, Yenambroong’s restaurants look and feel nothing like the Thai strip mall restaurants for which LA has become famous, which could ordinarily summon cries of inauthenticity. The menus help hush these comments, of course—many of the dishes don’t appear on other Thai restaurants’ menus. Does it even matter, though? Does Night + Market Song really care about being an authentic Thai restaurant? Yenambroong’s confidence and his obvious upbringing make it a moot point (in contrast to, say, Andy Ricker’s constant need to compensate for his American roots). The mystique of the restaurants implies a different mission: the millennial idealist one, for which LA has become a poster child. In this world, quality and enjoyment supersede ethnic distinctions and high/low class differentiation. Personality and passion bound out of the gate of any venture and food is the ultimate equalizer. Normally, discussions around authenticity in Los Angeles turns Sisyphean after enough comments on the city’s disparate geography, ethnic groups, and class distinctions. In a place like Night + Market Song, though, where the colors pop and the spice explodes in your mouth, the only authenticity that matters is the delicious experience of exploring Kris Yenambroong’s food among friends. It’s idealist, sure, but fuck—it’s delicious.

- AL

#SWMS389 #Night Market Song

bell hooks “Eating the Other”

When bell hooks writes the problem of “projection onto the Other of the sense of plenty, bounty, a field of dreams,” Michael Pollan comes to mind. His infatuation with the ways of yore is precisely the projection about which bell hooks writes. He’s nostalgic for a nonexistent time and participates in the erasure of power structures inherent in foodways and food preparation of the past (and, with the exception of his focus on corporate food processing, an erasure of continued power structures). Engaging in the food habits of non-White peoples is, for him, a way to purify himself of the evils of Western progress and civilization. He can rid himself of guilt when he admires the Moroccan bread baker, but then he can retire to his comfortable home in Berkeley without wondering whether maybe that bread baker would like the same air conditioning and time for social and economic mobility.

Cultural appropriation is an interesting conversation because the answer shouldn’t be, in my opinion, a disintegration of the act of cultural exchange. Rather, the problems of cultural appropriation demonstrate how cultural exchange should exist on a basis of fairness and justice. bell hooks exemplifies this situation when she rights how the “ever-present reality of white supremacy [is what] makes problematic the desire of white people to have interaction with the Other.”

I find it fascinating how much of the connotations around consuming (either sexually, spiritually, or through food) the “other” come from subverting puritanical anti-hedonism. If traditions of Western culture didn’t deride pleasure to such a degree, how would cultural appropriation look now? How would White supremacy play out? The “exotic” and the “other” have always held designations of guiltiness, pleasure, irresponsibility, etc. But what if Western society had developed along a different moral code, one in which restraint had less importance to social development? If Western society didn’t have roots in Judeo-Christian power?

- AL

#swms389

The Guide to Chinese Dumplings

So much of online food writing these days aims for one goal: comprehensiveness. The Eater maps, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Food Lab over at Serious Eats, The Washington Post’s search for “America’s Best Food Cities,” etc--food writing attempts to encompass every detail and iteration of any type of eating experience. Lucky Peach’s dumpling guide fits in easily to this landscape and even adds an extra touch of adorable watercolor illustrations. The list of 36 (!) dumplings is intimidating and, for someone who’s only eaten a few of these dumplings myself, a little hard to differentiate. What’s remarkable about the article, though, is that Lucky Peach’s editorial staff didn’t write it themselves. They outsourced the task to a magazine based in Beijing called The Cleaver. It’s a print quarterly “devoted entirely to Chinese food,” and 2 of its 3 editors are white men.

The history of white men’s infatuation with Asian culture (and the women who occupy it) is its own thing, but it’s interesting to see it manifest in this thorough guide to Chinese dumplings. These men at least live in China, but most of Lucky Peach’s readers could only aspire to consume each of the 36 varieties at some point here in the states. Why, then, do we really need to know the details about each variety? At this point, it’s collecting information; little cultural experience or value comes with each dumpling blurb. When does an obsessive need to obtain information and knowledge about another culture stop being respectful and start being appropriative?

The obsession is understandable for several reasons. Chinese dumplings are delicious and their specificity and tradition seems unmatched in other cuisines. Why shouldn’t other cultures learn as much about them as possible? It’s way better than trying to explain every variety of grocery store hotdog (but I’m sure someone has done this. probably vice) because there’s such a strong element of culinary skill and tradition within the dish.

Does learning everything we can about another culture turn a little bit into informational imperialism, though? It’s not old assimilation where cultures lost their individuality for the sake of being supported by a colonial invader, but it’s another form of absorbing a culture into the lexicon of a more powerful one (with America it’s a soft power, since the population and economic sizes of Asian countries make our other powers seem weaker by the day).

I’m not against globalism, and I’d much rather respect the quality and technique of cuisines that haven’t been traditionally lauded (AKA anything besides French and Italian), but there’s something grimy about being an expert on someone else’s culture.

That opens a whole new set of questions, though, like who gets to designate the authenticity of a person’s cultural experience (similar to the Andy Ricker/Pok Pok phenomenon). It mostly feeds back into the essential question of power, and how the information gets handed down. The history of power makes it difficult to imagine a way in which cultural exchange is devoid of all appropriation, though, so perhaps it’s the hurdle our society must jump over in order to reach an egalitarian cultural utopia (if such a thing will ever even exist). Appropriative now, but a lack of otherness in the future.

- AL

#swms389

2016 SGV Dumpling Crawl Itinerary

Modified from Lucky Peach and an excursion w/ the AznDarias

Meet 11AM SHARP at:

Beijing Pie House

846 East Garvey Ave, Monterey Park. (626) 288-3818 What to Order: #1 Summer Squash & Lamb “Pie” ($7.99) or #2 Lamb & Green Onion “Pie” ($7.99) and Vegetarian Option (Turnip Pie)