Thailand has successfully put a lot of effort in exporting cuisine.
It's no wonder that Pad Thai and other Thai cuisine is ubiquitous in many countries, with the Thai government putting so much effort into 'gastrodiplomacy' [0][1]. I'm certainly not complaining!
What’s interesting is that Thai food in some east Asian countries is considered fancy and the price reflects that while in North America most of them (but not all) are the affordable kind —that is on par with other non-fancy food joints.
It seems that Asian is fairly set on low-mid, while European can go higher and still do well. Same with Japense and Chinese. Italian has been so integrated into the local cuisine that you have very cheap to very fancy. French is rare so more expensive. Japense also rare, though sushi train type places are becoming more popular (though still on the pricer side).
Note: Tex/Mex, Italian, and Japanese availability, quality, and pricing vary widely according to where in the country you are.
I'd chalk up French to the 1980s. As in "If you wanted to be a really good chef, you studied French cooking", which resulted in popular "If you wanted to go to a really fancy restaurant, it was French."
Thankfully, that seems to be fading in the urban US in favor of more local/fusion emphasis.
I'd say that cheap Italian and expensive Italian food are completely different cuisines in Australia.
Cheap places are "Australian Italian", usually with incredibly generic menus and large servings of bland food. That's your Lygon Street Italian, if you're familiar with Melbourne.
Compared to nearby Tipo 00, what I would probably consider to be more authentic Italian (although still not 'expensive'): https://www.tipo00.com.au/food/
There are also significantly better inauthentic-Italian experiences around, like Capitano which takes its cues from Italian-American food culture.
As an aside I find it amusing that we have at least 3 of the more expensive Asian places here in Sydney (Spice Temple, Sake, and Longrain) run by local white guys who did significant time overseas to learn the cuisine. And the food is good. Though I just found out Longrain closed so that's sad, they had a few things you'd not see at a local place.
In the US, there's an informal hierarchy of what kinds of cuisine can be "fancy" and demand an above-average price. French, obviously, and most other Western European cuisines can be fancy. Which isn't to say that there can't be a cheap pizza or pasta restaurant, but if you look at the range it will be above average. Japanese food - sushi especially - can successfully be expensive, more so than other East Asian cuisines like Thai and Vietnamese. There are regional variations here - if there is a regional interest in it, you can have more expensive restaurants of a particular cuisine - I'm talking more average across the US.
In the US it seems to follow the economic characteristics of the supporting population. So while there is expensive gastronomic cuisine in Mexico City, the great majority of Mexican food (not including chains) is working class cheap. Same for Vietnamese and most Thai.
Italian seems more bimodal, you have cheap pizza joints and sandwich/sub/hero shops and you have the white tablecloth places. Japanese is either $$ or $$$ (in rest pricing parlance). But rarely do you get cheap Japanese or cheap Korean though Korean rarely goes to $$$. (maybe LA has super fancy ones) Indian mirrors Korean. I think they kind of loosely mirror the economics of the population that brings the cuisine and those that give it their patronage.
Sashimi/sushi slot nicely into $$$+ pricing range because the small portions and emphasis on presentation are very similar to the aesthetic often found in high end gourmet restaurants, which tend to serve things that are beautiful, tasty, and tiny.
At least where I'm from there's bimodalism in Japanese cuisine if you count sushi rolls, which can be had dirt cheap (pretty localised/internationalised though). I like cheap sushi here because the cheap sushi game is usually locked down by koreans, so the rolls end up being this blend of kimbap and sushi rolls.
Dunno about Korean restaurants in the west though, have only been to Korean restaurants in Korea.
edit: Wish I was from/lived some place with nice cheap Italian sandwich shops etc, that must be amazing.
To edit further, I think western consumers' perception of a country (as well as what you said about the country's population) affects price as well
It’s also interesting to compare one food’s country in its one country. In Japan there is local food option ranging $-$$$$. This is not true of France, where $ is kebab or Mc Donalds. $$ is in most cases from frozen food which is a shame, thus I do not count it as a real option. $$$ starts to have meals from fresh food. Of course $$$$ exists as well, yet it may be disappointing quantity wise.
I agree, and as people get more established this can change. There are a couple $$/$$–$$$ Vietnamese places in Minneapolis now and I saw one in London recently.
In the UK a Thai restaurant is typically at least semi-fancy, but you'll often be able to find a pad thai or thai red/green curry as an inexpensive option on a pub or cheap restaurant menu.
I went to Thailand a couple of a years ago and visited a restaurant in Bangkok that was supposed to have the best pad thai in the country. It was decent, but I've had better in the UK. The best thing about the restaurant was that every table had a pot of peanut dust that you could add as liberally as you liked to your meal.
They say "There is a pad thai for every cook in Thailand."
My (non-exhaustive!) sampling doesn't contradict that.
Tastes differ on which variations are best, but I agree with the ground peanuts (and lime and pepper powder and ideally served with cucumber slices...)
in LA, you can find excellent versions of every type of asian cuisine (thai, vietnamese, japanese, korean, filipino, indian, cambodian, bangladeshi, etc.), not to mention other cuisines like ethiopian, mexican, salvadorean, etc., for a range of prices. the affordable end is still often delicious, but requires a bit more trial and error to find the good places. european cuisines and “new american” tend to be pricier, but is still often yummy. this is why i think LA is the best food city in the country. you can often find the same (particularly asian) foods elsewhere, but either for more money, inferior quality, or both.
I remember Thai restaurants being fairly fancy back in the '90s and early 2000s. Its evolution into regular "take out" food over the past ~20 years has been interesting to see.
Huh? A bento lunch goes for 70 to 120ntd, most Thai places will be over 200 closer to 300. It’s the same price as Indian or Spanish (or figure “foreign food”)
Interestingly, it turns out that competent governments are able to export culture and brand in a directed, purposeful way (as opposed to organic) if they put enough money and effort behind the effort and have the right kind of staffing.
It's fascinating because most government tourism boards rarely achieve success. I'd never have imagined that bureaucrats would know anything about promoting the arts.
> most government tourism boards rarely achieve success
How do you figure that? Most government tourism advertising is branding, and not specific to a business (it's usually "Visit X" with some motivational photos, where X is a country or region). Countries certainly have brands, are perceived in a certain way. Are you suggesting that brand advertising has no effect on this? Is it that brand advertising works for brands other than countries?
I speculate, but have no data, that most exercises carried out by tourism boards like advertising, cultural events, etc. barely move the needle on tourism because they're based on the usual drab formula of advertising and cultural events.
To really create interest in a country, one has to export a desirable mainstream cultural product like food or media. One has to tell a story, and good branding requires a compelling story.
I mean, if all there was were nice advertising of sandy beaches and temples in Thailand, etc. I'd probably not be motivated to visit. Nothing wrong with it, but there's no emotional connection because there's no narrative (sandy beaches are everywhere, and there are temples in most Asian countries -- there's nothing distinct about these things in themselves). But the tourism board of many countries stick to this formula because there's not much imagination on what else there is to be done.
On the other hand I've eaten Thai food regularly due to the ubiquity of Thai restaurants in North America, watched viral tearjerker Thai commercials on Youtube, watched Muay Thai (popularized by American movies like Kickboxer, and more recently by Tony Jaa's movies like Ong Bak), read stories about Bangkok's traffic jams where people have to pee in a cup (probably hyperbole), seen Thailand featured on travel shows like Bourdain's -- the result of which I now have a human connection to Thailand and made me want to visit. (I did a few years ago and really enjoyed it)
I can't say I have the same feelings about Indonesia for instance, even though it's the 4th largest country in the world and probably quite fascinating to visit. Australians frequent Bali because it's a nearby tropical destination, but I'd bet many people around the world couldn't tell you much about Indonesia if you asked them. Now imagine if Indonesia started exporting its food, which I can attest is quite good based on what I had in Amsterdam. That would start a whole new conversation about Indonesia.
Sure - you can't tell much of a story in a single image, so you piggy-back on an existing narrative, and increase its salience and availability, while associating it with the brand target.
I'm no advertising expert, but I don't believe that brand advertising doesn't work. It's clear that Thailand is already more salient and relevant to you, but that doesn't mean that advertising for Indonesia is pointless; it's just that it's starting with fewer hooks, and it's got to reach for stories more indirectly.
I wouldn't make the extrapolation that brand advertising doesn't work -- that's too general. I was merely observing that for countries (as opposed to consumer products), advertising alone isn't sufficiently salient to create an emotional connection -- efforts to produce culture and export soft power are much more along the right track.
Take Canada for instance -- I'm from there. Anthony Bourdain had this to say on Canadian tourism ads: “Whoever is in charge of promoting Canada abroad completely have their heads up their asses. It’s all like bears and swatting salmon and Mounties.”
Canada is so much richer than the stereotypes Americans have of us -- we're not just about the pristine wilderness, cold winters and funny accents. Canada's cities are culturally deep and have a dynamism fueled by immigration that is palpable--and more compelling than many U.S. cities--due to sheer Brownian motion collisions of different cultures. The dynamism of Toronto rivals and in some ways exceed that of Chicago where I now live.
So much culture and innovation is being created every day in food (especially in Montreal), TV shows, movies, universities, arts, etc. in Canada but no one has figured out how to sell that.
To be fair, there are some small successes: Anne of Green Gables for instance is a distinct cultural product that guarantees hordes of visitors to Prince Edward Island every summer without fail and with a near zero advertising budget. We need more of this.
In the marketing world, regional tourism is a dog. Municipalities and politicians dump money into billboards and magazine ads for basically no results, if they even bothered to measure anything half the time.
> It's fascinating because most government tourism boards rarely achieve success.
I don't agree with this. There are many examples of Tourism boards successfully selling a country really well. 100% Pure New Zealand, Incredible India, etc
The article was about food but glossed over one point: the kingdom of Siam was multi-ethnic, including various people with shared connections across borders (e.g. muslim Malays, Hmong, Karen, Chinese, etc). Switching to "Thai" land was intended to marginalize these other factions. I mention this because the name change was blandly listed along with mentioning the desire to dechinesify the noodles' origin.
This was very much the tenor of the times: Hungary had achieved dual status in the "Austro-Hungarian" empire half a century before; by the 30s "national" self determination was all the rage thanks to WW1, Woodrow Wilson, and picking apart the bones of the Ottoman Empire.
I am not a member of any of the groups involved with no axe to grind (at least in this regard!). But since the article was both a fun trivia piece but brushed against this topic I thought it worth clarifying.
This article and your comment actually clarified a lot for me. I always thought it was strange how many quintessentially "Thai" things have the word "Thai" in their names (muay thai, pad Thai, Thai tea, etc.) It didn't seem natural that people would make stuff and then self-consciously name it after their own ethnicity. It would be like Indians calling their tea preparation "Indian Tea" rather than just using "chai," the native Indian word for "tea."
The Indianness of the tea wouldn't have been a relevant thing if it's being made in India for other Indians after all. So why would Thai people invent a style of boxing and then call it "Thai style boxing" even in their native language?
It hadn't occurred to me that it was all a top-down effort to create a "national identity" and didn't organically develop from the folk culture at all.
Well, in Greece we call a particular kind of coffee "Turkish coffee" [1] and that's definitely not for nationalistic reasons, we're supposed to be enemies with the Turks. In fact, some people do call Turkish coffee "Greek coffee" and that seems to have started for nationalistic reasons, but to my experience most people mix the two names freely.
The reason is really to tell that kind of coffee apart from e.g. Italian or French coffee styles (we call filter coffee "French" whereas we don't call anything in particular "Italian coffee" but of course there's lots of preparation styles that originate in Italy).
So sometimes maybe it's a bit of a mix? If you have a variety of something that's distinctly different from what your neighbours are using you might want to call it "my-style X" just to know what you're talking about. Of course then there's a bit of nationalistic pride that comes with it "this is how _we_ do it" etc.
Do Turks call it the word for coffee or is it referred to as "Turkish coffee?" though? In Thai the Thais themselves call these things "X Thai" in their own language.
Like it makes sense to me that we might have domestic boxing and then decide that boxing from the country across the border is [Neighboring Country] Boxing. What was confusing for me is people calling THEIR OWN style of boxing "[Our Country] Boxing."
FWIW, in the case of Muay Thai it was basically invented as a sport in the modern age. It's derived from an older martial art known as "Muay Boran," which translates to "Ancient Boxing" and is more analogous to traditional martial arts like Kung Fu. Muay Thai was developed to create a Thai national sport to compete with Western boxers.
All tea originated in China. In southern Chinese dialects tea is called "Cha," which is where other languages got their "Cha" sounding word for tea, and this includes the Indian languages afaik.
The northern dialects' word sounded more like "tea" which is where the Western languages got their word for tea, through trade
You've got the geographic regions mixed up. Northern Chinese refer it to "cha", while Southern Chinese call it "te" (sounds like tailor). Even though India is geographically closer to southern China, they got the word from Portuguese.
National self-determination movements go back far before the 1930s and indeed that’s (one of the primary reasons) why the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires started to break up in the late 19th century. WW1 and its aftermath were just the final steps.
Apparently my favourite pad see ew (I've seen at least 5+ spellings of that over the years so pick the one you like) is Chinese inspired too and wears it a bit more proudly.
Not exactly... 'Burma' is a British colonial mispronunciation stemming from the same root source as 'Myanmar', though the latter tends to be associated with the military junta since they formalized it.
Ramen is also a modern food, but at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to Pad Thai.
Pad Thai is top down designed. Made by the government to be appreciated by most people, but with enough character to make it distinctive of the country.
Ramen is bottom up. That's essentially people trying to make survival food taste good.
And it shows. The base recipe for Pad Thai is always the same, just like with traditional food. Individual chefs then add their own personal touch.
Ramen however vary wildly. It is a soup, and there are noodles in it but beside that there is no real recipe. There are some common themes (ex: pork, onion, seaweed, ...), but you will probably find more exception than there are rules.
While a restaurant can claim it serves "true" Pad Thai, "true" Ramen makes no sense.
Is Pad thai designed? The article seems to have implied that the guy who decided it was a national standard was just a thing his housekeeper happened to make.
One local place here served haggis nachos. The lungs, heart, and liver of a sheep boiled, ground, seasoned, mixed with oatmeal and stuffed in its own rectum to be boiled again then chopped and sprinkled over corn chips with salsa and cheese and served with sour cream and guacamole. What's not to love?
> The lungs, heart, and liver of a sheep boiled, ground, seasoned, mixed with oatmeal and stuffed in its own rectum
Hey we're no monsters. It's the heart, lungs & liver of a sheep stuffed into it's _stomach_ not it's rectum. (Though often these days it's in an artificial casing, the whole stomach thing seems to put people off).
> A bowl of rice noodles uses less grain than does a serving of plain rice, and after the second world war Thailand experienced a rice shortage. Popularizing the noodles was also a way to make precious grain supplies last longer.
I like the hypothesis, though I wish this was tested. In my experience, rice can be pretty airy once it's been scooped.
Probably the biggest thing I’ve missed since moving from Australia to London is remotely passable Thai food. Thankfully I’ve found one place, on Deliveroo, that is pretty decent, but everywhere else is mostly rubbish unfortunately.
No wonder when I visited Georgia (country), they had more Thai restaurants than Chinese restaurants. That's unheard of coming from the North American background.
I love the why for Portland. I've always felt like we have so many Thai places because they are so flexible on options.
Going to dinner with lactose intolerant folks, vegans, veggies, and carnivores? Thai will easily serve everyone, and there will be multiple choices for each person.
There's been popping up Thai restaurants left and right here in Norway for the past 15-20 years.
I suspect it has something to do with the large amount of Thai women immigrating here...hell, even in my small rural hometown of 3000, there's one Thai restaurant, and one Thai food truck. Every neighboring town and village has the same.
And you always see them selling spring rolls etc. on facebook buy / sell groups.
Most Thai places cannot make good pad Thai. I don’t know why, but I’d have to go to one that is known to have a good one, otherwise it’s usually way too sweet
I’ve had three, one allegedly from somewhere pretty good, and all were way too sweet for my taste. Only had a couple bites of each, just found them really unpleasant. And I’m American, so I’m fairly desensitized to sugar!
In my experience I never hear the 'D'.
It's like it's dropped and you are left with "Pa Thai". Maybe it's because the letters sound the same and the flow of speak takes it away.
Either, really. And you’ll hear Thai people pronounce it either way (depending on their English reference - usually British), since locals will not call it “Pad Thai”.
Not sure what you mean by this. This is the name in Thai and "ผัดไทย" ([pʰàt tʰāj] in IPA) is what is written on shops and carts where it's sold.
The vowel in "pad" is in between the two options given in the question above. Unlike English, where accents primarily change the vowels, vowels stay quite constant across accents in Thai.
The /a/ in Thai is a central vowel. This is different than English /a/, which is a front vowel. And /o/ is the open back vowel. That is why it falls between English ⟨pad⟩ and ⟨pod⟩. And if you don't speak a language with such a vowel, any particular utterance will probably be mentally mapped to one or the other.
The dish is foreign in Thailand too. It's always available where westerners might be expected to ask for it but I've never, ever, ever seen anyone Thai order it. (Where westerners are not expected it's not on the menu) I can completely understand why as it's never even half as good as a cheap place outside Thailand would serve. It's always kinda dry and bland. You can even massively overpay for it at the best hotels in Bangkok and still it sucks. It's like trying to get proper American Chinese in China... good luck with that.
I suspect you have a very warped view of Thailand -- and of course Thai people are not going to order vastly overpriced pad Thai at the best hotels in Bangkok, because they know where to get better versions for a tenth the price.
I used to work at the HSBC tower on Sathorn, in the heart of Bangkok's financial district. There was a simple open-air shack just outside that served (IMHO) the best pad Thai I've ever had at 25 baht a plate, and the place was packed every day with everybody from suited bankers and lawyers to tuk-tuk drivers. I don't think I ever saw another farang on there though.
Also, proper pad Thai is not spicy, like all noodle dishes in Thailand it's supposed to be served with condiments (chili flakes, phrik kii nuu in fish sauce, sugar, ground peanuts) so you can tweak the flavors to your liking.
> The dish is foreign in Thailand too. It's always available where westerners might be expected to ask for it but I've never, ever, ever seen anyone Thai order it.
I'm sorry but what on Earth are you talking about? I can only assume you have simply never visited Thailand? This is just so inaccurate I don't know what to say.
I live in Southeast Asia and have been to Thailand many times. Pad Thai is well known to every Thai person but it is not seen all that often on their plates (or in their plastic bags, where takeaway food is conveyed). And indeed a lot of Thai restaurant menus do not list Pad Thai, or if they do it's far down the list, like "chicken fingers" in an American restaurant.
In tourist hotspots (which abound in Thailand) you'll tend to see picture menus and Pad Thai will be on them. But there are much, much better dishes to be had outside these areas. One issue is they don't all have consistent names, e.g. when I asked for a recommendation and was given an absolutely amazing dry curry crab noodle dish with egg, I asked for its name in Thai and translated it was "curry crab" which would never get you a similar dish in another restaurant. Even the venerable Pad Kee Mao, which I think is always a noodle dish in America, is sometimes a totally different rice dish in Thailand.
I bet McDonalds sells 50,000 burgers for each time that happens. In my experience most would choose a warmed sausage pack from the convenience store over what is sold as "pad thai" in Bangkok. Like okay, you absolutely need to eat something. They both taste the same but at least the sausage pack only cost 20 baht.
It's no wonder that Pad Thai and other Thai cuisine is ubiquitous in many countries, with the Thai government putting so much effort into 'gastrodiplomacy' [0][1]. I'm certainly not complaining!
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20130926085448/http://thailand.p...
[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/paxadz/the-surprising-rea...