One of the most exciting chefs to be in town for the Sydney International Food Festival was the witty and erudite David Thompson. If you aren’t familiar with Thompson, the caffeine-fuelled chef is the father of Thai food in Australia and one of the main reasons that Sydneysiders have a taste for good spicy Thai food rather than creamy bland green curries.
He is consultant to the one Michelin star Namh in london and is about to move to Thailand permanently with his longterm partner Tanongsak Yordwa.
Thompson was in Sydney back in October to play host to several of the SIFF sessions but also to launch the superb Megachef fish sauce and his doorstop of a $100 book Thai Street Food. I was lucky enough to met him again for the Melbourne launch of Megachef in Decemberat Longrain where we were treated to some of his awesome food where the assembled press (including The australian’s John Lethlean) picked the bones of crisp fried fish clean.
I recorded this interview for a story I’m writing for SBS Food outside Sailor Thai in Sydney so it’s pretty rough. But it’s worth a listen to 30 minutes of Thompson’s views on cooking. Just click on the link to either listen here or download.
David Thompson on Thai food, El Bulli and pretty much everything
Checkout my previous postcasts with Heston Blumenthal, Thomas Keller and Sat Bains.
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I just adore David! Erudite yes he is most definitely. Intelligent, dry, and a little bit cheeky too.
Marvellous piece Ed. Thank you.
Glad to have been of service.Hope to do more this year.
Yes, great stuff!
I mentioned this on Twitter, but it bears repeating: you should get a dedicated RSS feed for your podcasts, so we can subscribe with iTunes.
Matt, Easy enough to set up a podcast feed in Wordpress just by making a podcast category. I’ll sort it as I hope to do a few more interviews for the Food festival.
My interview in which David Thompson slags El Bulli http://bit.ly/4NTLr0
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http://bit.ly/len9p Thai master David Thompson in conversation: One of the most exciting chefs to be in town for th… http://bit.ly/8YAcWy
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How sad, and lazy, to be bothered enough by the (minimal) challenges of the Asian supermarket to write a whole article. Personally I love that I can buy a whole lotta different flavours and experiment. Because I no longer live near an Asian supermarket we tend to do this in big periodic shopping trips. You know what? A years worth of Asian jars and sauces and spices probably costs me less than $50. So I go nuts and take a risk, I buy mystery packets, I buy stuff I don’t know what to do with, and we test it at home.
I don’t want to pay a premium for Simon Johnson or someone to repackage that gear in a bottle with English writing. I love the Chinese Cocking Wine too much (ok, sometimes you buy, you taste test and buy the one that tasted best, but sometimes you just buy the one with the rudest mistranslation).
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As they say in South America, every Simon Johnson has his Necia Wilden.
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Great post, Zoe. And you’re right, that article has irritated the crap out of me as well. I agree with your claim that she’s spoiling the adventure, the learning we all go through when we’re actually interested in the process of cooking, not just the ‘elite’ (or as Ed would say, wankerish) knowledge of what’s ‘best’.
Sure, we all want quality ingredients – for flavour, for ethical reasons in terms of the food workers who grew or otherwise produced the goods & the animals from which they came, and for reasons of environmental sustainability. And I imagine that many Asian ingredients will increasingly be available that adhere to these bourgie, righteous requirements – which is great, IMO. Though demanding them because they’re attached to some white dude’s name or come in sleek packaging to match your stylish KitchenAid is not great, I reckon. It’s just about accruing cultural capital – distinguishing yourself from the masses with your excellent ‘taste’.
And finally, you’ve certainly nailed the core issue with Wilden’s article: It sets up European food traditions as normal, and Asian food traditions as deviant.What a ridiculously ahistorical description she offers with her claim that going through the Asian grocer is like a “Chinese remake of the Da Vinci Code,” as though learning any new foodway is not a treasure hunt, full of pitfalls and discoveries! But the real low for me came when she complained about not being able to distinguish which soy sauce is organic because it’s written in Japanese.
Sorry, Necia, we’ll ensure in future to get all that translated for you. We’ll make sure and get ‘them’ to translate all the Greek, Turkish, Italian, Spanish… you get the picture… on all the other interesting and delicious foodstuffs available in Australia while we’re at it. And won’t the world be so interesting when everyone here is just like us and there’s no need to work through the challenges of translation, be they linguistic or cultural?
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“We’ll make sure and get ‘them’ to translate “
I made my friend K8y read the article this afternoon (she didn’t get very far without spluttering). She used to work in Ashfield in Sydney, which has many Chinese-owned businesses. She said there had been Council regulations to make English signage compulsory where there were Chinese signs displayed.
Couldn’t really believe it, but here’s a 2006 article by Deborah Singerman in Eureka Street and a very recent one by Brett Nielson of UWS in the journal Portal (a pdf). Off to read them now!
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A great article.
I always find it interesting to see the positioning that goes on with food.
As someone of Greek background, I always find it interesting how cuisines – other than the traditional canon – French, Italian and (more recently) Spanish – are always deemed as inferior cuisines.
To watch a Greek mother make their own filo pastry by hand is a wonder to observe. It requires skill and technique.
I did not read the original article but I am appalled by the racist assumptions it makes.
It is as if there are no other grand culinary traditions – Persian, Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Lebanese, Egyptian, which require technique and refined understandings of taste and texture.
It reminds me of the discussions I have had with Anglo-Australians re the folk traditions of ‘cald’ communities when it comes to the arts. Ballet and contemporary dance are deemed to be paragons on ‘excellence’ but classical Indian dance or Macedonian folk dances or flamenco are deemed to be ‘folkloric.’
I understand that it is easy to find the markers of excellence in the classical food traditions of Europe but not for Chinese or Vietnamese or Persian or Indian food traditions.
We have enough enough discourse to understand what constitutes a great ‘olive oil’ or a great ‘Bordeaux’ or a grand English cheddar.
But have we had the discourse to establish the markers of what constitutes a great pho or a great basmati rice or a great couscous or a great ghee?
How do we know that we are eating a good felafel or a baklava when we are eating out on Sydney Road?
Will leave it at that for now. I think we need to make sure we construct the alternative discourse to the middle class snobbery of Necia Wilden and make sure we construct an alternative universe in which we construct the counter-discourse.
We need to share our knowledge and experience and reach out beyond our assumptions.
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A great post about a terrible article.
I’ve only been into a Simon Johnson shop once, and I wanted to retch.
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You’re absolutely right of course about the white bourgie entitlement on grotesque display in that article (and you generously said you din’t mind a bit of food snobbery, but I really thought the food snobbery going on there was crudely correlated with prices and brands, and that got up my nose). I do think however that it might be prudent to limit consumption of food produced in China and Hong Kong, especially seafoods and extra especially shellfish. My friend (who owns the visitor cats) is back from two years living in HK and was just the other day talking about the endemic food contamination because of pollution and issues with food processing. The melamine in milk scandal was apparently just the tip of the iceberg. Local fish and shellfish is all contaminated with bacteria and heavy metals. There are announcements on the loudspeakers in supermarkets to soak your vegetables for three hours before cooking, etc. I think if you were eating a lot of oyster sauce it’d be safer to make your own with oysters you knew about. This is a different issue to what you’ve pointed out, naturally.
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There are many things that article didn’t do, Laura
In general I try to buy local food, but we eat probably 2-3 tablespoons of oyster sauce a month between four of us. At that level, it doesn’t concern me, which is not to say I wouldn’t be happy to look at an alternative.
for the dimensions of the problem, check out these photographs by Lu Guang (卢广) which won a prize in “humanistic photography” last year.
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Part of the fun of going to various Asian and Middle Eastern grocers is that you discover how much you can save by avoiding the Simon Johnson’s of this world. Often the difference *for exactly the same product* is quite substantial. I had this experience with rose water and orange flower water when moving between The Essential Ingredient (when it had a Brisbane branch) and an Indian grocer. Pulses were another ingredient where I observed considerable disparity.
Still, I think there is a place for the kind of ‘translation’ of ingredients that cultural mediators like David Thomson effect.
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Shit my wanker alert just went off the freakin’ dial!
I do not want to go to Simon Johnson to have some kind of over-packaged, over-priced mediated gastronomic “experience” for people who can’t handle the real thing. That kind of thing is more about food as a status symbol rather than about eating and sharing the love. It’s all way too self conscious.
However, I’m not really convinced about the racism criticism. The cuisines she refers to glowingly, and which now have elite ingredients attached to them, have only been considered worthy of such ingredient trainspotterism very recently. Spanish, Italian, Greek were all subservient to French, the only ‘true’ cuisine. And English was considered a joke less still a cuisine. Given that these vaunted Euro cuisines were, until recently, considered the “other” to French’s “norm”, I’m not buying the racist line. IMO her article is embarrassing and gauche, but not racist.
I’m also going to be a bit controversial and say I find this kind of ingredient trainspotterism rather tedious. Seriously, can you really tell the difference between, say, normal olive oil and olive oil hand pressed at midnight on a full moon by virgins, once you’ve browned the onions?! If you’re only making tuna mornay, what’s the point of using Ortiz??
I would have classed myself a food elitist & happily a snob. Perhaps I’m more of a pleb than I thought. I just don’t think it’s about cost- it’s about adventure.
Great post Zoe, very thought provoking.
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I think that that “ingredient trainspotterism” (great term, btw) can cut both ways – sometimes uber-quality is irrelevant, eg all the sensible Italians who warn against using your best EVOO to fry an egg – but a good middle-level product will be significantly better than the cheapest (oils again a good example).
The articles I linked to up there in comment #8 both mention the desire to train Chinese shopkeepers in Ashfield in the sort of commercial niceities that Euro-descended shoppers value, such as greetings and smiles and freely offered advice. I see a racist tone in the demand for hand-holding and refusal to engage with the Asian ingredient shopping experience on its own terms.
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I wrote a comment but it got lost. Probably a good thing – it wasn’t too coherent. I don’t think this one is much better, I’m afraid. Sorry it’s so long. Again.
Here is what I think I wrote about:
1. I think, here, class is perhaps a bit of a bigger issue than, or at least working in complicated ways with, race. So the tossers writing that article are aiming to eat like hoity toity types. So they’re looking for hoity toity ingredients. Yes, it’s nice to have very good quality ingredients, but unless you are actually hoity toity, and aiming to eat like a hoity toity, you won’t eat all meals comprising of all expensive/top shelf ingredients. Here, I keep thinking of issues of ‘authenticity’: eating like a well off person? Someone on a basic wage? Someone struggling? Someone living in the city? A farmer? … which is kind of related to…
2. Sure, there are heaps of wicked cool top shelf ingredients from all over a particular country, but certain ingredients tend to be specialities in certain areas. So you might get awesome Cheese Type A from region x, fabulous Sausage B from region y, etc etc. I’m figuring that if you lived in region x or y, you’d eat that region’s speciality quite regularly, for a more reasonable price. And I’m wondering if the rest of your diet might be a bit less amazing. So you wouldn’t get Cheese Type A in region y, but you do get that Sausage B.
3. Foods are seasonal. So Sausage B might rock at one part of the year, but not in another. So mightn’t it make sense that you can’t find it all year round, everywhere? Inaccessibility is part of what makes an ingredient so great – I mean, mangoes are great because they’re at their best only part of the year. So you gorge then, but then don’t eat them the rest of the year. So not being able to have everything you want all the time is kind of a good thing.
Is it just a hoity toity tosser impulse to get shitty that you can’t have EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW?
4. wtf is ‘Asia’? I mean, if this author is crying like a baby because they can’t find That Great Asian Hoity Toity Shop, maybe they need to get a clue: there’s a big difference between Thai, Vietnamese, Indian… cuisine. Let alone within China. So I’m figuring that part of the pleasure of eating within or borrowing from or just getting nommy with a particular cuisine is having to look a little further afield than that one, convenient, super-packaged hoity toity speciality shop. So you do have to check out the Phillipino grocer, the Hmong family’s stand at the market, the Vietnamese grocer.
5. There ARE speciality shops selling ‘Asian’ food gear. It’s just that they’re not carefully whiteified, hoity-toitified shops where everything is overpriced and carefully labelled in english.
6. I think that searching for particular speciality products distracts from the importance of fresh produce. I’m thinking about particular Indian or Thai culinary traditions where eating fresh greens is really super important. I mean, having just the right soy sauce is nice, but having perfectly fresh greens cooked just right is far more important. And of course, this leads to the idea that if you’re a truly badass foody, you have a garden of your own where you grow badass veggies.
… I keep having visions of Jamie Oliver in his telly veggie patch crapping on about kids’ lunches, or Stephanie Alexander getting so crazy about veggie patches in schools…
And I have to add a word for the Ashfield grocers:
I go up to the main drag in Ashfield every day to buy my groceries. I deal with at least half a dozen sales people regularly. I have dealt with dozens and dozens. And every day I get smiles and friendly greetings and then ‘have a nice day!’s. When I go to the fish shop, I don’t speak any Chinese languages and the ladies behind the counter don’t speak a heap of English. It’s crowded in there and it smells bad on a hot day. But the ladies are happy to tell you what to do with a whole, giant fish. And the nannas standing near by are often keen to disagree and offer contrary advice. In Cantonese. Most people in there are also pretty cool with answering questions. If you’re nice and not a pain in the arse. You just have to be brave and to take it slowly, taking risks on fish you might end up hating. It’s also worth reading up on fishes before you go in. I think that if you weren’t used to the shop, it’d be scary and intimidating. My Squeeze only buys their pre-packed salmon because he’s shy. But even he’s getting braver and asking for help with things.
I also go to a good butcher where one lady speaks good English but the surly teenager doesn’t (well, do any surly teenagers?) and the older man doesn’t. But we muddle through and they’re very good about taking heads off chickens for me, cutting me deals when I’m short of cash, etc. At the BBQ place there’s less English, but they know me and it’s one of my favourite places to go.
You can still make jokes even if you don’t share the same language, and people usually like helping other people. Especially naive white girls like me who want to buy the wrong type of chicken (‘no, no, you want this – very sweet, very tender’) and silly frecklers like my Squeeze wanting to buy crappy tinned tomatoes instead of fresh (‘no! this is better!’)
I tend to shop at the cheapy greengrocer which is jampacked and super busy. I’m often the only skip in there. I’ve noticed that while it’s always busy and often super crowded, people in there know how to behave in a busy, crowded shop. When we (very rarely) get a confused yuppy from summer hill, they don’t seem to know how to shop in a crowd where you have to kind of push your way through politely. There’s one thing I’ve learnt shopping in Coburg, Brunswick and now Ashfield: nannas don’t say excuse me.
I’ve also learnt:
- If you want to get anywheres, you can’t stand back with weirdly formal British queuing manners.
- You also have to be cool and relaxed, especially when it’s fucking hot (as these joints aren’t air conditioned): don’t get angry.
- Don’t be rude. Rude = loud and sweary, _too_ pushy or aggressive, too demanding.
- Get out of the way of tiny nannas with giant shopping trolleys.
- Don’t use a huge supermarket type trolley, use a basket.
- Touch everything. Dismiss anything that’s not fresh. Ask the young fellas putting out stock to find you something better from out the back. Haggle.
- Buy groceries everyday; only eat gai larn or choy you’ve bought that day, eat your fresh herbs immediately. Sure, this is time-hungry stuff, but it makes you eat your fresh veggies STRAIGHT AWAY and you’re better for it.
- In season stuff is cheap – buy a lot of it and eat it quickly.
A certain degree of bravado and posturing is appreciated. But too much is rude. I mean, when I go to my favourite dumpling joint if I’m offered the dodgy table at the back I say ‘no thanks’ and then I ask for a better one. If they reply with ‘it’s reserved’ I go to walk out. Queen of Bluff. And they then offer me the better table. But you can’t be too pushy. And it helps to tip.
I find shopping in Ashfield very different to shopping in Brunswick or over in Haberfield, where shop keepers are much more inyourface European style friendly. I like that inyourface stuff, but it doesn’t feel polite to stare/make super-eye-contact and get all up in someone’s grill that way in a Chinese restaurant or grocer. I’ve also noticed that I’m physically much bigger than most of the people in the grocer and that the aisles can feel a bit squashy – because I’m Anglo and because I’m fatter than they are. So that can make me feel a bit awkward.
Basically, I figure that I need to learn the skills to get along. I quite like learning new skills; it makes me more awesome. I don’t like shopping in up market hoity toity speciality food shops. I’d rather get amongst it and have a few scary first time experiences and get some skills.
So I just want to end with: Ashfield is full of super-friendly, super-nice shop keepers that I see everyday. I see far less nastiness or shittiness or arsehole-ness there than I do in hoity toity Summer Hill (land of yuppy arseholes).
Zoe, this post was so thought provoking and interesting.
I need to learn some Cantonese, because I mean, what the fuck, I can’t even say thank you in a Chinese language and I sure as shit learnt how to say ‘graci’ and ’scusi senora’ in Brunswick.
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dogpossum your comment was ated by the spam filter, but I have put you on the whitelist (ha!)
I take your point about class and race – the “Asian food experts” namechecked in the section of the article about what you should buy are: Kylie Kwong, Tony Tan, Cheong Liew, Neil Perry, Martin Boetz (of longrain in Sydney) and Ty Bellingham (of Sailor’s Thai in Sydney).
And that coming to understand where you are and how to behave is exactly what I’m talking about. I’m 5′11 and not a small person, so I take up a huge amount of space in a crowded aisle (even more so when I had a giant bourgie three wheeler pram with me). I love that point about being wary of the Nannas – they’re more powerful than they look
If you’re after a good fish book, I’ve been finding Hilary McNevin’s Guide to Fish very useful – it’s Australian and focuses on sustainable eating. She blogs at Food for Thought.
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Dogpussum –
I agree with every word. Shopping on my local high street’s been an education and absolutely brilliant. I like the way that what you’re talking about is just what you do on a day to day basis, as I do. It’s not some self conscious special occasion exercise in foodie-ness. It’s just normal shopping.
Since living in this part of north London I’ve learnt that smiles, questions and becoming a known regular, as well as an ability to hold one’s ground in a throng of people with different attitudes to personal space, are all that’s needed to have heaps of fun and adventure while doing the otherwise routine milk/ bread run.
Your point about how you need a bit of bravado really rang true to me. I remember I took a loaf of bread back to the turkish mini-market because it was stale. Of course, it shouldn’t have been stale, but, to me, the benefits of all the cool stuff they sell (pomegranate molasses-yes!) outweigh the risk of old bread. And because I stood my ground and told them off (but not too much!) I now had a relationship with the guys, which is handy when you’re 50p short on the pot of hommous…
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Sounds to me like this woman’s problem is with Simon Johnson.
All I’m really hearing is “why can’t I do all my wanking in the one place, where everything’s shiny and the staff pretend to adore me?”.
By the way Zoe, I’ve found a couple of reliable sources of toban djan (and various barky/rhizomey/peely things) up in Preston, so I shouldn’t be needing your mailorder help again for a while.
I made an awesome snack for blokedy blokes watching cricket – sichuan pork bites. Marinate 2cm cubes of pork belly in toban djan and rice wine for 24 hours or so, then bake them on a tray till crispy round the edges and serve with lettuce leaves for wrapping. The skin stays chewy rather than crackly, and there’s fat all over everything, just as it should be.
On which note, I got href=”http://www.eatmedaily.com/2008/12/avant-lard-fat-by-jennifer-mclagan-cookbook-review/” rel=”external”>this for xmas. I’m working up to a dinner party on the theme.
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Erk.
Link better?
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I loved this quote from Dogpossum: ‘I figure that I need to learn the skills to get along. I quite like learning new skills; it makes me more awesome.’
It does. Also liked the note about absence of ‘excuse me’ – the Vietnamese don’t do that either. They just push you where you think you should go.
Zoe, those photos are horrible. Vietnam is not so developed but you do worry a bit eating there. I’ve never seen so many plastic bags in all my life, and the smog is a mix of scooter exhaust, burning plastic (because you can’t get rid of it any other way) and industrial funk, and heaven knows what’s in the dust. England was like that once – how very fortunate we are to live now, and live where we do.
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