Khao soi, the Chiang Mai favourite spiced noodle soup, is slowly finding it's way onto Thai menus around Sydney. So seeing it at Jorjarn Thaifood meant we had to have a crack at it.
Here all the additional 'add to taste' toppings (pickled mustard greens, red onions, lime) usually served on the side are all together on the top of the bowl with a small handful of deep fried noodles. The chicken is on the bone, soft and easy to eat and a couple of good bitey hunks. The broth is a thicker curry style, a lardier than laksa soup. It's $12 a pop, plastic bowl and all.
There's only a couple of soups on the menu, including tom yum kuy teaw, a light broth noodle soup with bobbles of pork meatball and a soft boiled egg. As we ordered this, the server mentioned it was spicy. We replied that yes, we didn't mind it spicy so that's OK. He insisted on giving us a less spicy soup. Well, he was wrong. Ripping out the spice also ripped out a lot of the flavour, so this soup was a half what it could have been. While in the end the soup was OK, we couldn't help but wonder what it tasted like in all its full glory.
'Less spicy' - no thanks!
The dish we notice heading out of the stall most is kra pao, chilli chicken mince and rice. It's a big serve of fried chicken mince well spiced up with chilli and holy basil. Orange plastic spork stylists own. This time around we had learnt the lesson of the Tom Yum and when told again by the server that we should have it less spicy, but we insisted on spice. Spice, dangnabbit! Did it blow our heads off? No. We were quite safe.
While we can appreciate many people don't like a spicy dish, we would also love to be trusted to like or love a dish as it's made. Aren't chefs always bleating on about how they hate customers changing their dishes? Just tell us if it's a spicy dish on the menu and we'll order it (or not) how we want it. We'll deal with the burn ourselves. It's a shame to think that stalls feel the need to dumb down the spice or ingredients in dishes because of what they think people want and compromise their food.
Jorjarn Thaifood is at Shop F5, Level 1 Food Court, Market City.
Make Thai food spicy again!
Give this place the flick (in fact, Market City as a whole since they Westernised their food court) and go round the corner to Do Dee Paidang. Not shy at all with their spiciness!
ReplyDeleteOhhh, this is a complicated one. I suffer from the same issue a lot. It's a constant battle.
ReplyDeleteI think the difficulty is that tolerances are so varied and perceptions of tolerance is equally varied. While we may say spicy yes please, get that spicy dish and love it, others may say spicy yes please and be absolutely destroyed by it. Unfortunately, some of them complain and leave bad online reviews based on that experience.
There's an extra layer with Thai people too, as they're socially wired to never want to upset anyone they're extremely risk averse gastronomically. So white people generally carry a lot of risk simply because we're unknown. Of course this isn't the case everywhere but I find it's extremely common.
I can imagine you had experienced a lot of this while in Thailand too?