The bad taste guide and rice in lotus leaves

The other day a friend sent me a clipping from a British newspaper, probably the Times of London, which was titled: “In Poor Taste”. The author, Jonathan Margolis, suggests in this article that after Michelin came out with yet another one of its tyrannical “Guides” for the best restaurants in Europe (read French!) what we really need is a “Bad Food Guide”. He writes: “I’m seriously thinking about a Bad Food Guide, complete with awards for the worst restaurants of the year. Hopeless cooking, I can’t help feeling, is so comfortingly English, and there is nowhere better in Britain to start looking for it than in London’s suburbs.”
I like those Brits. They’re droll and good at downgrading themselves. Some of my best friends are British. I even have - believe it or not - an English sister in law who is incidentally an excellent cook. I think it is a splendid idea, I mean the “Bad Food Guide”. Albeit I would be the last one to compile it. Heaven forbid. When I was still living in Bangkok in the early sixties, I wrote restaurant reviews for a while and discovered that it is not done with impunity. At one occasion I was pursued by an irate Chinese restaurateur along Suriwong Road after I had written that his “special” Chinese dessert was nothing else but, what the Americans call, a “Baked Alaska” and for that matter, a disaster. After that incident I vowed never to undertake it again. At another occasion I was asked by the waitress to kiss her. That was also on Suriwong Road and the restaurant was recommended to me by a friend and well known writer, presently based in Hong Kong. The question is; “How far should a customer go to please the management?”
Mr. Margolis, who is definitely not a kind man, went out of his way to find bad food. He says in the article, that’s what people want and describes one place which was extravagantly recommended in six letters, all suspiciously similar. The editors of the paper dispatched a food critic who went for dinner but excused himself the next morning from writing the review because in his words: “It was just too disgusting. The chef would commit suicide if I wrote the truth. And all those nice middle-class customers loved it, so why upset them?”
The author himself went to a hotel restaurant on the M25 which seems to be one of the main drags in the land of Shakespeare. He wrote the following: “It is just possible, I suppose, that ‘oyster, chantarelle and cep mush-rooms picked early this morning, flown from fields across the Channel, pan-fried with shallots, dry vermouth and simply finished with cream in a puff pastry case’ could be an honest description of what was to come but you won’t be surprised to hear that it wasn’t. What did come was a patch of edible dung that Baldrick might have wolfed down.”
Of course people living in glass houses like me should not throw stones for some very good reasons. However, I have to get this off my chest; Thai food in general is excellent, depending on where you eat it, but the nadir of the coffee shop cuisine is undoubtedly “Kow Pat”. Ninety percent of the Kow Pat served in this country is junk. Tasteless, soggy, unappetising, full of lumps, cherry tomatoes, large pieces of onions, kale and other debris and only edible when doused with lots of Nam Plah and Prik Kee Noo. An emergency food for the starved masses perhaps but not a dish to write home about.
What the local cooks do not realise is that Kow Pat, and for that matter any kind of fried rice, should be made with cooked rice which is cold, preferably from the night before or, if not available, let it steam out and cool on a large platter. This is why Nasi Goreng, the Indonesian and Malaysian version, is often served as a breakfast dish, made from left-over rice from the night before. It is still customary in Indonesian hotels to offer a choice of Nasi Goreng or a European breakfast in the morning.
Many years ago, when on a visit to Hong Kong, I was invited by a prominent Chinese citizen and his wife for a Sunday lunch in an old traditional teahouse. My friends explained to me that it was impossible to get a seat there on a working day as the place was booked for generations by local business people. The fare was “Dim Sum”, those delicious Cantonese tit bits, and one of the dishes was a plate of small parcels of a special kind of fried rice steamed in dried lotus leaves. One of my cookbooks says that one may use either dried or fresh lotus leaves but my host said that only dried leaves should be used because of the fragrance. I copied the dish at home and bought the dried leaves (Bai Bua) in the Bangkok markets. They should be steamed first to make them pliable.