Chicago Thai Food Adventures by Ruth Paget

Thai Food adventures in Chicago for Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

My childhood buddy and I took turns heaping thin, green chile rounds into our now forgotten dishes the first time both of us ate Thai food at the Thai 55^th Restaurant in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood in 1983.

“I really don’t think you like spicy food,” I taunted as she placed a spoonful of peppers on her plate.

“You’re the wimp, Ruth,” she said as she placed another spoonful of the dark, green seedy peppers over her dish.  Was it Pad Thai, the stir-fried egg noodles?  I could not let that remark pass, so I helped myself to a few more spoonfuls.

We considered ourselves spicy superwomen after downing bowlfuls of hot sauce with chips at the Las Brisas Mexican Restaurant in Detroit where we grew up.  We emptied the glass container that held about ¾ cup of chiles.

I took the first bite.  A sensation like ammonia-flavored hot wax sent little needles of heat into every surface of my mouth and into my glass of water and chomped unceremoniously on the rice.

“Rice is supposed to help,” my childhood buddy ventured to say.

I ignored her and waved my arms to get the waiter’s attention.  He looked at me and started to come our way, but I could not wait for him to come to the table, go get water, and return.

I made what I hoped was the universal sign for water by cupping my hand and tilting it towards my mouth.

He understood and walked very slowly to our table with a pitcher of water.  I indecorously blew my running nose on my napkin and breathed in through my mouth to cool off my palate.  What was taking him so long?

When he finally arrived, he took one look at the green chiles heaped on our dishes and laughed.

“Those are very hot,” he needlessly said.

“Please leave the pitcher,” I managed to say before I snatched up the water glass.

I chomped on some more ice cubes, which seemed to numb the pain and what I thought was swelling under my eyes.  I could see the waiter laughing with the busboy in the back of the restaurant; no doubt talking about the pepper lovers in the corner.

My childhood buddy started to move the green chiles off to the side of her dish.  I crunched some ice before breaking the bad news to her.

“The juice is hotter than the peppers,” I said, feeling like a marathoner who has crossed the finish line before another runner.

“You’re just trying to scare me,” my childhood buddy said somewhat hopefully.

“Just try it and see,” I cackled before wishing her, “Bon Appetit.”

I poured another glass of water and felt the heat finally subside from my forehead.

Reason returned; I was no longer living for ice cubes.

My buddy, on the other hand, had just taken her first bite.  Her face turned crimson.  I offered no solutions to her problem and just laughed at her cruelly.

She grabbed her glass of water and looked at the pitcher.

“You drank all the water, Ruth,” she said with a scowl.  The waiter brought a new one and my buddy went through the same water drinking and ice crunching ritual that I had just done.

“The restaurant owners have not watered these babies down yet for the Yankees,” I said.

I knew my buddy was thinking, “This is another fine mess you have gotten us into!”

“Maybe the heat wears off after you get used to it,” my childhood buddy said.

“Let’s see who can eat the most bites before taking a drink of water,” she said, knowing that a challenge might get us through the meal.  We had each taken one bite of our meal so far.

For the next three hours, we alternated between fanning our open mouths and eating.  The chiles prevented me from tasting or remembering my food that evening.

“What were those chiles?” I asked myself for twenty years as I read cookbook Cracking the Coconut: Thai Home Cooking by Su-Mei Yu.  Prikk Namm Som in vinegar reminded me of my steamy evening eating “Thai Bird Chiles.”

The Thai 55^th visit encouraged me to check out the Thai Restaurant in my neighborhood with my daughter Florence – Baan Thai in Seaside, California.

End of Article

My family’s visit to Baan Thai in Seaside, California forms Part 2 of this blog series on Thai food.  Traveling with small children is hard, so I was happy I could introduce Florence to other cultures at restaurants in our neighborhood and by cooking foreign food at home.

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Flaming Table Korean Barbecue by Ruth Paget

Flaming Table Korean Barbecue by Ruth Paget


Korean Barbecue is a lot of food to eat.  It is expensive, but I still queried The Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200, 000) to do an article on it.  They asked me to go and have fun with little Florence.

Nak Won Barbecue is no longer in business, but there is still a barbecue house where the old restaurant was.  They just have new owners.  They do not use the fire pit tables anymore to barbecue.  Barbecuing is done in the kitchen now.

My entire family learned a lot about Korean food on this review.  I looked at a Korean cookbook before going, but it is always fun to see what you are actually served in a restaurant.

I did this review in the Year 2000 and love it that Korean food is the big “in” thing now like Vietnamese and Thai food.  I consider this to be another use of my degree in Far Eastern Languages and Civilizations.  I knew my extended family members were joking, but they did ask me when I graduated, “What is that? How are you going to make a living?”

My family no longer laughs about that degree that I got in 1986.  With that thought in mind, my family and I went to Nak Wan Barbecue, looking to have a fun time.  I wrote the following restaurant review for the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 100, 000):

Nak for Barbecue

My daughter Florence loves Korean bulgogi, thin strips of grilled beef that have been marinated in soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic, and sugar.  Nak Wan Barbecue in Marina, with its charcoal pit grill tables tops her list as the “most fun place in town” to sample this delicacy.

My entire family shares her opinion.  Usually when we go to Nak Wan, we all ordered bulgogi.  The night I reviewed the restaurant, we allowed our daughter to order bulgogi as usual.

My husband Laurent ordered dak bulgogi, a grilled chicken version of this dish, and I ordered dol sot bimimbap, a mixed rice, meat, and a vegetable dish.  We sat in the regular dining area.  You can still order a grilled dish there, but it will be prepared in the kitchen rather than at the table.

The owner opened his restaurant eight years ago, using recipes he learned from his mother: waiting for your food is half the fun at this family restaurant.

If you sit at the fire pit, the waitress will turn on the flames in the charcoal pit.  Then, she will add the charcoal, which turns out to be no ordinary charcoal.  This charcoal comes from oak trees.  The redolent smell of oak trees rises up from the table as customers warm their hands above it.  You could see all of this from the regular dining room area, too.

We picked up the pieces of bulgogi with our chopsticks.  Laurent has become handy with chopsticks, too.

Nak Wan’s bulgogi is tender and less sugary than what you get in other restaurants.  The beef gets tender by having length-wise and cross-wise incisions made into it before it marinates.  The oak charcoal contributes a woodsy flavor to the meat.  The chicken bulgogi that Laurent ordered was equally tender and juicy.

I have learned enough Korean to know that I have to order bibimbap in its “dol sot” version, if I want it to arrive piping hot instead of cold, which I find unappetizing, especially since I like it topped off with an over-easy egg.

The cookbook Traditional Korean Food published by the Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism describes bibimbap as “steamed rice with assorted wild vegetables.”  The owner described it to me as “mountain food” with tamer vegetables at sea level.

Bean sprouts, thin slices of zucchini, carrot matchsticks, tofu rods, strips of bulgogi, and purplish, brown onion-tasting straws decorated the top of the rice, wagon-wheel-style at Nak Wan.

A fried egg reigned over it all.  The stone bowl arrived sizzling with the rice adhering to the bowl.  I mixed all these ingredients together with kochusan hot sauce made from red peppers and soy bean paste.  The spicy sauce was balanced out by the savory, onion-tasting stems and salty-sweet beef.

The sauce formed a crust with the rice on the bottom of the bowl that tasted like a salsa-flavored rice Krispie treat.  The bibimbap was such a tasty meal that I could only pick at the pan ch’an (side dishes) that I usually finish.

Pan ch’an surround you at almost all Korean formal meals.  They run the gamut from hot and spicy to salty, savory, and outright bland to counter the effects of the hot and spicy offerings.

The food you will always find in a selection of pan ch’an is cabbage kimchi, Korea’s national food.

“Kimchi is over 4,000 years old,” the owner said, “and each family has its own recipe for making it.”

To make kimchi, cabbage is sprinkled with salt and gets passed down like sauerkraut, but there the resemblance ends.

The Koreans add lots of red chili pepper, garlic, and secret family ingredients to kimchi.  I like Nak Wan’s crunchy cabbage kimchi as well as its cucumber version.

Rice cools off the tongue from both of these dishes, but I actually liked letting the temperature go up as I drank some of Korea’s thirst-quenching OB beer with the kimchi.

The only thing I really did not care for was the turnip soup, which I thought was bland.  They do have hot sauce you can add to make the food spicy.

Nak Wan Barbecue is well-known among Marina’s Korean community; all the seats around us were full of Koreans.  I knew that was a good advertisement for a good restaurant.

End of Article

Book Recommendation:

Growing up in a Korean Kitchen by Hi Soo Shin Hepinstall

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Teen in China, and Marrying France

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Sampling Filipino Night Club Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Sampling Filipino Night Club Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

We have always had a Filipino restaurant that doubles as a nightclub at night in one of our strip malls in Marina, California that does karaoke, dancing, and dinner.

The nightclub has changed names and owners over the past twenty years that I have lived in the neighborhood, but Filipino nightclubs resemble one another as does the food, so I am writing up a nostalgic restaurant review about the spot where I discovered Filipino food with my daughter Florence that no longer exists.

The review for Fiesta Manila is an excellent introduction to Filipino food.  The following restaurant review appeared in The Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200, 000):

Love that Lumpia

Hidden in a U-shaped mall off Reservation Road in Marina (California).  Fiesta Manila has been quietly perfecting its Filipino Cuisine – one of the world’s first fusion cuisines.  All the customers at the restaurant were Filipino the day I went, which I took as a sign that the food must be as tasty as what they would cook at home.

I used the “turo-turo” system of pointing at what I wanted to order from the hot table in this small eatery that evokes the “carinderias” that dot the 7, 000 islands of the Philippines.  Fiesta Manila’s co-owner advised me that the portions easily serve two as she set out a Rabelaisian feast for my daughter Florence and me.

Menu items change daily at Fiesta Manila, but lumpia, pancit, and pork adobo are always offered.  Lumpia, the egg rolls of the Philippines made with the same ingredients as their Chinese cousins, get spiced up with sweet-chili dip here.

Pancit, savory transparent rice noodles stir-fried with scallions, green beans, and carrots reflects another Chinese contribution to Philippine cuisine.  The dish gets its bright, orange color and flavor from a sauce of shrimp juice and annatto seeds.

Fiesta Manila serves scrumptious pork adobo, the national dish of the Philippines.  Pork adobo is made from vinegar, soy sauce, and garilic.  This stewing sauce does not taste sour.  It has a slightly tangy-savory flavor.  Reynaldo Alejandro speculates in The Philippine Cookbook that Mexican puerco en adobo is related to a Spanish dish brought to the islands.

The restaurant’s longanisa sausage recalls Spain’s pork, garlic, and paprika sausages.  These sausages were mild-flavored and tasted great with the coconut juice I ordered.

The restaurant’s longanisa sausage recalls Spain’s pork, garlic, and paprika sausages.  These sausages are mild-flavored and tasted great with the coconut juice that I ordered.

These Spanish also brought beef from the Americas and other foods like tomatoes and peppers to the South Seas; they show up in Fiesta Manila’s unctuous mechado beef stew made with soy sauce.

The owner also served us indigenous Malay fare in a dish called lanka, otherwise known as jackfruit stew.  I had never eaten this before.  It reminded me of tender, somewhat sour artichoke hearts.

The stew is made with coconut milk and shrimp paste.  The coconut milk tempers the pungent flavor of the shrimp paste, leaving a sweet tang in the mouth.

A Philippine meal would not be without fish, and I loved the crunchy, tart taste of the bangus milkfish.  The owner told me that San Miguel beer from the Philippines goes well with this food.

Next, I tried pinkabet, which the owner’s wife suggests for vegetarian guests in addition to stir-fried soy, which her husband whips up in the kitchen.  Pinkabet could be described as a Southeast Asian ratatouille.  It is made with squash, spinach, eggplant, bitter melon, and green beans in a shrimp-flavored sauce.  The sweetness of the squash balances the bitter taste of the melon.

The owner’s wife asked me to try sin-kiang soup.  Tamarind juice polishes off this soup made with barbecued ribs.  The salty, sweet pork had a caramelized crust and tasted better than lollipops.  One thing that I noticed about Filipino food is that it is mild unlike the chili-hot dishes of many Southeast Asian countries.

The one dish I did not care for was the Filipino fried rice.  The scallions, corn, and carrots in the brown rice made it look appetizing, but it was bland.  I prefer salty, hot flavors, so other people might find that rice to be just fine.

You should leave room for “Halo-Halo” dessert.  “Halo” means “mix” in Tagalog, which is exactly what goes into this layered Filipino sundae of caramel custard, diced gelatin, presented jackfruit, ice cream, crushed ice, and sweetened beans.  The crushed ice makes it taste lighter than it is.

I must say that I had never thought of using caramel custard in a sundae before, but it certainly marries well with ice cream.

I am more interested in food and ambience, so the utilitarian décor did not bother me.  I was more impressed with the Holy Child altar above the cash register than the linoleum floor, which was perfectly clean.

End of Article

Just as a note – there is starting to be an American food writing tradition that I feel has been established with these books:

M.F.K. Fisher

Laurie Colwin

Mark Kurlansky

Jay Jacobs

Colman Andrews

Anthony Bourdain

Ruth Reichel

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Teen in China, and Marrying France

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Chinese Banquet at Chef Lee's with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Chinese Banquet at Chef Lee's with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Ruth Paget


When I told my editor at the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) about the Fu Dogs guarding the entrance to Chef Lee’s Mandarin Restaurant in Monterey (California), she assigned me to write a restaurant review of the place due to this great visual to go along with the article.  They had windows looking out onto Chinese gardens for a visual, too. 

I knew this would be a trip to China for my little Florence, who just laughed at my diplomacy-career training sessions when she wanted to sing and act when she grew up.

I took some of my friends along, so we could do a real Chinese banquet with several dishes to sample.  The following is the article that appeared in the Monterey County Weekly.

A Traditional Banquet

A pair of white, stone Fu Dogs, protectors of sacred places in Chinese lore, welcomes diners to Chef Lee’s Mandarin House, which resembles a small palace with its carved red-tiled roof and white walls festooned with oversized Chinese characters.

Chef Lee’s makes me feel like dressing up, so I can fit in among the decorations of deities clad in pastel colors that dance across the walls and across the stained glass in the ceiling.  Wood sculptures of Chinese sages in the mountains vie for attention with the golden peacocks carved into the screens.

I reserved a round table with a round, turntable in the back room.  From our vantage point near a window opening onto the restaurant’s Chinese garden with waterfall, we could watch water stream down a rock face into a pond bordered by garden plants. 

The surroundings whetted our appetites for a grand meal as a waiter in white shirt and black bowtie took our order.

We started with a medium-sized bowl of san-san soup, this a basic egg-flower soup based on a chicken-ginger broth made with the imperial addition of scallops and shrimp.

Chef Lee’s big scallops were so tender that they melted in our mouths like chocolate.  They also had the sweet flavor that fresh seafood has as did the shrimp.  The shrimp had more seafood in it than some other restaurants put on their seafood platters.

While we watched for the arrival of our banquet - walnut shrimp, Chef Lee’s special lab, Mongolian beef, and Mandarin chicken – my friends enjoyed Tsing Tao beer from the People’s Republic of China.

Having all the dishes on the turntable persuaded Florence to share the Mongolian Beef she ordered for once, but that dish was not the banquet star.

That honor went to the Walnut Shrimp.  Three elements go into this dish:

-sugared walnuts
-deep-fried shrimp
-honey-lemon mayonnaise that holds it all together

The walnuts first get boiled with sugar, then they are deep-fried until they are shiny and brown.  While they cool, the shrimp is deep-fried in a light cornstarch and egg-white butter.

The secret to the mayonnaise’s flavor comes from adding condensed milk to the mix.  Florence thought this dish was too rich, but the rest of us gave the turntable a workout as we politely took three morsels at a time from the mound on the serving dish.

One of my friends was more intrigued with Chef Lee’s Special Lamb.  The lamb came coated in a sweetened soy sauce with mushrooms and other garden vegetables.  

When I first  went to Chef Lee’s, I was surprised to see lamb on the menu and thought the restaurant was caught up in the Mediterranean Diet craze.

However, after reading Nina Simonds Classic Chinese Cuisine, I learned that China’s northern regions have a Mongolian population, who influenced the Chinese with their Muslim dietary laws. 

Muslims shun pork and prefer lamb.  The Northern Chinese like lamb, too, to such a extent that Beijing was once called “Mutton City.”

It was interesting to eat thin slices of salty, sweet lamb.
The Mongolian beef came with a mild, soy sauce coating on green, stir-fried scallions and tiny noodles.  The sauce tasted sweet from the addition of brown sugar and savory from the addition of ginger and garlic.

The Mandarin fried chicken begged to be picked up; it resembled Chinese chicken McNuggets.  I bit into the spicy meat and crushed three bones.  You have to pick these out.  The menu did not list that this dish was made from chicken wings.  It is delicious, but be careful.

I now had to indelicately removed bones from my mouth.  We all tried eating the chicken with our forks and chopsticks, but had little success.  We asked for a bag to take this dish home, so we could eat it with our hands.

Chef Lee’s started out as a small restaurant more than 20 years ago.  It now has two rooms for large parties in addition to the two dining rooms, which attests to the restaurant’s role as a real banquet provider.

I secretly hope to be invited to a banquet there one day.  Until then, I can eat palace cuisine without the imperial price tag.

End of Article

Chef Lee’s serves from northern China which is different from the food of Guangzhou in southern China.  (Most Chinese restaurants in the US serve food from Guangzhou, where railroad workers came from.)

Three cookbooks I would recommend that have information about the food of northern China follow:

-Classic Chinese Cuisine by Nina Simonds

-Complete Chinese Cookbook by Ken Hom

(He does a nice explanation of the four main cooking schools of Chinese cuisine.)

-The Food of China by E. N. Andersen

This is not a cookbook, but a history and ethnographic book combined.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Teen in China, and Marrying France

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