On 24/01/2015 4:56 PM, Sqwertz wrote:
> On Sat, 24 Jan 2015 15:21:33 +1100, Xeno wrote:
>
>> On 24/01/2015 2:22 PM, Sqwertz wrote:
>>> On Sat, 24 Jan 2015 13:53:36 +1100, Xeno wrote:
>>>>
>>>> My wife and her niece went to Vietnam a
>>>> couple of years ago and found the food there tasteless according to
>>>> their palates.
>>>
>>> I'm not really interested in your wife's secondhand experiences. I
>>
>> No, they were their firsthand experiences and, being Thai, I expect they
>> are reasonably expert on the topic of Thai food.
>
> But you said they went to Vietnam...

Where else would you go to get real Vietnamese cuisine?
We have friends in Vietnam though they are not Vietnamese. One is Thai,
the other Sri Lankan. They are the persons with whom my wife and her
niece visited. During their stay in Vietnam, they dined at all manner of
food venues from high class restaurants to street vendors.

> I would not expect a Thai person
> to find Vietnamese food more appealing than Thai food and would except
> negative comments.

But you said Vietnamese food is as spicy as Thai... If so, there
shouldn't be a problem, right?
>
> This is getting even less interesting. Vietnamese food is not bland.

Eat Thai food done properly for long enough and you will soon have
palate adaptation and you will agree with me. The operative phrase here
is "done properly". My wife and all her friends can tell in an instant
if the food in a restaurant is not cooked by a Thai well versed in Thai
cooking. What they also do, if they are trying a new restaurant out, is
bring a selection of their own condiments along, including chilli sauce,
as they find restaurant fare generally not to their liking. If they know
the restaurant or have advice from friends, they know they don't need to
bring extras along.
A good example is a Thai restaurant we went to once here where we now
live. The restaurant was very popular here and did extremely good
business. My wife said the food wasn't right. Our friends said the owner
was Thai. We met the owner later that evening and it turns out he wasn't
Thai at all, he was Burmese. The two countries are adjacent neighbours
but the cuisines are different and that influenced the owner's view of
what Thai food was like. My wife will not go there again.
The Thai restaurant just up the road was a different matter entirely.
The owner is a real Thai and the restaurant does Thai food done right.
We have been there several times...
>
>> It's interesting. 30 years and more ago in Australia, and in particular
>> Melbourne and Sydney, Vietnamese food was popular. This was because, due
>> to the refugee situation, the Vietnamese community grew to be the
>> largest single Asian community there. As Thai food became more popular,
>> the Vietnamese restaurants, The Malaysian restaurants and the Chinese
>> restaurants all morphed into Thai restaurants. Some even had signs
>> alerting one to their duality; Vietnamese and Thai Restaurant or
>> Malaysian and Thai Restaurant. The sad thing was that all they produced
>> was a sad representation of Thai food. That's why, out of the literally
>> hundreds of Thai restaurants in Melbourne, there are very few that Thais
>> themselves will frequent. Why do you think that is?
>
> I can't comment on what they serve in Australia.

Nor I the US.. but my wife can comment on Thai and Vietnamese food both
here and in those cuisines respective countries. I can only go by what
she says with respect to Vietnam since I haven't been there. I have
sampled the cuisines of Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and
Burma whilst I was in those countries.

> The Vietnamese
> restaurants I frequented were packed with Vietnamese people and didn't
> speak much if any Engrish.

In Melbourne you get that if you go to Springvale, Footscray or North
Richmond. These three are Vietnamese enclaves. I am most familiar with
Springvale because we used to go there regularly and North Richmond
because I worked at Richmond Technical College just a short distance
down the road.

> After 9:00pm the restaurants would get
> packed with large groups of Vietnamese people smoking cigarettes
> (illegal in restaurants) all yelling in their obnoxious-sounding
> language that annoyed the hell out of me. But I still patronized all

It is an odd language and it takes some getting used to. But then, so is
Thai. Both languages are, for want of a better term, discordant. i have
become used to Thai by now obviously but I still haven't become used to
Vietnamese even though I have a number of Vietnamese friends.

> those places. I was known as 'white guy mam nem' in one restaurant,
> which was a term of admiration of sorts - because a lot of Vietnamese
> people won't even go nea mam nem while I ordered it by the pint (it's
> a very powerful fishy condiment).
>
> -sw
>
We buy those "fishy" condiments by the carton. Much cheaper if you buy
them in that manner at an Asian Wholesale Food supplier.

--

Xeno.