Though he leaves the meat out of his version of the national dish, the aromatics remain key ingredients: cinnamon, star anise, cardamom and fresh coriander, plus a generous splash of gin and triple sec for good measure.

The cocktail is a departure for denizens of Vietnam’s capital city, where cheap and cheerful open-air ‘bia hoi’ beer markets reign supreme.

Beer is the beverage of choice for most Vietnamese drinkers, who downed 3.4 billion litres of the cold stuff in 2015 compared to 70 million litres of wine and spirits, according to an EU-Vietnam Business Network report.

“It was a bit hard for me to promote this, to beat the bia hoi or rice wine, but we are making it for a different level, it’s more luxury and more elegant,” Tiep told AFP at his cocktail bar, Ne, tucked away in Hanoi’s Old Quarter.

He developed the cocktail six years ago while working at the French colonial-era Metropole hotel, inspired by his time working in a pho restaurant as a teenager.

Growing up poor, Tiep said there were days his family could barely afford a bowl of the noodle soup, typically made with beef or chicken, always heavy on herbs and fish sauce, and often slurped streetside.

“My life story belongs to street food because during hard times we didn’t have much money, we just had street food,” said Tiep, 30, wearing a denim and leather apron.

The award-winning bartender never imagined he would one day be slinging $7 cocktails at his packed bar, a moody, slick spot that wouldn’t be out of place in Brooklyn or Berlin.

Tiep’s customers have mostly welcomed his novel take on the national dish.

“There are a lot of restaurants bringing street food to fine dining, so bringing street food to classic cocktail is… a way to bring street food to something new,” businessman Kien Phan told AFP, sipping on a custom-made drink.

In a sign of Tiep’s success, copycat pho cocktails have turned up on menus across Vietnam, where the upscale bars have taken off in recent years — especially in the bustling southern commercial hub of Ho Chi Minh City.

The cocktail scene is not the only domain to be invaded by the soup’s flavours: pho pizza, pho burrito and even pho ice cream have popped up on menus and foodie blogs around the world.

For his part, Tiep promises to keep pushing boundaries in the beverage world: he’s working on a pickle-flavoured tipple, and already serves a fish sauce-based drink called “Under the Bridge”.

Ne bartender Nguyen Tuan Anh hopes the creative cocktails will further boost the popularity of local food: “Through cocktails, we can promote Vietnamese cuisine around the world.”

THE SUMMER heat is rising and restaurants everywhere are offering relief in khao chae – rice chilled in jasmine-scented water and served with various side dishes. It’s usually a series of delicate snacks, but at Baannai in Bangkok, the khao chae can be a full meal, with the rice presented in a deep platter that can be endlessly replenished.

“Khao chae is complicated and takes a long time to prepare,” says restaurant owner Doungsawart Soonthornsaratoon. “But we’ve always had it at family gatherings and everyone lends a hand in the preparation.

Khao chae set

“When it’s ready, we have a ritual of serving the rice in a deep plate rather than the usual small bowl. You’ve put so much work into making it that you have to enjoy it as much as you can. And that’s the approach I wanted to share with our guests at Baannai.”

Presented on the side are battered and fried shrimp-paste balls, stuffed shallots with fish, sweet peppers filled with shrimp and ground pork and delicately wrapped in egg, and slices of pickled radishes sauteed with egg.

You also get beautifully carved fruit and vegetables, including green mango, cucumber and green onions.

The khao chae set costs Bt390 and is available until the end of May.

Baannai the restaurant is part of a boutique hotel set in a renovated wooden mansion and filled with charming mementoes of a bygone era.

Doungsawart, who formerly worked at interior-design firm P49, renovated the colonial-style wooden house that belonged to her great-grandfather Phraya Ronnachai Charnyut (Thanom Bunyaketu). Two years ago it opened as the four-room boutique hotel Baannai the Reminiscence.

The term baan nai refers to the innermost residence among houses on a large family estate. In the case of Doungsawart’s family, the land sits opposite Samsen Railway Station.

Phraya Ronnachai left the mansion to his three unmarried daughters, who remained there a long time, extending from the reign of King Rama VI to that of Rama IX, King Bhumibol.

“The renovation was done with full respect for the original structure,” says Doungsawart, who grew up in the residence. “We wanted it to look the same way it did when the three ladies lived in the house.

“We followed the original floor plan, with three rooms upstairs and one downstairs. The dining and living rooms became the restaurant and the hotel lobby. Much of the wood was replaced with concrete to reinforce the structure, but sections of the wooden stairs, walls, windows and doorframes are used as decoration to recall the building’s glory days.”

The menu in the 50-seat restaurant is faultlessly authentic Thai, straight out of family recipes. It’s good enough to have earned Baannai a Bib Gourmand rave in the inaugural Michelin Guide Bangkok last year. The award recognises places that are popular as good values for money.

Bael fruit juice

To quench a summer thirst, Doungsawart first recommends two cooling drinks – Bael Fruit Juice (Bt80) and the Baannai Special (Bt120), a concoction of galangal, lemongrass, lime juice and lime syrup.

Younger diners might never have tasted Pla Haeng Tangmo (Bt150), yet it’s one of the most enduring of Thai appetisers. A sweet cube of watermelon is tossed with sugar, shallots and crispy flakes of smoked fish. It’s simple yet sophisticated, and it’s both freshening and wholesome.

Pla Haeng Tangmo

Flower blooms from the garden are used for the salad Yum Dokmai (Bt190). The petals of various buds are lightly battered, deep-fried and capped with blanched prawns. This comes with a sweet-and-sour dressing of roasted-chilli paste and minced pork.

Yum Dokmai

The flowers used change with the seasons, but on the day I visited, I was happily munching on the blossoms of anchan (butterfly pea), khem (ixora), khae (sesban), kularb mon (damask rose) and phuang chompoo (Honolulu creeper).

The next course is Phra Ram Long Srong and Khao Pad Khun Seng (Bt290) – pork in rich and creamy peanut sauce on a bed of leafy morning glory – presented with a bowl of rice fried with just salt and garlic. Doungsawart explains the origin.

Phra Ram Long Srong and Khao Pad Khun Seng

“My grandfather, who was an architect, visited his friend one day, a Chinese contractor named Seng, who cooked them this simple dish of fried rice with salt and garlic. My grandfather loved it so much that he always cooked rice this way for the family and served it with phra ram long srong.”

The spiciest entry on the menu is Gaeng Moo Yang Bai Chaplu (Bt230) – grilled pork yellow curry with chaplu leaves.

Gaeng Moo Yang Bai Chaplu

Baannai also serves afternoon tea from 2.30 to 5.30, mingling Thai and Western bites. It costs Bt590 for two and includes fried breads spread with minced pork, steamed tapioca dumplings stuffed with minced pork, and Thai rice crackers with crabmeat and coconut dip.

Afternoon tea set

You also get crabmeat in a crispy pastry cup, mango sticky rice, a tuna sandwich, passion-fruit panna cotta and chocolate cake – and of course tea or, if preferred, coffee or bael fruit juice.

YOU’RE IN FOR A TREAT

Baannai Hotel & Restaurant is on Soi Kamphaeng Phet 5 off Setsiri Road in Bangkok, opposite Samsen Railway Station.

It’s open daily for lunch (11 to 2.30) and dinner (5.30 to 10). Coffee, tea and baked goods are available from 2.30 to 5.30pm.

Call (02) 619 7430 or visit http://www.BaannaiHotel.com.

Awards usually come with controversy. There will always be people who will dispute and doubt the win and/or the process. The sixth staging of Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants, sponsored by S.Pellegrino & Acqua Panna, at the Grand Theater of the Wynn Palace in Macau last March 27 again raised questions and some eyebrows.

However, the chefs being given recognition apparently know better and prefer not to be affected by issues. Instead, they focus on the value of such an undertaking in the restaurant industry.

“Being awarded the best in anything related to gastronomy is very subjective so I choose not to focus on a label or title, but instead on what it can do for the Thai culinary scene,” says Paste Restaurant’s chef Bongkoch “Bee” Satongun, who was named Asia’s Best Female Chef 2018.

“I was not expecting this award at all so it came as tremendous shock. But I’m tremendously happy with the exposure it gives Thai cuisine, Thailand and female chefs so I take this award as a great privilege.”

The winners of the Highest Climber Award, Mume from Taiwan and The Neighbourhood from Hong Kong, both climbed 22 spots to land No. 18 and No. 22, respectively.

Lifetime achievement awardee Andre Chiang (right) being interviewed by Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants group editor William Drew

The chefs of both restaurants welcome and acknowledge the recognition, but for them, Asia’s 50 Best is really more about the event than the award itself.

“One great thing is that it gets all like-minded people together,” says Kai Ward of Mume. “You get all these great chefs around Asia and the world, and bring them together. It’s a great way to exchange ideas and to look towards collaborations, or see how we approach different things, especially since we’re too busy cooking in our restaurants and we don’t get to travel to Macau or Japan or see each other.”

David Lai of The Neighbourhood says, “A lot of us chefs do what we do independent of these lists. It’s not a primary motivation but it’s good that sometimes we get recognized. Since Asia’s 50 Best started, there has been so much more dialogue between chefs from all over the world. That, in itself, is very good.”

If anything, Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants can help raise the standards of the food business, especially in the Philippines.

This year, no Philippine restaurant made it to the list. Rather than questioning the winners and the award-giving body, it might be better to ask, what else can we improve on, not with the intention to be noticed and land on the list, but to simply be better.

Winners wear this around their necks thewhole night.

Top 10 winners:

1. Gaggan (Bangkok)

2. Den (Tokyo)

3. Florilege (Tokyo)

4. Sühring (Bangkok)

5. Odette (Singapore)

6. Narisawa (Tokyo)

7. Amber (Hong Kong)

8. Ultraviolet by Paul Pairet (Shanghai)

9. Nihonryori RyuGin (Tokyo)

10. Nahm (Bangkok)

Special individual awards:

Andre Chiang, winner of The Diners Club Lifetime Achievement Award

Bongkoch Satongun, elit Vodka Asia’s Best Female Chef 2018

Nicolas Lambert, Asia’s Best Pastry Chef, sponsored by Valrhona

La Cime, Highest New Entry Award, sponsored by Aspire Lifestyles

Yoshihiro Narisawa, Chefs’ Choice Award, sponsored by Estrella Damm

Ultraviolet, Art of Hospitality Award

L’effervescence, Sustainable Restaurant Award —CONTRIBUTED

To see the full list of winning restaurants, visit www.theworlds50best.com/asia. Special thanks to the Wynn Palace Hotel in Macau.

Gaggan Anand faces the press after his restaurant was named the best in Asia for the fourth consecutive time.

Mume chefs Kai Ward, Richie Lin and Long Xiong

Chef Hiroyasu Kawate of restaurant Florilege jumps from No. 14 to No. 3 this year.

Asia’s Best Female Chef 2018, self-taught chef Bee Satongun

JACKIE HO, the renowned chef at the Peninsula Bangkok’s Chinese restaurant Mei Jiang for a decade, recently returned home to Hong Kong, passing the baton – or perhaps the ladle – to Ball Yau, who’s ready to take the kitchen in some exciting new directions.

Though the crowd-pleasing menu remains unchanged so far, Mei Jiang has for the first time since it opened 20 years ago introduced a 16-course degustation menu. It’s Yau’s splendid way of introducing himself to the regulars and a great chance to sample unfamiliar dishes served in tasting portions.

Chef Yau adds modern flair to Chinese tradition. /courtesy of Peninsula Bangkok

Patty Lerdwittayaskul, the hotel’s director of public relations, calls Yau a pioneer in “incorporating Chinese culinary tradition with contemporary flair and innovative presentation”.

He’s never before worked in a non-Chinese-speaking country, but he’s been in restaurant kitchens since he was 17. He’s now 40, and the interceding decades have placed Yau at 1949 Jin Bao Street in Beijing, the Langham Shenzhen and the Lei Garden chain in Hong Kong.

He was the celebrated head chef at Lei Garden Mongkok, earning it two Michelin stars, and Lei Garden Shatin, garnering another one, and spent two years at Lei Garden Macau, part of the Venetian Macau Resort.

Carabineros shrimp and stewed red grouper

Advanced booking is required at Mei Jiang as Yau personally prepares each of the 16 sampler dishes, a task so painstaking that only 12 sets will be available per day.

The feast costs Bt4,900-plus, and for teas pairing, it’s another Bt888-plus.

The style is Cantonese and the focus is on vegetables, herbs, seafood and white meats, with minimal use of sugar, oils, seasonings or red meat. Yau won’t swap ingredients around to suit individual preferences, so if a dish contains something you don’t like, move on to another.

Crispy bean curd filled with mushrooms

The chef makes his own bean curd skin that’s ready to try first, stuffed with assorted mushrooms, fried crispy and slashed with plum sauce. The home-made preserved plum sauce adorns the thin pumpkin slices that follow, along with goji berries, for a crunchy sweet-and-sour experience.

Patty notes Yau’s choice of a familiar ingredient – pumpkin that’s “pleasing to both palate and eyes” – in a nod to Westerners’ reluctance about eating preserved green vegetables.

The signature dish is double-boiled soup prepared much the same way Yau’s mum made it when he was a child – except that he always wanted it more flavourful.

Pumpkin with plum sauce and double-boiled soup with sea conch 

He yearned to quit school and become a chef, but his parents wanted him in a suit and tie working in Hong Kong’s Central district. They made a deal. Yao, all of 13, would prepare the family supper every day. The folks figured it would be too tough for him, but on the contrary, he was watching the clock all day at school, anxious to get to the market and buy his ingredients for the evening meal.

An avid viewer of television’s “Mrs Fong’s Cooking Time”, young Yau jotted down the recipes and followed the instructions. A new version of double-boiled soup emerged, clear, rich and tasty, and his parents were convinced they had a gifted cook on their hands. Yau got his first restaurant job at the age of 17.

At Mei Jiang, the double-boiled soup is sea conch and morel mushrooms in chicken broth.

Phuket lobster with egg white and crab coral

It’s hard to beat, but the follow-up is a fantastic bite of stir-fried Phuket lobster presented on a bed of egg white and topped with crab coral.

The first four dishes are paired with cold brew Long Jing tea, a green tea that’s steeped in cold mineral water for at least six hours to extract the flavour. Its light body perfectly matches the opening rounds of the menu.

Tomato with braised vegetables

The culinary journey continues with pan-fried Hokkaido scallops crowned with minced shrimp, followed by a whole organic cocktail tomato filled with braised mixed vegetables and dressed with pumpkin sauce – a modern version of Chinese-style mixed vegetable stew.

Stewed chunks of snow fish with garlic, onion, bell pepper and chilli sauce appear on a layer of crisp-fried noodles, chased by a Spanish Carabineros shrimp coated with egg yolk, fried golden and resting in sweet-and-sour sauce.

Next up is stewed red grouper with black mushroom and bean curd skin in garlicky brown sauce.

Stewed red grouper with black mushroom and bean curd skin

These five dishes are paired with white peony tea mixed with rose buds. The taste and aroma are a bit stronger, in keeping with the seafood.

Oolong tea mixed with goji berry accompanies the next two dishes, one of which features the only red meat on the menu – braised M6-score wagyu beef brisket wrapped in thin slices of turnip, all this in beef soup.

Braised wagyu beef brisket rolls in beef soup

Served at the table, braised bamboo fungus and black truffle are rolled with bean curd skin and smoked over apple wood.

The last three savoury dishes are free-range chicken steamed with red dates in lotus leaves, noodles with barbecued Iberico pork, and fried rice with Chinese sausage and taro. These are paired with pu’er tea, which has a bold and earthy character and helps burn off fat.

Noodles with barbecued Iberico pork, fried rice and steamed chicken in lotus leaves

The adventure ends with two tempting sweet treats – pumpkin coconut cream in a bird’s nest, and refreshing sweetened tofu moulded into the shape of a chrysanthemum blossom.The desserts go well with cold black tea, which is good for the digestion.

Pumpkin coconut cream with bird’s nest and sweetened tofu flower

JOIN THE ADVENTURE

Mei Jiang at the Peninsula Bangkok is open daily for lunch from 11.30 to 2.30 and for dinner from 6 to 10.30.

Make reservations at (02) 020 2888 or http://www.Peninsula.com/bangkok.

At the Wynn Hotel in Macau, where chefs and restaurateurs have gathered with food journalists and bloggers from the world over, the air is full of whispers, with sly winks and nudges all around.

At one table, journalists are arguing why Gaggan, the exuberant chef of the eponymous restaurant in Bangkok, can’t get voted as Asia’s Top Restaurant again.

There are conspiracy theories on why Restaurant Andre really closed—and speculation on whether or not the judges of the awards will include him on the list even as he has just closed his signature restaurant in Singapore.

By the time this article comes out, the winners of Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants will have been announced, the list released, and the same journalists will fly home ready to transcribe fresh interviews with the significant winners. The dissection and discussion will continue in print, online and in social media.

And there will be the usual accusations that the list is biased, commercialized, a big publicity stunt and, most important, that it is of very little value to the vast majority of the population.

Great importance

I actually agree with the last part, to some extent. It’s like when golfers get together and start nattering on about handicaps and swings and the most difficult 18th they’ve played, my eyes roll backwards in their sockets and I tune out.

Ditto with analyses of the stock market, insider’s tips, Formula One racing and so on.

It’s like being in high school and discovering to your horror that you’ve managed to join the lunch table of the Dungeons & Dragons crowd.

Similarly, to most people, the inside story of the politics surrounding the 50 Best Restaurants list is of little or no interest at all.

However, I would argue that while the minutiae surrounding the actual inclusion of a particular restaurant doesn’t really concern the average reader, the list is, in fact, of great importance.

This year, for instance, the big news from the Philippines is already out: Jordy Navarra’s Toyo Eatery has won The One to Watch—not an inclusion on the list but an enormous honor nonetheless. It is the springboard to the higher ranks in a year or two, if Toyo plays its cards right.

Margarita Forés remains in the pantheon as Best Female Chef of 2016, and she collaborated with the winners of 2014 and 2015 for a “six hands” lunch that was widely acclaimed.

Big deal

Food tourism has become a big deal. I remember when I started writing about travel, back in the days I was traveling more often than not, and writing that this mad-rush visit to the cathedrals, temples or ruins, was overrated, and that one could learn much more about a city by sitting down in a restaurant, eating the local cuisine and watching the locals go about their business.

These days I find myself in the awkward position of having to reverse my stance and insist that people make an effort to go to museums, the Colosseum, the palace—even if doing so means you’ll miss the lunch booking in the two-Michelin-star restaurant you made four months in advance.

Culinary tourists who fly in and go from one celebrity restaurant to the other make me nervous. They insist that the cuisine must be local, the ingredient locally sourced, the menu reflective of the culture of the country or city.

It sounds, really, as though they are looking for the knowledge of a civilization or of a people to be served up to them on a plate—or maybe 10 plates, as part of a degustation menu.

This is not the role food should play, this is not a burden that restaurants should assume.

Restaurants are great bastions of civilization, but they should not take the place of the civilization itself.

Food studies session

In the Wynn Hotel ballroom, where the plenary session and discussion took place the day before the awards ceremony, the air was thick with talk about identity, the indigenous, what “native” meant, going back to one’s roots, what philosophical approach a chef should take to sourcing and cooking ingredients—topics that seemed to have been plucked out of an undergraduate Food Studies elective and put in a big hall with gilded ceilings and chandeliers.

I believe that chefs should be engaged in cooking not just delicious, but also meaningful and important food, and that they should go about creating—their restaurants, menus, concepts—in a mindful, thoughtful way.

But I don’t believe that they should be made to answer those questions, which is the job of food writers and scholars.

In the worst-case scenario, what could happen is analogous to what transpired when creative writing was put under the aegis of university degree programs. Writers became critics, and began writing to please critics rather than express themselves.

Controversial list

The list—while controversial, ephemeral or flawed like any human endeavor—is a continuing statement that food matters—that it’s something more than what we eat to feed ourselves.

Well-heeled “completists” will manage about half of the list. Most of us would be lucky to get to go to more than a handful of the restaurants on the Asia’s Top 50 list, more so the World’s 50 Best list.

For every naysayer who says that all this hype is out of proportion and it’s only food—it isn’t, because it’s about people. It’s about the farmer who grows specialty mushrooms, about people like myself who sit by a keyboard and type out opinions about what we just ate. But most of all, it’s about the cooks

—who peel, scrape, boil and reduce, broil, bake and torch and ferment and plate and serve and clear, and who think, night after night, how to make people eat better.

All of us, including the much-feared judges of the list, are there to celebrate the act of creation that they and so many others do—often to so little reward.

Khao chae was once known as chao wang, meaning “dish from the palace”. It was truly the cuisine of monarchs.

Two hundred years ago, ice was all but unheard of in Siam, so the ingredients were typically chilled in earthenware jars kept in the shade or even partially buried.

At the Mandarin Oriental Bangkok’s Sala Rim Naam, amid beautiful views of the magnificent Chao Phraya River, khao chae will be served as a part of the lunch buffet from April 1 to September 30.

Chef Prasert Sussadeewong, who launched his career at Sala Rim Naam in 2004, learned the art of cooking from his family, beginning when he was just 14. His mother taught him how to make dishes beloved of Thais, such as stirfired crab with curry powder.

Prasert is thrilled to be introducing a new generation of food lovers to such classic dishes and his modern interpretations. He describes his approach as “striving to creature authentic Thai tastes while being flexible with the ingredients”.

The lunch buffet costs Bt1,119-net on weekdays and Bt1,354 on weekends. Book a table at (02) 659 9000 or mobkkSala@mohg.com.

At the Amara Bangkok, Element will be offering khao chae all through April and May. Parboiled rice is immersed in ice-cold jasmine-scented water and presented with various side dishes, including shrimp-paste balls, stuffed sweet peppers, shredded sweetened pork, sweetened sundried fried fish and glazed Chinese turnips.

The full set costs Bt420-plus. Call (02) 021 8888, extension 5320.

At the Golden Tulip Sovereign Hotel Bangkok, 92 Cafe has a khao chae assortment made with the original ingredients and including young green peppers stuffed with minced pork that are then drizzled in egg and fried.

There’s also deepfried kapi (shrimp paste) balls rolled in ground coconut, battered, deepfried and served with cucumber, spring onions and raw mango. The menu extends to shredded sweetened pork or beef, and planaem deepfried red onions.

Available through May, it costs Bt420-net. Call (02) 641 4777.

Up & Above on the 24th floor of the Okura Prestige Bangkok will have khao chae throughout April for Bt525-plus. Make reservations at (02) 687 9000 or upandabove@okurabangkok.com.

The “Summer Fresh Buffet” at Diwan at Al Meroz Hotel continuing through May 15 features khao chae alongside dishes from China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia and France. The khao chae can be enjoyed in a halal recipe, with dishes including fried shrimp-paste balls, shredded turnip and stuffed fried chillies.

Arrive in a group of four and only two pay the Bt765-net price. Call (02) 136 8700 or visit http://www.Facebook.com/almeroz.bangkok.