As his latest ode to Thai food walks off the shelves, David Thompson talks to SBS Food about the evolution of Thai cooking in Australia.
If you want to eat Thai food in Australia the place to do it has traditionally been Sydney. For a sit down meal you’ll find the food even better than Thailand where the best food is really served on the streets and in people’s home’s rather than restaurants.
But now there is evidence of excellent Thai food becoming available outside of the harbour city.
“Thai culture in Sydney is stronger than Melbourne,” Dr Simon Wallace, the Melbourne based honorary Thai consul, says. “There are more Thais and the restaurants are more concentrated.”
In fact Australia also punches far above its weight internationally with over 1,400 Thai restaurants, making it the third largest centre for Thai food after Thailand and the US, which has 15 times the Australian population.
One of the main differences of Thai culture in Sydney over other parts of Australia is the level of sophistication of the non-Thai palate for hot Thai food and stinky, flavour packed fish sauce. Elsewhere, tame creamy green curries are usually the norm.
No doubt part of Sydney’s authentic Thai food is due to David Thompson, author of the bright pink bible Thai Food and most recently the $100 doorstop, Thai Street Food.
Through his restaurants, the late Darley Street Thai and Sailors Thai (which he no longer owns), he introduced Sydneysiders to what Thai food could be.
But it wasn’t always this way.
Thompson still has the disturbing memory of his first taste of Thai in 1978 — dodgy fishcakes and lemongrass — in a restaurant on Curlewis Street, Bondi. “I hated it,” he says.
He then started to play around with a westernized Thai cookbook before a 1986 visit to Bangkok. “I was seduced by the country, the culture,” he says. “I loved the edginess of it… I wanted to live on that edge, that dangerous edge, but that charming edge too because the Thais have an agreeable charm about them.”
It is that charm, according to Thompson, that makes Thais want to please their customers which means food is often watered down for what they perceive to be Western tastes.
Thompson first moved to Thailand in 1988 and stayed until 1991 when he met an old woman who taught him “authentic” Thai cooking. “She cooked with a skill that was beyond suburbia, that was world class,” he recalls. “And it was the first inkling I had of how good Thai food could be.
“I still remember the dish that she cooked, which was a sour orange curry over deep-fried fish with lots of small young chillis tossed in there with vicious abandon. It just made me realise there was something much more than dodgy fishcakes and the disagreeable lemongrass that I’d had at Curlewis St.”
Thompson attributes Sydney’s taste for Thai food to many factors, one being the concentration of the Thai community. There was also access to fresh Thai ingredients attributed to pioneer suppliers such as Pontip Walpole.
Plus Sydney traditionally has been more aspirationally Asian than Melbourne, which until recently kept itself rooted in European cooking styles. (Although Melbourne is stronger than Sydney on the Vietnamese front simply because it has a larger, more concentrated Vietnamese community).
The likes of Asian-influenced chefs such as Neil Perry and Christine Mansfield have also influenced the Sydney palate with their Asian-inspired cuisine — and more recently the food of Thompson alumni Martin Boetz of Longrain, which has extended its reach to Melbourne.
Interestingly, Thompson says that it is difficult to find good Thai food is restaurants in Thailand, despite superb street food in the markets.
“One of the ironies of, paradoxes of Bangkok is that it has an enormous food culture but its not a restaurant culture,” he says. “You don’t find very good food often in restaurants. You will find it often on the streets, in the markets and in homes but not in restaurants. That’s slowly beginning to change as Thais jump over the hurdle of their culinary cringe and realise their food is better than just being in the markets.”
Now the Thai influence of Sydney is feeding through to Melbourne with Thai restaurants in Melbourne rated by the food guides such as Charm in Albert Park, Trinitas in Camberwell and Paladarr Thai Issan in Alphington. And, for instance, in Collingwood there are Thai restaurants serving off-menu authentic Thai dishes such as fish intestine curry.
Melbourne, and other state capitals, are finally finding their taste for Thai food.