Monday, August 31, 2009

Spicy Food in Japan.....Part 3

Last night I had one of the spiciest dishes I’ve had in a long time. Except it wasn’t Japanese, it was Thai. One of my co-workers is married to a Thai woman and they recently celebrated the birth of their first child. His wife wanted to give birth in Thailand so that her parents could help out after the birth. He’s been in Thailand the past three weeks but returned on Sunday. I invited him out for a celebratory dinner and he decided on a Thai restaurant. I asked him whether he really wanted to have more Thai food especially after being there for the past three weeks but he said it was okay and knowing my penchant for spicy foods, he wanted to take me to a restaurant that his wife said served really authentic Thai dishes.
The restaurant was called Chao Thai in Shibuya but it’s really a chain of Thai restaurants. They had a very extensive menu and also offered set course meals which looked really good but my co-worker insisted we order multiple dishes from the menu. We started off with Po Pia Sod (Springs Rolls) and Tod Man Pla (Spicy Fried Fish Cakes). The Fish Cakes had some heat to them but, had I known what was to come, I would rate their overall heat as “Sissy”. We then stepped up the heat level with a spicy vegetables dish consisting of a Chinese green vegetable that had hollow stems and sliced chilis. Very spicy and very good. The vegetables were followed by a mixed seafood dish and a green curry with chicken (one of my favorite dishes). The mixed seafood also had sliced chilis and I was starting to feel the heat. My co-worker than asks if I’ve ever had Papaya Salad. I’ve heard of it but never ordered it. He insists we get it and says it’s incredibly popular in Thailand. He orders it “Thai-style” which sounded ominous but since my co-worker is the same one who took me to the Chinese red restaurant discussed in the first “
Spicy Food In Japan” blog, I’m “assuming” it’s not going to be that hot. You know what happens when you “assume"............you get the sensation of lava being poured into your mouth against your will. That dish was so f’ing hot but it didn’t hit you immediately. This one lulled you into a dull stupor by first giving you the taste of sweet delicious papaya and then when your guard was down the freakin’ chilis kicked you in the gonads followed by the oh-so-enjoyable sensation of licking a red hot poker from a flaming fireplace. My face was red and tears were streaming from my eyes. I had to eat more of the green curry to cool down. After having the Thai-style Papaya Salad, the green curry tasted sweet and had no heat whatsoever. My co-worker was equally red, which looks even funnier on a Japanese person, and his forehead was one big sweaty mess. After I cooled down from the initial assault, I looked at the dish more closely and realized that the chilis used in this dish were the very small Thai chilis or what’s often called Bird’s Eye Chilis. The chilis from the earlier dishes were more likely a Jalapeno-like chili. The difference on the Scoville Scale is that the Thai chilis can easily be twenty times as hot as the Jalapeno. No wonder I was on fire. Oh, and if you think we wussed out and stopped after the first helping, you’d be wrong. We finished the damn dish but after the first wave, your mouth and face feel like they melted away so the pain is irrelevant at that point.

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