The frontiers beyond pad Thai
When Lers Ros opened its original location on Larkin Street in 2008, chef Tom Silargorn’s cooking introduced me to wonders like crisp pork belly stir-fried with basil leaves, and spiky, bone-in bits of eel sauteed with galangal and sprigs of young green peppercorns. His steamed whole sea bass was a joy. I remember marveling one afternoon as a flatbed truck pulled up outside the restaurant and a deliveryman scooped live fish from a makeshift tank and plopped them into a bin held by one of the restaurant’s cooks.
I’m hopeful that some of this freshness remains intact at the Tenderloin restaurant, but during a recent lunch at the Hayes Valley branch, my kai yang — that perfect and classic dish of grilled chicken and rice — tasted old and unloved. My bird had undoubtedly been sitting on a
rack with other precooked legs and thighs, waiting to be warmed and dumped onto a plate during the afternoon rush. The place was packed on a weekday with diners ordering lunch combination plates (two entrees, rice and a bleak iceberg salad for 10 bucks). I don’t exactly blame Lers Ros for playing it safe with userfriendly combo plates. The full-length menu is loaded with potential booby traps — as in, places where you might inadvertently step beyond your comfort level in regards to spice, funk or acidity — and I understand Silargorn wanting to provide diners with a safe path through the chileladen woods.
The year-old Saap Ver and its chef, Nutnawat Aukcara-pasutanun (a.k.a. Kobe), have taken up the torch of giving San Franciscans a peek behind the pad Thai curtains. The menu at the Design District restaurant promises “authentic country-style Thai cuisine,” and a short rant printed on the front page laments other Thai restaurants’ hackneyed names and explains that “Saap Ver” (“damn delicious,” according to the text) is a break from the expected.
Aside from a glass of Champagne garnished with gold leaf, the menu appears promisingly rugged. (For funsies, my wife ordered said Champagne. It arrived sans gold leaf. I suppose we’re not the first San Franciscans to be lured in and deceived by the promise of gold.) There are two different northern Thai sausages on offer, three variations on nam phrik, a few head-turning som tum (green papaya salads), and a grilled beef dish called Crying Thai Girl. I neglected to inquire about the name, and take it from me, you shouldn’t Google it.
(To be fair to Lers Ros, Saap Ver also offers lunch combinations, but like I said, I’m willing to see past that.)
While placing my order — hot-and-sour pork rib soup, fried fish larb, a plate of fermented pork-and-rice sausage and salted crab som tum — the server asked me how spicy I wanted each item.
“How spicy should it be?” I responded.
“How spicy do you want it?” she repeated, as though I hadn’t heard her the first time.
“Could you just make it as spicy as it’s supposed to be?”
It felt like communication was breaking down, so in order to save some face — hers or mine, I’m not sure — I ended up ordering everything spicy or medium spicy.
Look, I get it. I didn’t take offense to the question, and I wasn’t trying to be pretentious. I was honestly looking for some guidance. Nobody ever asks me how salty I want a dish, or how acidic, or how bitter. But spice, for some reason, seems to be a scalable flavor component that’s left to the diner’s discretion, and I’m not so sure it should be up to us.
The best Thai meals I’ve ever had were balancing acts. Where Western cooks talk about balance as something to be achieved within the confines of a single dish, in Thai cooking, equilibrium is accomplished across an entire meal. On the table, there might be a face-meltingly spicy relish (nam phrik) next to a milder, coconut-milk-based curry. Sharp, acidic salads cut through fatty grilled meats. Rice acts as a sort of all-purpose tempering device. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re bound to wander into some unstable territory.
On this occasion at Saap Ver, the pork soup was outstanding, sour and spicy and smelling strongly of lemongrass and makrut lime. Throughout the murky broth bobbed tender bone-in ribs that tasted extra porky in that way you can only achieve when you forgo browning. From there, however, things went a little off the rails. The batter-fried cubes of tilapia on the massive plate of larb had been over-fried into fish croutons, yet still tasted distinctly muddy — a flavor that even large quantities of lime, onion and herbs couldn’t overcome. But other than that, our dinner’s downward trajectory was mostly my fault.
I’m not afraid to tell you that I didn’t know what I was getting into when I ordered the field-crab som tum. I’d chosen it sheerly out of curiosity and for whatever reason, I assumed the shells would be soft, or a parental figure would warn me about biting down on hard bits of crab. Only after chomping down on a solid piece of carapace did I realize I was meant to suck the sweet, slippery crab meat out of the shells.
The sausages came with a plate of accoutrements that I recognized from ordering the same fermentation-soured dish in Thailand: brunoise of ginger and skin-on lime, roasted peanuts, cabbage leaves and nubs of chile. The idea, as it had been demonstrated for me before, is to jab a bit of chile into the sausage, wrap it in cabbage with the other garnishes, and pop the whole thing in your mouth. It’s a dish that requires cold beer, maybe some other grilled meats, sticky rice and little else. I know that, and yet, I looked around my table and saw a tureen of hot soup, an enormous mound of fried fish, and a napkin wadded around shards of spit-out crab shells. Nothing made sense together. What had I done?
To make myself feel better, I decided I deserved a guiltypleasure plate of pad Thai hor kai — everyone’s favorite sweet-sour noodles wrapped in a thin egg omelet. Does that logic make any sense? No, nothing I was doing made any sense.
In his review of Lers Ros for SF Weekly five years ago, my friend Jonathan Kauffman noted that as much as he liked the place, he’d never felt like he’d ordered correctly from the restaurant’s menu of more than 100 items. I feel you, Jonathan.
I also can’t help but think of a kerfuffle that took place about a year ago, when Bon Appetit published a video online under the title “PSA: This Is How You Should Be Eating Pho.” BA caught all kinds of flak for portraying a white chef as the face of Vietnamese noodles, and I agree that the video was tone-deaf, but there’s also some truth to the idea that there’s often a right and wrong way of eating something. It’s not right because it’s traditional or authentic, but because your meal will be better if you taste your pho broth before doctoring it with Sriracha and hoisin, or if you think about how the various dishes you’re ordering at a Thai restaurant interact with one another.
Saap Ver and Lers Ros could both stand to shorten and focus their menus. I also wouldn’t mind a little more guidance from the servers and less input from me about how hot I’d like the cooks to make the food. I understand why yellow curry is always on the menu, and why customers are given the option of ordering domesticated versions of spicy dishes. But I also have faith that if you remove the safety nets, San Francisco diners will reward you with their trust. Look at what Pim Techamuanvivit has achieved at Kin Khao, for instance.
For now, I’ll just try to do better. On my second trip to Saap Ver, I was more careful. We had garlicky sauteed cabbage, fried fish cakes and duck salad. As the centerpiece of our meal, I ordered a pungent, shrimp-paste nam phrik with steamed vegetables and fried sardines for dipping (tasty but skimpy on the sauce itself; plus the sardines were cooked to hell). If I’d stopped there, we’d have had a sensible, harmonious meal. But because I can’t help myself, at the last second, I added a plate of pad kee mao — literally, a dish of stir-fried rice noodles invented to sober up wayward drunks.
Nobody stopped me.