The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker by Will Self

Author:Will Self [Self, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241962619
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

Thai

My friend Ian’s girlfriend Cindy has opened a Thai restaurant at Toll Cross in Edinburgh. There’s nothing particularly reprehensible about that – I mean, at least Cindy is Thai, unlike a lot of the folk who run such establishments. Propping up the bar at Passorn (which means ‘angel’ in Thai, and happened to be Cindy’s name), Ian was scathing about ‘Thai’ restaurants which are anything but: ‘Most of them are Chinese places that offer a few Thai dishes,’ he opined, ‘which they can’t cook properly anyway.’

Cindy has brought in a couple of top-class Thai chefs from the mother country, and they’re doing the real thing with a vengeance; their signature dish of pad normai fa rang – a stir-fry with monkfish, among other things – was superb, and deliquesced on my mouldy Allied Carpets runner of a tongue. As for their pad thai, I don’t think I’ve ever had better – I particularly liked the way it came with little additional heaps of herbs and spices so you could spritz it up to your taste.

Still, enough of this wanking-on about delicious food – I’ll leave that to the venal scum who junket with the industry: I pay my way. What interests me more about Thai dining is how ubiquitous it’s become. Thirty years ago there was only one Thai restaurant – that I knew of – in London’s West End, and we thought we were doing some impressive cross-cultural engagement just by going there. Nowadays there are approximately 1,700 Thai restaurants in the UK, and since they are located – according to precise astrological guidelines – equidistant from one another, it means that no Briton is ever more than eight miles (as the crow flies) from a dod daew – yum ma kuer doi kum (salad with crispy aubergine and boiled eggs and shallots, topped with Thai garlic dressing).

I made that last bit up, but you know what I mean: there are a lot of Thai – or possibly ‘Thai’ – restaurants about nowadays, and you come across them in unexpected places, such as on arterial roads running between provincial towns, where they’ve winnowed out old coaching inns, replacing thatched roofs with curling eaves and scrumpy with satay. To be fair to the ‘Thais’ it’s difficult to see how 1,700 authentic Thai restaurants could be staffed, given that there are only 36,000 people of Thai descent in the country. Assuming half of this number are either children or retired, it leaves a ratio of ten Thais to every restaurant, implying that all the Thais in Britain are in catering – surely an unwarranted slur?

I’ve only been to Thailand once. The first half of the trip was profoundly unreal – my then wife and I stayed on one of the islands in the south off Phuket, in a luxury resort. This was over twenty years ago, when the homogenization of moneyed global culture was still something of a shock; with its Western breakfast cereals and servile masseuses the place seemed so

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