Old and new

Among the features we prize when we come upon them in this streamlined vital metropolis are bits and pieces of serene, funky old Bangkok. Until 30 years ago, Krung Thep (its other Thai name) was a swampy conglomeration of canal-laced neighborhoods full of teak dwellings and stucco two-story shop houses with tile roofs and pretty fretwork over the second-floor shuttered windows. There's still some of that vanishing Bangkok left in Chinatown and over around the Grand Palace, but not much elsewhere.

So what a pleasure it was last week when Al Roberge, the former Broadway musical performer we met in Hua Hin, suggested we dine at the Ratsstube, a German restaurant on the grounds of the Goetha Institute, a ten-minute walk from our condo. We had looked down on this leafy oasis from our room at the Pinnacle Hotel when we stayed there, and we had ambled down the quiet soi that leads to the German cultural center. But we'd never thought to venture past the front gate.

The food was excellent---we shared a big plate of sausages, sauerkraut and fried potatoes---and even better was the gorgeous old house with its tiles and dark carved wood and flowering bushes and trees that were as an organic a part of the architecture as the interior decor, which Joe described as Siamese Bavarian shloss. The economic pressures on throwbacks like this place must be fierce---similar former multi-acre refuges are now occupied by shopping malls---so I don't know how long this place can last. The same goes for the old Baptist Seminary across the soi from us. Historic preservation does go on here, but it helps if the government or the royal family are involved. One wonders if the Baptists might eventually be seduced by the almighty baht. There's another condo tower about to go up down the soi from us, and we aren't happy about this. We've lived here for under two months, and we're already complaining about more people like us moving in.

It's always fun to do things with Dick Sandler. He's an American who has lived here since the late '60s, knows everybody and everything, and speaks Thai like an erudite native. Yesterday, we met Dick at the Royal Hotel for another excursion into the inner recesses of the old city. The Royal is a dank Edwardian heap of marble not far from the Grand Palace. It's not much of a hotel anymore---we met some Americans who fled from their grim room in February---but it's famous for housing the Thai students just back from Paris who led the 1932 revolution that put the monarchy out of business until King Bhumibole revived it after World War II. The Royal is also where the bodies were laid out in 1973 when the Thai military put down a revolt by shooting nearly 200 university students. It was one of the darkest events of modern Thai history.

We chose the Royal simply as a place to meet, before Dick led us to one of the best small restaurants in the city. The New York Times of October 12, 2005 ran a piece by R.W. "Johnny" Apple, the Times's beloved political reporter and insatiable gourmand, about his favorite place to eat in Bangkok. (You can easily Google up the article.) In the company of his friend Robert Halliday, Apple dined at Chote Chitr, a tiny family-owned place on Prang Phuton. This is an out-of-the-way area behind a former minor royal palace, circa 1910, that's now a health clinic. Apple's descriptions are wonderful and his joy infectious. Halliday tells Apple they have to order the banana flower salad, which is "one of the wonders of the world, up there with the late Beethoven quartets." Writes Apple: "The banana flower salad was stunning indeed, another example of a standard transformed. Prawns, chicken and the shredded red buds of the banana tree, among other things, went into the dish, but its brilliance, as with all the best Thai dishes, lay in the complexity of its seasonings---sour in the front of the mouth (tamarind pulp), fiery in the back (dried chilies), and sweetly nutty at the top (coconut cream). Eating it left me punch-drunk with pleasure."

Among other dishes, Apple also had the tum yum pla, "the eye-poppingly vibrant fish soup" that was "hot, rich and sharp" and which "owed everything to the liltingly fresh, vividly perfumed lemon grass, ka-prao or holy basil, coriander and kafir lime leaves that flavored it along with the obligatory chili."

So guess what? Chote Chitr was just closing when we arrived at about 12:30; the proprietors were taking a week off to visit family in Chiang Mai. Phooey. The owners did, however, advise us to try a place down the street. We did, and its hard to imagine that the food at Chote Chitr could have been better. After all, this is Thailand. We had a curried crab dish that was as exciting on the palate as it was on the plate---all red and orange and tumeric yellow---and a sweet soup with chunks of omelet in it and a crunchy, flavorsome green vegetable of unknown (even to Dick) origin that was kale-like but not kale. We shared a bottle of red soda pop, because we had been wondering why the bottles of pop left by prayerful merit-makers at spirit shrines around Bangkok were always red Fanta and never orange. We asked the restaurant owner about that, and he said it was a Chinese tradition that's taken hold in Thailand. To the Chinese, red is a lucky color. After lunch, we walked across the little park behind the former palace and had dessert at a shop that sold nothing but coconut ice cream. You could get it with fruit or nuts or corn kernels on it, but we just had unadorned dishes of the most intensely coconutty dish I ever tasted. It was more icy than creamy, and in the 97-degree heat, just the ticket.

What else have we been doing? Joe is sorting through 50,000 pictures of dried squid on a stick. We saw True Grit---Joe became impatient with the cliches, but I loved the Coens' fresh variations on them. We went to the drag show at Dee Jay Station, a gay club. Unlike the mind-boggling gay "fuck show" (the vivid Thai term) we took in on our first trip to Bangkok, this one was not raunchy, it was FABULOUS. My favorite act---basically a diva lip-synching, with a couple of Isaan lads flinging themselves about on either side of her more or less in unison---was "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" done to a disco beat. The gorgeously be-gowned diva had a couple of rhinestone encrusted chandeliers dangling from her ears, and affixed to her head were what appeared to be three black minks. Not mink hairpieces but actual minks. The audience---80 percent young Thais, 20 percent young and old farangs---cried out with glee over these antics, and so did we.

This blog is about to go to sleep for two weeks. We leave for Burma on Monday. I'll be back in Bangkok March 26, trekker Joe a week later. We'll be incommunicado in AOL-free Myanmar. We're looking forward to meeting Burmese friends and hearing their stories---the "election," the release from house arrest of "the lady." We'll tell some of those stories when we get back. So-long for now.