I’m a big advocate of regional and local foods; meals that celebrate and reflect local ingredients, as well as a sense of place, season, and extreme tastiness.  And yet, there’s something about having a favorite food from far, far away.  One that you crave.  One that you associate with a specific time and place in your life, because time and place and food and memory are inextricably linked.

I drove down to Vancouver, Washington for a meeting today.  I agreed to go partly because I knew I could sneak into Portland afterwards for a meal.  Specifically: khao soi from Pok Pok.  Khao soi is a regional specialty of Chiang Mai, a city in the north of Thailand where I spent a semester in college.  It’s a noodle soup with a spicy, tangy curry broth, flat egg noodles, fried crispy noodles, chicken (although they also offer a vegetarian one at Pok Pok), and sides of lime, cilantro, shallot and pickled greens for delicious sprinkling.  Pok Pok is one of two restaurants I’ve found in America that make khao soi properly (the other being the famous Madam Mam’s in Austin, a Thai restaurant I found accidentally which, it turned out, was the place to which my Thai friend Paew used to drive for hours from Houston just to eat their noodles).  

I adore khao soi.  It’s one of those foods that I suspect secretly contains crack.  The first time you eat it, you think, “Wow, that’s pretty tasty.”  The next day you wake up desperately wanting more.  I first ate khao soi when I was a fairly new student in Thailand.   Our professor took us to a khao soi place on our lunch hour.  We carefully ate the splashy red broth with tangled noodles, trying not to stain the white shirts of our student uniforms, since we were about to go meet the staff of a local NGO and wanted to look polite.  “Don’t worry,” our professor teased us, “We’ll just tell them you were eating khao soi and they’ll understand.”  The next day, the addiction hit and I wanted more. 

The more I felt at home in Thailand, the more foods added to my ever growing list of local comforts, most bought from the market three blocks from my dorm or the street vendors who set up restaurants for students every evening.  Bags of sticky rice and chili paste for dipping. Som tam, a pounded salad of shredded green papaya.  Gai yang, the barbecued chicken with sticky rice and dipping sauce that turned me from a vegetarian to a flexitarian.   Khao mun gai, a simple dish of rice steamed with chicken broth and thin slices of chicken, and served with a ginger sauce and slices of cucumber.  Slices of perfect pineapple.  Nam manao, which is limeade with a little bit of salt.  Khao lam, a stick of bamboo stuffed with coconut sticky rice and red beans, and roasted over a fire.  While I lived in Chiang Mai, these foods transitioned from curiosities to local comfort food

Having not eaten much Thai food in America before I went to Thailand, I had no idea how hard it would be to find a regionally-specific street food when I returned.  Thai food in America is different.  There’s a lot of sugar and peanut sauce.  To quote my friend Phueng from Chiang Mai: “What’s peanut sauce?”  Most restaurants offer the same list of dishes, and they’re fairly de-spiced and altered versions of the Thai originals.  Regionally-specific foods are very, very hard to find.

And then there are places like Pok Pok.  This little shack with outdoor seating specializes in the Chiang Mai street foods I crave.  They have a miniscule menu but it includes khao soi, gai yang, som tam, and even nam manao to drink.  And it’s all done correctly!  While I wouldn’t quite drive to Portland just to eat at Pok Pok, since that would involve a lot of gas and time, I can pretty easily be talked into a trip down there for another excuse important reason, especially if it lets me take a detour for some khao soi.

I’m all for delicious food in general, and authenticity doesn’t matter so much if the food is tasty and you don’t have a connection to the authentic version.  But when food is tangled up in your memory with place, experience, and home, authenticity matters.  You want [kugel, fried chicken, borscht, curry, whatever] like your mama fed you.  You want a sandwich that tastes like that one place you always used to go when you were in college.  In some cases you want noodles or fruit or cakes like they tasted in that country you left as a child, tastes you haven’t had in years.

Most of my food cravings are from New York or the East Coast - proper bagels, Zabar’s smoked fish, crisply tart apples in what I never knew as a kid were heirloom varieties (Cortland, Ida Red, Maccoun).  In the case of khao soi, I spent only four months in Chiang Mai, but it became a kind of home over those months.  I crave foods not only because they’re delicious and unavailable here in the United States of Peanut Sauce, but because I long for the particular experience of home I found in Chiang Mai.  I miss gai yang with sticky rice and dipping sauce, but I also miss the night I sat on a dorm room floor with Pi O and Pi Nu Dang, eating these foods (with sides of pineapple and Thai whiskey).  I miss those roasted sticks of khao lam, but I also miss wandering through Dalat Wororot, the market where I first found them, where two buildings of several stories, plus outdoor street stands, were filled with cooked foods, fruits, fish, crafts, tchotchkes and spices.

The first time I thought consciously about Chiang Mai feeling like home was at five o’clock in the morning, on a bus pulling back into Chiang Mai from a trip in the south.  I woke up, still listening to Jaran Manopetch’s soothing Northern Thai folk music on my headphones, looked out the window at my neighborhood, at the familiar scene of a line of monks accepting early morning offerings of food while the market vendors set up stalls, and thought, “I’m home!”  My flight from Chiang Mai back to Los Angeles was three days later.

It’s a side effect of moving around or doing serious traveling that we find home in more than one place.  Wherever we live, home will also be somewhere else.  It’s a blessing, and a slightly bittersweet one.

I wouldn’t trade in my beloved Northwest home for any of the other places I miss, not for Chiang Mai’s markets, or the warm nights of Michigan in the summer, or the streets of New York where libraries and cultures and subways and serendipitous stories intersect.  I also wouldn’t trade in the experience of finding fleeting or lingering experiences of “home” in other places.  I’ll continue to travel, and continue to create home, and continue to interact with the place I am.  Especially if the place I am isn’t too far away from proper khao soi, just in case the cravings hit.