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That is actually a great idea.
The best way to build a bridge between peoples is through culture, and food is an important part of culture.
The next step in bridge building is sharing meals with people of other cultures. Starting or strengthening friendships around food is a great way to lessen the power of prejudices, and put aside our national identities for the benefit of sharing a common bond as humans through our cultural identities.
Edit: even though the stated reason in the article has a political motive, I still think it helps at a human level.
I love the Thai food in the US, so much that it has made me consider visiting Thailand. I wonder if it actually nets tourism dollars? I guess it doesn’t need to because Thai restaurants could also be a relatively safe investment if more people love them as much as I do.
> Starting or strengthening friendships around food is a great way to lessen the power of prejudices, and put aside our national identities for the benefit of sharing a common bond as humans through our cultural identities.
I agree, and I have a theory/dream that this same principle can be extended and to all identities, including gender, sexual, and political (which are all subset of culture, of course). The value of having these discussions over a meal may be in part that there are certain expectations of social behavior in play, so people tend to be on better than normal behavior, and everyone knows they're going to be there for a while anyways so might as well make the best of it. As a result, it facilitates an environment where people actually listen to what other people are actually saying, rather than relying almost entirely on subconscious, preconceived notions, as is what routinely happens on internet forums. This extra time and dialogue helps bring people's perceptions of reality, in this case their understanding of the beliefs/culture of others, more closely inline with reality itself.
In a sense, discussions over a meal forces good behavior on people, and the result of that is that people realize their preconceptions were off the mark. Absent a meal and the social structure and expectations/rules that come with it, and particularly in the case of internet discussions where there is no physical presence and often no strongly enforced behavioral expectations at all, we're left to rely on rationality, conscious awareness and personal discipline, things that aren't really taught or practiced in certain cultures. I'm a big believer that this is one of the key enablers of the increasing polarization we are witnessing in our societies, Western societies in particular.
I have to assume when you say national identity it means the same thing to you as racial identity because our national identity is mutable and transcends race. I can't move to Thailand and become Thai. I can't move to China and become Chinese. But they can move here and become American. They can move here and live the American Dream.
Not mentioned is that probably half of Thai restaurants in the US are run by Chinese people. A good chunk of Japanese, Vietnamese and even some non-Asian restaurants are run by Chinese also. One of the top Thai restaurants in my area is run by a white guy. And there's a sushi place run by Thai folks. Good cooking doesn't care where you're from.
Where I went to University in upstate New York, there was a Taiwanese tea house run by a Korean family, a Japanese sushi restaurant owned by a Taiwanese family, and a Korean restaurant managed by a Japanese woman.
When I go to a Thai restaurant, I also frequently hear the cooks speaking Mandarin Chinese (I'm conversant in the language).
> Good cooking doesn't care where you're from.
Except when it does. Attention to detail and skills matter. Clientele demographic and competitive pressure matter too.
In most survivalist/subsistence businesses, the owner typically optimizes for volume and profit rather than quality. He/she will typically do just enough to appeal to a broad clientele and keep costs low. There is no culture of craftsmanship or perfectionism -- it's just business. The owner is merely trying to feed his/her family... there is a nobility in this, but it doesn't always make for good food.
Many suburban sushi joints in the U.S. run by non-Japanese people fall into this category. Good enough to satisfy an American clientele, but not really done to the level of a craft (e.g. the rice in the nigiri falls apart as soon as you pick it up, the vinegar is left out altogether, etc.) Sushi is a craft that takes years to perfect and commands a premium.
Truly good places are run by people who know the essence of the cuisine they are serving, and make an effort to be true to it. They don't necessarily have to belong to the culture of origin, but they have to be serious about getting the details right. Such places are typically not run as survivalist businesses.
In NYC, Derek Lucci (white guy) is possibly the best thai chef, and he taught himself to cook while working as an Apple genius. (Although he now also spends a few months a year in Thailand learning from local chefs in various regions.)
The primary middleman ethnicity for restaurants where I live (Southern California) is Korean. There's lots of Korean-run places for the following non-Korean cuisines (in descending order for the quantity I've seen): Japanese (sushi & ramen), Americanized Chinese (distinct from Korean-Chinese cuisine, e.g. Jajangmyeon), Vietnamese, Mexican, Thai, Middle Eastern. There's some Korean fried chicken places, but I think that's kind of its own style, and is still advertised/branded as Korean. All of the aforementioned places don't make any mention of it being Korean-run. Though some of them will have things on the menu you wouldn't find at a non-Korean-run place, like kimchi.
My wife is Thai and she tells me that the majority of the Thai places she's eaten at in North America suck.
Exception is San Francisco. There's a place in Little Saigon that is run by Thai people and she said the food there is exactly the same as home.
Here in Toronto we recommend Si Lom Thai Bistro. Which is good but not perfect.
Yeah, a lot of places around here are Chinese/Japanese/Thai combined and run by Chinese people.
> Good cooking doesn't care where you're from.
Except for some reason it's hard to find good pizza outside the Northeast. What's with that!?!
Regardless of cuisine, most kitchen staff in Houston are Hispanic and we have some damn good food including Thai. Is it authentic enough to pass muster with a native? Not sure about that. But it's good enough to be popular. :-)
Having said that my favorite Thai place is still Morningside Thai and I'm pretty sure it's native run.
If only they were all "good cooking". I'd say maybe 1/10 Asian (Chinese/Japanese/Thai/Vietnamese etc) restaurants are actually tasty- the rest are barely adequate, and their continued success relies on the fact that most American diners don't have developed palates.
There are also plenty of Thai restaurants in Reykjavík (and Iceland in general), probably for a different reason then the article states since Iceland has a significant Thai population.
Living in Seattle for the past year, and loving Thai food, I noticed that there is a general overall difference in the type of restaurant a Thai place is between Reykjavík and Seattle.
Thai places in Seattle seem a lot fancier then in Reykjavík. In Seattle you most likely have to order a table, or at the very least have a waiter show you to your table. In Reykjavík, on the other hand, Thai places tend to range all over the place, all the way down to having only 4 bar-like seats by the window.
The menu is also way more diverse in Reykjavík. In Seattle, you can pretty much guess the entire menu before you walk into a Thai place. While in Reykjavík a Thai place might only have three types of pad thai on the menu, or only sell soup, or even sell have 3 or 4 pages of stuff on the menu, including non-thai cuisine.
Generally, I like the Thai places in Reykjavík better then in Seattle.
Check out "Thai Tom", it's more the style you're thinking of and very, very good. Expect to stand in a big line though
One of the things I found interesting is that in Thailand there seemed to be a big difference in the food at the Thai restaurants for tourists (which were similar to the food in the Thai restaurants abroad) and the Thai restaurants for Thai people.
Since I'll be in Reykjavík in a few days, any specific Thai restaurant suggestions are welcome.
You make me want to go to Iceland for the Thai food.
I have been to Thailand about 5 times since 2006. In fact, I'm writing this from the airport returning from Bangkok this evening.
One thing I've noticed over the past decade is that the diversity of tourists has changed dramatically over the years. The first time I went to Thailand I saw mostly Americans, Australians, and Europeans. Nowadays its common to see people from all over the middle-east, Africa, South America, and of course the rest of Asia (China and Japan in particular). I was even surprised to see a Vietnamese tour group at Suvarnabhumi today (interesting to see Vietnamese with the disposal income to travel and the interest to travel to their next door neighbor). Just goes to show everyone loves Thailand.
Gastro-diplomacy appears to have paid off! What a great investment!
> I was even surprised to see a Vietnamese tour group at Suvarnabhumi today (interesting to see Vietnamese with the disposal income to travel and the interest to travel to their next door neighbor).
I live in Vietnam. Virtually every middle class Vietnamese I know has been to Thailand. For two simple reasons: it is one of the few places on Earth a Vietnamese can travel visa-free and it is relatively cheap. (Especially compared to, say, Singapore, which also allows visa-free travel.)
Indonesian food are delicious and the country population are huge but yet relatively unknown outside Indonesia. So yeah the power of marketing and deliberate smart plan can't be underestimated.
I will briefly add that Indonesian food is massively popular in the Netherlands ("East Indies" being a former colony). Rijstaffel [1] -- literally, "rice table" -- is a national specialty that is celebrated by the Dutch, although I will admit that the history of the meal is rooted in that former colonialism.
Indonesian food is definitely popular in Australia as well.
My pet theory: foreign cuisines do better when there are clear boundaries. There's sort of a continuum between Indonesian, Malaysian and Singaporean cuisines, which then overlap somewhat with Cantonese. This makes it harder for foreigners to find the cuisine memorable. The boundaries get blurred further because in many places, it makes sense for an Indonesian or Malaysian family to just call their restaurant Chinese or "Asian", and then offer a mix of the most popular dishes.
Thai cuisine overlaps with Laotian and I guess probably Burmese cuisine a bit, but it's otherwise very distinctive --- and it's not like there are many Laotian or Burmese restaurants around.
This one is pretty easy to see the reason for if you go to a random tourist restaurant in each country.
In Thailand, you get four pages of Thai food, going way deeper in variety than you ever see exported. Enough that you could eat there every day and not feel the need to flip to that last page full of Pizzas and spaghetti bolognese.
In Indonesia, though, you get Nasi Goreng, Mee Goreng, and if you're really lucky a single curry, before learning about their wood-fired pizzas and other western junk.
So you can go there for a month and come back having eaten a lifetime's worth of salty noodles, but not really learning anything about all the other good food you can get there.
It's pretty rare that I choose Indonesian over Thai, when I have the choice.
I had always assumed that many Asian themed restaurants added Thai menu items because it was trendy/popular. It's common to see sushi at Chinese, Korean, or pan-Asian restaurants.
Also, where I live, many specific Latin American restaurants (Peruvian, Costa Rican, etc) have started offering burritos and hot salsa, even though it's not typical of their cuisine.
While this play by the Thai government is a pretty indisputable home run in terms of mutual goodwill, what would be the reaction if [controversial foreign power of your choice] launched a similar effort at a greater scale?
It’s a lot simpler than this. Pad Thai is very sweet and Americans love sugar.
if only more countries invested in soft power instead of saber rattling.
If you don't appreciate the clickbait headline, it's because the Thai government subsidized them, as a form of soft-power diplomacy.
This says that the Thai government started the program in 2001, but I remember Thai food suddenly becoming trendy in the 90s.
Interesting. I've been surprised by the number of Thai restaurants that have opened (and often, quickly closed) here in upstate SC, a relatively rural area that, so far as I know, doesn't have a large Thai community. So I guess this at least somewhat explains it.
I've also noticed that Thai restaurants tend to be a little more hit-or-miss than other ethnic food places. I imagine the Thai gov't pushing to encourage Thai-Americans who are on the fence about whether they should open a restaurant would explain that as well.
It's the same in Stockholm.
Lots of Thai restaurants, food trucks and those semi-permanent wooden structures.
I wonder if that's the reason why a few of my favorite local Thai restaurants all have the same or similar Thai tourism posters displayed throughout.
Regardless I think this is a brilliant idea by the Thai government. I'd love to see other regions / governments do a similar thing!
In London there are plenty of Thai restaurants too, but I don't know how that compares with the proportion of Thais in the general population.
There are also plenty of Japanese restaurants, yet very few Japanese. Many of them are run by Chinese who have learned to prepare Japanese food.
Depending on where you live, the reason also could be because there is a refugee population that has been resettled in that city.
Omaha, where I live, has a growing local chain of Thai restaurants (Salween, if you live here) that are owned and run by Karen refugees who have been resettled here. Their food is very, very good, the restaurants are very popular around town, and they greatly assist their community.
If you want to help refugees and other people groups, patronizing businesses owned by them is a fantastic way to do so.
Very interesting. I wish there were more, "authentic" Thai places around. I'm in Chicago and by far the best Thai place I've ever eaten at was a small shop in Vermont. The owner is Thai and it's only open for lunch in the summers. No other Thai I've ever had compares. My brother who has spent some time in Thailand said it's because most Thai places are serving Americanized Thai food.
Authentic Thai Food is also a difficult thing to search for.
I had a look at ratios of immigrants to numbers of restaurants in Italy a while back, but it looks like the chart may have been lost during a blog migration:
https://journal.dedasys.com/2008/05/13/restaurants-immigrant...
All this may be true, but part of the reason is still that Thai food is yummy and delicious! Speaking for myself, I could eat Thai pretty much every day. And luckily enough, I feel like we have an embarrassment of riches in terms of good Thai food here in the Triangle area. You've got:
YumYum in Cary
Thai Villa in Cary
Thai Cafe in Durham
Thaiphoon in Raleigh
Champa in Raleigh
Thai Palace in Chapel Hill
etc., etc. So sure, thank you Thai government, for sending all this yummy goodness our way!
Interesting, had never heard of gastrodiplomacy or culinary diplomacy. But a few other countries, including the US, have established some of these programs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culinary_diplomacy
On a similar theme, there's a couple of companies that produce cookie-cutter Irish pubs for global markets:
Smart plan, and works on many levels--both product and service industries included (in terms of creating demand), but of course cultural and diplomatic ones as well, with network effects.
I remember reading something similar regarding Chinese restaurants.
It works though, my wife and I spent 2 weeks in Thailand largely because we were so enthralled with Thai food in the US.
As I skimmed through the first N paragraphs in search of the buried lede of this article, as I seem to need to do for most articles these days, I am reminded yet again that HN needs an abstract service (aka tl;dr). Commenters should submit an abstract which is voted up or down, hopefully based on accuracy and compactness. Reader could then skim through abstract and make a more informed decision about whether it's worth the time to read, just like is done with academic articles.
(People who are going to comment without reading the article will do this regardless of whether you have an abstract.)
TL;DR:
> But as it turns out, there is a much simpler answer: The Thai government paid for it.
Thai is pretty terrible compared to Vietnamese and Indonesian cuisines. Such a shame the latter two have made so little of an impact on most of the west, France and the Netherlands, respectively, excluded.
I would like to believe this article but:
a) Having eaten supposed Thai food in the USA I can tell you it's not Thai! Most of it's Chinese based.
b) You're talking about a government that couldn't organise its way out of a coupe let alone have a foreign policy. There's no way they are organised enough to do this.
It would be a great idea if it was in fact real.