Yes, that Blue Elephant…
Seriously, not easy to find with Grab
…the famous Royal Thai cuisine restaurant / cooking school in Thailand. Since we went to Bangkok without any specific plans, I needed to fill in my time. Since I have Barbara and Justin with me, roaming the redlight districts scouring for ladyboys are out of the question, I needed to find things to do that would pique my interest. What better than to learn how to cook Thai food when you’re in the country’s capital? So, I began my search. I looked online for the “Best” cooking school out there, because Jimmy only wants the best experience, money was no object. I searched online for different schools and most felt like small independent operations. The classes looked like they were held inside someone’s apartment, the student looked like dirty backpackers with freshly contracted STDs. While they are very affordable, they were not for me, I did not want to mingle with the hostel staying crowd, I wanted to be with people closer to my income bracket, in which I found the Blue Elephant. It was the most expensive class I could find online, it is a well-known brand, and it was different because while most Thai cooking schools offered familiar dishes such as Pad Thai, Tom Yum Goong, the Blue Elephant offered Royal Thai Cuisine lessons. My vanity got the best of me, I immediately signed up for the morning session with the market tour for THB 2,800.
The day arrives, I’m excited. I went for a run in Lumpini park in the morning. Side note – running in Bangkok is tremendously difficult. You will sweat twice the amount you would sweat normally in Shanghai. I was struggling completing 3-4 km when I was regularly running 5-7 km the previous week. After the run, I went for a quick breakfast and I was on my way. Got a taxi through Grab and off we go. I arrived about 5 minutes early, and was told to sit in a waiting room, oh gosh this is just like the time I went on a ski trip by myself with another high school. I’m sitting there all alone, everyone else came as couples. There’s a gay Chinese couple, from Shanghai no less, and BTW, I bumped into one of them at Sober Company the week after. There’s a father daughter duo from the US, a Taiwanese couple – the guy obviously hasn’t hit it yet, he was working way to hard trying to impress her. Once everyone arrived, we filled in a quick survey, and then off we go to the market.
We took the metro to a market one stop away, I’ll be honest, I was really looking forward to this market tour. My head was filled with ideas of what the tour could be like, will we see different herbs and spices? The tour guide giving us tips on how to tell which ingredients to buy? Showing us things that are indigenous to Thailand? None of that happened, this couldn’t have been more disappointing. You want to know how disappointing? Imagine you meet a pretty girl, you’ve been dating for weeks and the two of you decided that it’s time to get down, and at that point she whipped out her cock. It’s more disappointing than that, because at least in my hypothetical transphobic story, it’s at least interesting and a great story you can tell your friends. For this market visit, we stopped by a fruit stand where the tour guide tried to sell us mangos, then we walked another hundred meters to a Thai milk tea / coffee stand where some people in the group got drinks, and then to a mosquito infested back room where the shop makes curry paste for the Blue Elephant and we just stood around looking at different kinds of curry paste without much explanation. That was the whole market visit.
Back to the classroom disappointed, all I can think is that this better be good. The air conditioning in the room was way too cold, we’re sitting there fore 20 minutes waiting for the class to start. The instructor was a middle age lunch lady type. Friendly, cheerful, and that’s about the only good thing I can say about the class. We did 4 dishes, and essentially we only made the sauce. Take the first dish for example – Steam halibut over red curry sauce. The fish was already steamed, we just made the sauce. For the curry sauce, the curry paste was already made, so basically we chopped some garlic, onions, combined the paste with all the ingredients and then reduce with coconut milk. THAT’S IT!
The bubbly teacher, she was really entertaining
Pretty simple dishes
Even though the class fell below my expectation, I’m still happy that I had taken the class, overall it’s enjoyable, just a little more expensively priced than it should be and really it could’ve been down in an hour.
But other than that, Bangkok was a great experience, Thai food is sooooooooo amazing. Ate a lot of crabs, Somboon – AMAZING, and the largest curry crab was on 1,200 baht. But even better than Somboon, my friends Evan and Judy too us to Krua Je Ngor on Mahaset Road, I highly recommend the crabs there and also the salt egg rice noodles there. Another great restaurant we went was SRA BUA at the Kempinski hotel, I only brought shorts for this trip and they made me put on a pair of pants. SRA BUA is a Michelin star restaurants and the food didn’t disappoint. Well, except for my pomelo and raw scallop salad. I asked for mild in terms of spiciness and it was like scorching hot. Nonetheless, the rest of the dishes were amazing, especially the lobster. Last place I want to mention is Siamese Boat Noodle, we found it inside the Central Embassy mall and it was delicious. I purposely ordered the most expensive wagyu beef one and it was delicious. 700 baht for a bowl of Thai boat noodles must be some sort of a record but it was worth every dollar. Second only to the crab, the Thai Boat noodles were absolute divine, I wish I ate more.
A nice place if you feel like splurging some dough
BTW, you have to wear pants, they made me wear a pair of their house pants
All in all Bangkok was a great experience, Justin will be too young to remember any of this so I framed some of his pictures in my office and will show him one day and tell him the story of how on the last day, we ran out of swimming diapers and are left with the regular one. I decided to take him swimming anyways and the regular diaper soaked up so much water that it eventually exploded. I’ve always thought diapers are made from materials like cotton, actually, you’ll be surprise that it’s not, inside the diaper is a gel like substance, and it will just soak the water until it balloons to the size of a soccer ball. That’s it until next time, here’s a picture of happy Justin!
Justin approves!