Even though some think it’s a cop-out ordering Pad Thai in a Thai restaurant, marking you as a newbie, I like it quite a bit. I do tend to go for Pad See Ew, wide pan-fried rice noodles, although I’m a little picky about them because I like the dish when the chewy ribbons of noodles have stuck to the wok and start sticking together, getting charred in the process, and the dish isn’t overly saucy. Chow fun can be made like that, if you order it dry-fried, which I do.

At a book event in Paris, Danette St. Onge stopped by and gave me a copy of her book, The Better-Than-Takeout Thai Cookbook, knowing that I liked to make foods from other countries. Being from California, foods from Asia are part of our DNA, regardless of our individual ancestry. I’m happy to be part of that mix, and in Paris, Asian restaurants are thriving (and usually packed) outside of the traditional quartiers asiatiques, most notably Belleville and the 13ème. Thai cuisine isn’t as well-represented as, say, Vietnamese (perhaps due to the seasonings), so I often take matters into my own hands, or wok, or skillet, and make it myself.

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