Thai Food 101: The story of ‘suki’

ABOVE: Dipping sauce and veggies at Number One Suki

THAI FOOD 101 — Like just about every other dish adopted from somewhere else by Thais, Thai-style sukiyaki bears little resemblance to the Japanese original. Unlike other culinary borrowings –  Hainanese chicken rice, Portuguese-style eggy-sugar sweets or Thai-Muslim chicken biryani – there is ample opportunity for sukiyaki enthusiasts to compare the two versions side by side. One involves a communal saute pan deep enough to hold a little liquid and the meat and vegetables that will be dipped into a sweet sauce and a beaten raw egg; the other is actually a Chinese hotpot dish. Both are wildly popular, proliferating across the country like Starbucks branches.

Not surprisingly, Thai sukiyaki’s success rests on the strength of its dipping sauce. The hotpot itself, the liquid inside it (water or broth) and even the quality of the ingredients to be cast into the pot are secondary to the mix of fermented tofu, garlic, chilies and vinegar that make sukiyaki such an addictive enterprise. A great sauce makes more bites imperative, and whether you get that from another tray of fish dumplings or enoki mushrooms doesn’t really matter.

Maybe this explains this dish’s success in Thailand – a land obsessed with sauces. Or maybe it’s the zen-like communal nature of the hotpot itself. Or possibly it’s the hotpot’s wholesome inoffensiveness, the fact that it’s the Taylor Swift of Thai food. In any case, sukiyaki has become big business: MK Suki, Thailand’s biggest sukiyaki chain, boasts at least 375 outlets across the country, netting over THB14 billion in revenue last year, according to their annual report.

The sauce of dipping at MK

But there was a time before mammoth sukiyaki chains promising healthy DIY fare for the whole family. In the 1950s, a couple of Thai-Chinese restaurateurs offered an adapted version of the Chinese hotpot in which a selection of raw vegetables, marinated proteins, dumplings and noodles could be presented to the table for the diner to cook at his or her own leisure. The restaurants padded their menus with other Thai-Chinese favorites like deep-fried crab dumplings and fried rice. And of course, there was that dipping sauce, the recipes of which were always closely guarded.

Today, bottles of the dipping sauce from Ruen Petch (1903-5 New Petchburi Road, 02-314-5047) are said to be sent to Thai grocery stores in Los Angeles. This is not surprising – the sauce is delicious, heavy on the red fermented tofu (towhoo yee) that lends the noodle dish yen ta fo its characteristic tang. Naturally, it comes with mini-bowls of chilies, garlic and lime wedges, because there is no sauce that a Thai person thinks he or she cannot improve with just a few little flourishes. I am one of those people. I go heavy on the garlic, moderate on the chilies, easy on the lime. One does not want to kill at that beautiful towhoo yee flavor, after all.

Ruen Petch’s pot of hotness.

Which is exactly what I did at the other grande dame of Thai-style sukiyaki in Bangkok, Number One Suki (also known as Eau Hua Suki, 842-846 Rama IV Rd., 02-234-3548). Started in 1955, Number One Suki claims to be the originator of Thai sukiyaki, and its dipping sauce – less sweet and more earthy than those of its competitors – is also accompanied by a dangerous trio of extra lime, chilies and garlic that come to your table unbidden, ready to turn that carefully balanced mix of sweet, salty and spicy into something no good no more.

Number One Suki’s marinated meat comes mixed with egg yolks

Instead, disregard that stuff and concentrate on the myth of Thai suki, a story that, like all food stories, involves the ingenuity of a single man. In this case, his name is Towhua Saguai, a Thai-Chinese cook who came up with the idea for Thai sukiyaki after falling asleep in church. The ingredients to the very first Thai suki dipping sauce came to him in a dream. The restaurant he started, Number One Suki, is still run by his descendants, out of a dingy one-room shophouse that once played neighbor to a no-hands restaurant known as Galaxy. Today, that neighbor is called Versailles, and the food still cleaves to Mr. Towhua’s dictates: meat marinated in a garlic-based sauce for 3-5 days, to be cooked in broth boiled from chicken bones.

With the area gentrifying, Number One’s future is up in the air. All that is certain is that the restaurant is still operating from its original location for the next three months. So go to Number One if you can and enjoy a Bangkok culinary landmark before it, too, goes the way of the dinosaur and disappears.

Study up with more Thai Food 101:

Don’t turn your nose up at ‘pla rah’

Your food is killing you