Restaurants are informal embassies: Food diplomacy and reflection in Thailand (3)

Reflection one: what is the standard?

Efforts to promote food diplomacy have made the number of Thai restaurants continue to grow as the government wishes, so that overseas guests have more opportunities to know Thai food, and have a good impression of Thai food, even willing to visit Thailand for food, but whether the taste can really standardization?

David Thompson, a celebrity chef from Australia who owns a Michelin-starred Thai restaurant, believes that standardizing the taste of Thai food is an unrealistic fantasy, because taste is very subjective. Even if there are standards in cooking, the essence of cooking lies in bringing Humanity, taste, seasoning and skill are all part of a chef's personality, and a machine can never measure a hand-made product. Strongly maintaining tradition and trying to control the scope of change may also reduce the possibility of Thai cuisine diversifying.

Reflection No. 2: Those selected Thai dishes

In addition to the fact that the taste standards cannot be unified, the main Thai dishes that have been carefully selected for overseas promotion cannot really reflect the wonderful picture of Thai food.

There is an electronic recipe book on the official website of Thai Select, with a total of 10 dishes, including pad thai, coconut chicken soup, green papaya salad, cold beef pho, green curry prawns, massaman curry chicken, hot and sour prawn soup , Southern Sour Curry, and two desserts: Sticky Rice Pudding and Banana Coconut Soup.

In addition, since overseas guests tend to order the same dishes repeatedly in Thai restaurants, Professor Amaraporn Wongphak of Suan Dusit University put forward 13 favorite dishes of foreign guests in a seminar on how to promote the development of Thai food overseas, namely: Pad Thai, Roast Duck Curry, Coconut Chicken Soup, Satay Pork, Hot and Sour Shrimp Soup, Fried Chicken with Cashew Nuts, Panam Red Curry, Fried Toss, Fried Shrimp Cake, Minced Beef Salad, Pandan Leaf Fried Chicken, Roast Chicken and green papaya salad. There is a lot of overlap with the dishes in the Thai Select electronic cookbook.

These dishes are characterized by a mild taste, suitable for foreigners' tastes, and easier to gain support and exposure in the international market. However, although the above dishes appear in almost every Thai restaurant overseas, the various chili sauces and other dishes with strong flavors that are most commonly eaten by Thai locals do not or rarely appear in overseas Thai restaurants. Since the "World Kitchen" project to internationalize Thai food is to allow more people to accept Thai food, these dishes that cannot fully represent the daily life of the Thai people have become internationally renowned representatives of Thai food.

What's more, roast chicken, cold ground beef, green papaya salad are not actually the dishes of central Bangkok, but from the northeastern region of Thailand, but in the process of pushing Thai food to the international stage for food diplomacy, these The dishes have been made into a part of central Bangkok cuisine, and the strong local flavors of the original have been improved a lot. That is to say, although the Thai government is committed to creating the most orthodox image of Thai cuisine overseas, it has not actually adhered to the stance of maintaining its original flavor when facing its own domestic non-Bangkok specialties.

My experience studying Thai cuisine at Le Cordon Bleu in Bangkok is a testament to that. At that time, I found out that it took several classes to study the chili sauce alone, but this was not the Thai flavor that one would eat in Taiwan in the past; when the second semester began to learn the regional specialties of Thailand, the chef also mentioned that it was a foreign student A semester that is more difficult to master, because there is usually a big gap with the past experience of foreign students, and this is also true in practice. The special spices, ingredients, and seasonings used in various regions of Thailand were eye-opening to realize that Thai food is not just curries or cold papaya salad.

It turns out that the Thai food in the impression of us foreigners is also the result of the deliberate creation of the Thai government. Therefore, the Thai government is trying its best to standardize and orthodox internationally within the range of Thai dishes that foreigners can accept, and this process has somewhat sacrificed the special flavors of various regions in the country, which may be promoted by "country" as a unit Gastronomic diplomacy is inevitable.

Epilogue

It has been 20 years since the promotion of Thailand's food foreign policy. With the cooperation of various governments and private units, very good results have been achieved, and the national brand image of the food kingdom has been successfully established. object of learning.

However, Thai food is only a part of this country. The Thailand we are most familiar with is a country of friendly and beautiful smiles and a tourist destination, but there are many aspects of this country that we are not familiar with and are not used to, such as severe political situation, heating up The epidemic situation and police law enforcement violence, etc., coexist with the fascinating Thai food, which is one of the faces of today's Thai society. Just like the Thai food we often eat is not the whole picture of Thai food, getting to know more about different parts of Thailand is like trying local dishes from different regions, which may have a different effect on the Thai food and national image created by the Thai government. an experience.