But her sous chef Dylan Heath, formerly of Cafe Marie-Jeanne and Cellar Door Provisions, has, and together they’re executing a relatively specialized and concise menu that Sriratana says is “roughly two-thirds Isan.” Of the five vendors established in Fulton Galley, she’s the only one who, apart from a couple stages, has never worked in a professional kitchen (much less on a sidewalk). A few years ago the Bloomington-raised former health care worker turned to food blogging and dinner parties to help move on from a dead-end career and rekindle the magic of childhood. Palita Sriratana isn’t from Isan, but growing up she spent summers in Bangkok’s suburban Mueang Nonthaburi District, cooking at the side of her aunts, learning the dishes her late grandmother had handed down. I didn’t consider this tenuous comparison until Pink Salt opened in Fulton Galley earlier this summer, promising Isan food from northeastern Thailand, a region known for spicy meat-and-toasted-rice salads ( larb), sticky fermented sausage ( sai krok), and smoky grilled chicken ( gai yang) served with papaya salad and sticky rice. You can stroll among the stalls of Pier 21 on the fifth floor of the Terminal 21 shopping center sampling a splendid array of regionally diverse dishes and never break a sweat.Ĭhicago’s recent flowering of downtown food halls looks a lot like this (except, of course, if any of our street food specialists got too famous the city would hound them out of existence rather than offer them an indoor kiosk). Nowhere is this romantic fantasy undercut so effectively as it is in Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, where sprawling shopping-mall food courts often invite famous street specialists indoors to cook and sell their signatures in air-conditioned comfort. Somehow one is convinced this food tastes best in the open heat and exhaust of a thrumming metropolis. For tourists it’s not just the affordable, practical, utilitarian way of feeding oneself that it is for locals, but a cheap and easy way to feel like you belong-or at least identify-with a foreign culture at its realest. The allure of street food for people who didn’t grow up in a place where it flourished is largely psychological.
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