It was high noon in late June in Chinatown on the first really swampy day of the summer. There were a few customers at Lao Sze Chuan. There was nobody in the new Korean barbecue joint except three fat, sweaty white guys. And who the hell could even think of eating in any of the dozen or so hot-pot joints on a day like that?
“The method of manipulating ice cream on a cold surface had been around for a long time. You could find it in Korea, Japan, etc.—and Thailand too. But about 6 years ago, a small shop inside a mall in Bangkok started making their ice cream on a steel pan (that very much resembles a commercial pad thai pan, which is a wide, flat carbon steel pan with a short, flared rim) whose temperature registers at minus 30° Celsius. According to the owner of that ice cream shop, this is about 20° lower than the surface on which the same type of ice cream had been made in other countries. This means you get the job done in much less time—about one minute. They called it “Ice Cream Phat” (literally ‘stir-fried ice cream’), because the way you prepare it looks like you’re “stir-frying” the liquid ice cream base into solid ice cream, and the vessel also looks like a flat stir-fry pan. That shop eventually outgrew their original location and is now operating in over 60 locations throughout Thailand. Lots of copycats these days.”
*Full disclosure: I’m a contributor to Dill. It’s a quarterly that focuses on Asian foodways. Its first issue, which drops Saturday at the Thai Food Festival, is all about noodles.
