Q&A With Pok Pok's Andy Ricker, The Next '[City] Meets Nashville' Guest Chef at Pop

Andy Ricker has won mountains of acclaim for his

restaurants in Portland and New York — including a 2011 James Beard Award for Best Chef-Northwest — and his dedication to real Thai flavors. Decades of shlepping back and forth to Thailand has given him a perspective on Thai food that's matched by few Americans.

So, when Sarah Gavigan told Bites that Ricker would be the next chef in her [City] Meets Nashville series of visiting chef dinners, we were pretty damned excited. Ricker will prepare a five-course Northern Thai dinner on Saturday, Oct. 25, at Pop Nashville. Tickets are $75 per person (not including tax, tip or beverage) and there will be two seatings (6 p.m. and 8:45 p.m.).

"We're going to do a northern Thai menu," Ricker says. "When we do these kind of things, I don't really like doing a greatest hits of Pok Pok tour. We like to do things that make sense. We're not going to do the Vietnamese fish sauce wings with Northern Thai laab and a central Thai noodle dish. I like to give people a meal that's comprehensive so they can understand how a particular region might have a meal."

If you have even a passing interest in Thai cuisine, we'd suggest Ricker's Pok Pok cookbook as a gateway. It's a great read (Ricker collaborated with food writer J.J. Goode) and will help you understand that there's a lot more to the food than just pad Thai and drunken noodles.

Bites talked with Ricker by phone last week about rice, regionalism and changing American palates.

Where did I catch you? New York, Portland or parts elsewhere?

New York

First, I guess I have a complaint.

Um, OK.

Your cookbook is kicking my ass.

[Laughs] In what way?

No, it's very good. One of the favorite cookbooks I've bought in the last few years. It's just very detailed and it's not easy to find all the ingredients that you want.

That's on purpose. There's a million cookbooks out there that are like "101 Thai recipes made easy for the Western kitchen." And the whole point of writing this book was to say, "Look, you can achieve the same flavors we achieve at Pok Pok, but here's what you're gonna have to do to get them." And if you choose not to do all that stuff, you're not going to get those flavors. There's really only one way.

You mention this a little bit in the book. Americans take rice as such an afterthought, but it's such an important part of Thai food and indeed Asian cuisine. What makes rice transcendent? How do we get people to understand that it's more than just filler?

The first thing to understand is that rice isn't a side order. It's not like here how we use potatoes. It's more like potatoes were to the Irish. It's not a side, it's a staple. It's what you make a meal out of every single day. Everything else you eat along with it is the side. So, if you look at it that way, you start to get an understanding about how important it is.

Now, in Thailand, as in any other rice-growing culture, rice isn't just a staple food, it basically permeates every part of life, religion, seasons … all that stuff. If you look at any kind of ancient calendar, it's based on crop cycles, and rice is no exception. And until very very recently — the last 50 years or so when we started to get industrialized food in Southeast Asia — it was essentially the heartbeat of the nation. It was the staple, it was the cash crop. When tourism kicked in, it was how they made money from the rest of the world.

And, you know, it's not as simple as there being sticky rice and jasmine rice. There are different strains and varieties and quality differences. As the season shifts, the rice changes. The older it gets and the longer it sits in the rice barn, the less moisture is in it and the less aromatic it gets. You could write a whole book about it. I'm not going to, because I don't know enough about it. I know somebody who did their Ph.D. dissertation just on rice — it's a whole field of study.

As far as applying it to eating food, and again it's not a side, it's something you need to eat with food, but in some ways it completes dishes. The flavor of it makes the dish what it is. So, I can't imagine eating a central Thai curry without some rice. It doesn't make any sense. Who wants to huff down huge quantities of rich curry with no rice?

The other way to look at it is this: Because everything is a side to the rice, people would eat big quantities of rice. It's a poor farming society, except for the royals, so when you ate lots of rice (whether it's sticky rice or jasmine rice or plain rice), and you didn't have much meat, but you had lots of vegetables, the way that you would eat would be to eat something that's very intensely seasoned, because you had this bland rice. Something that's very intensely seasoned will make the flavor stretch. And so, you can get pleasure out of a meal by filling your stomach with rice and having something that's very flavored — spicy, salty, sweet sour — it stays with you longer. It completes that flavor.

It's like having a lot more of the protein of that particular dish than you would otherwise. So just imagine a family of like six people, sitting around having their meal at 5 a.m. and then at like 6 p.m. There's like three or four highly flavored dishes in the middle of the table. A whole shitload of condiments and herbs and vegetables. And then a big pot of rice that they cook twice a day. And that's gotta feed everybody, so that's how Thai food became what it became, this very intensely flavored kind of thing.

Now if you look at royal food, it's a much different thing. But you can look at French food much the same way. If you're eating rustic, country French food, it's going to be very simple. It's like a rabbit fucking stew with a lot of garlic in it, and you eat it with a lot of bread. But in the royal palace, they're having deep-fried hummingbird assholes with foie gras and morels. Same thing with Thai food.

Help me describe laab, the minced meat dish. You've talked about it as one of the first dishes that stopped you and made you love Thai cuisine.

The first thing to say about laab is that it's not Thai food. It's either Issan/Lao food or it's northern Thai food. In America, we look at Thailand as sort of like monocultural/monolithic kind of country where everything is the same. But Thailand is broken down into four distinct subregions.

You've got the south of Thailand that's way, way down south by the border of Malaysia. The people are ethnically Malay, most of them. They're heavily Muslim. There's a Muslim separatist movement down there, that's turned ugly. Ethnically, they're not Thai. Then you get into the center of Thailand, Bangkok and just south of there, you get where the seat of royal power has been for the last few hundred years. The central Thai people are what we think of as Thai. They speak a central-Thai language, which is what we call Thai. When you're in Thailand and you say "I want to eat Thai food tonight," you're not talking about what they're eating in the countryside. You're talking about central Thai food.

And then you've got Issan, or the northeastern part of Thailand, and the people there are heavily ethnically Lao or Khmer, typically, until you get to the Mekong River border. They speak a different language. The food is a different type of food. And then, when you get up north, these people speak a totally different language, they have a different alphabet and they have a different origin than the central-Thai people. Their food's totally different, and it has to do with region and ethnicity and historical origin.

So, what we commonly think of as laab in America is the Issan version, which is ground chicken with chili powder, lime juice, shallots … I've seen peas in it before. Mint. Cilantro. It's a typical-style laab. Believe me, a really good Issan-style laab is delicious. Even not a great version is still pretty tasty.

But when you get to northern Thailand, it takes different forms. The meat is minced. There's a lot of offal involved, just like in Laos or in Issan. But the spice mixture they use can range from fairly simple but exotic to extremely complex. It can be from four or five ingredients up to 20, depending on where you are in the region. There's a couple of things that hold it together. They use some seasoning in there called [a word that the author can't begin to transcribe], which is a relative of the prickly ash. Then from there, it's any number of different spices. They often put blood in it, so it's a very, very iron-y flavor. They use lots and lots of herbs with it. Fried garlic. Fried shallot. So it's a much more complex dish than the Issan version.

The other thing you have to realize is that there are hundreds of different versions in each region. It changes from province to province and county to county and city to city and village to village and restaurant to restaurant. There are so many different versions of it. There are similar characteristics that they share typically, but it's really important to understand that there are not just two versions.

When I'm talking about Issan, there's a fair amount of Issan-style here in Nashville.

Issan, until recently, was where the working people of Thailand come from. They're like the Mexican immigrants for a long time. They're the people who did street cleaning, driving cabs, laboring in factories … those were the Issan. They're like the hard-working country folk who came to the cities to work. And they've spread all through the country, so Issan food is ubiquitous at this point. Anywhere you are in Thailand, you can find Issan food. And a lot of the cooks that end up over here are from Issan.

What do you make of the growth of Thai food in the U.S.? What do you attribute that to?

I attribute that it's delicious. It appeals to our sense of adventure, but it's not too challenging. It's spicy, and the food hits a lot of our pleasure points. There's the heat, the sweet, the sour and the salty. There's the rich, noodley stuff that goes on.

And especially the Thai food that goes on in America is tuned for our palates. It tends to be a lot sweeter and have a lot more meat in it. It has a lot more mixed vegetables. The portions are big and relatively inexpensive. And I think, compared to your standard Chinese takeout, it became a lot more exotic and, frankly, tastier than the average Americanized Chinese food.

The world's changing. America's changing and our tastes are changing. What's available is changing and I think that the fact that Thai food is one of the fastest growing ethnic foods in the country is a testament that we're getting more and more adventurous as eaters.

A lot of what you're writing about in your cookbook that you like are some of the funkier flavors. The sours. The shrimp pastes and the stronger tastes. Is that something that will grow on Americans?

Well, let's look at what you mean by Americans. We're living in a changing society. You sound like a honky.

[laughs] I am. Kind of a pudgy one.

I'm a honky. We're gonna be in the minority here pretty soon. You know, Asians are the fastest-growing group after Hispanics. So when you say "American," you have to start thinking about the ethnic makeup of who we are. And you have to start looking that right now, if you've got kids and they're going to school, they're going with Africans, Filipinos, Chinese, Lao, Hmong and every kind of ethnicity you can possibly imagine. I grew up in rural Vermont, which was lily-white. We had like two people of color in the school, and they were both exchange students. Now, when I go back there, the demographic has changed dramatically.

You've got kids growing up, going over to their buddy's house who are second-generation Chinese and eating Chinese food. College kids aren't going out for hamburgers, they're going out for ramen and for Korean and other stuff. Korean food is super hip right now and uses a ton of funky flavors. The demographic is changing, and our tastes are changing with it. If you're talking about 60-year-old white folks, yeah, it might take a little longer for them to tune in. But in the next 20 years, America's base is changing. I mean, shit, one of the big fast-food chains is trying out the idea of a banh mi shop.

Really?

I'm talking about somebody like KFC is going to roll out a banh mi shop chain.

Wow.

So take that as you will. But my prediction is that we will not be stuck with McDonald's forever.

You're doing a lot of travel, splitting time between Portland and New York and trying to get to Thailand fairly often.

Yeah, and then we're opening in L.A. as well.

What's your frequent-flier account like these days?

[laughs] Oh, I'm like diamond whatever status. I'm pretty far along on my million-miler.

You've said that you're not a chef, but at this point, you're somebody who's opening restaurants and cooking food and supervising cooks in a lot of different places. That sounds an awful lot like a chef to me.

Well, that sounds a lot like a restauranteur. To me, when I was coming up, you didn't think about the guy who owned the restaurant. Chefs didn't own restaurants. It was a rare thing, not the norm. That's the new norm. In my mind I still can't wrap my head around the definition of a chef being a restaurant owner. At this point I feel more like a restauranteur. I'm a cook who owns a bunch of restaurants.

When you're not eating in one of your places, what do you gravitate toward?

It depends on where I am. When I'm in Portland I eat a shitload of Vietnamese food. When I'm in New York, I eat a lot of Chinese food.