Audio By Carbonatix
Yesterday, I got a very nice note from loyal reader Jason Marsell, hipping me to some killer street food in one of the most unlikely of places.
Pad Thai on the 16th Street Mall.
I was both intrigued and highly skeptical — my first blush of overwhelming enthusiasm giving way to some more sober and restrained thinking. I mean, hot dogs from a cart? Sure. Everyone knows that the hot dog’s natural environment is a pit filled with hot, murky water, and that the highest honor any tubesteak can hope for is to be lifted from its primordial bath, dressed ceremonially in bun, mustard and onion vestments, and then served, hot and pinkly, to me. Street dogs are fantastic. I heart them big time.
Barbecue from a cart has been done with reasonable success (in Writer
Square). Sandwiches from a cart are obvious. Ice cream. Donuts.
Tacos. The minute someone figures out to stuff a trailer full of bacon
and porno and pull it up out front of my office, they’re going to be
very rich.
But Thai food? I mean, okay. In Thailand, that
probably makes sense. All over Southeast Asia, street food is more or
less a way of life. But this is Denver and I was just a little bit
dubious about the affections of Denverites for Thai noodles from a
cart. When I woke up this morning, I was still wondering whether or
not the people of this fine city would go for something like that.
The answer, in case you’re wondering, is yes. In a really big friggin’ way.
I
made it down to the Mall about 11:30 this morning, walked past the
virtually empty paninni concession, the lonely ice cream vendor, the
guy selling authentic New Orleans-style shave-ice Sno-Balls to no one
and the wiener man all alone with his Sabretts, and by the time I made
it to 16th and Stout (more or less), the line for the Thai food cart
was already more than ten people long. In the forty minutes or so that
I stood waiting in the sun, I counted it swell to as many as
twenty-two people and never shrink to less than a dozen. And I swear,
if all those computer geeks out there fussing over new ways to send
American Idol videos out into the ether would instead focus a little
bit of their time and energy into figuring out how we could
email/blog/twitter smells, that line would’ve been ten times as long
because I would’ve done nothing all the while I was standing there but
broadcast the lovely aroma of Thai spices, hot oil, frying bananas and
searing green onions that I and my fellow street-food junkies stood
cloaked in on this beautiful summer afternoon.
The operation
itself is pretty amazing. One woman, one pan, one spoon and a line of
customers snaking halfway down the block, all of them braving the bums
and the busses, just for a cheap hit of some of the most amazing Thai
food I’ve had in Denver. Standing there inside her little cart (with
barely enough room to turn around, yet fully outfitted as a mobile
kitchen), the Thai cart lady takes orders one at a time, cooks the
orders one at a time, rinses out her pans, wipes down her utensils, and
then starts over again. She does this all day long, from morning until
night — a steady, unending stream of customers waiting patiently for
their hand-made orders of pad Thai, green curry rice, basil beef and
drunken noodles. The lady cooks fast. She cleans even faster. But it
is a simple issues of mathematics: even if it takes her only three
minutes to put together an order of pad Thai and a bag of fried bananas
with powdered sugar, if there are twenty people in her line (as there
were right around noon), that last poor sucker in the back is gonna be
waiting sixty minutes for his lunch.
But you know what? It is so
worth it. The pad Thai I got (which I am eating as I write this) was
unlike any other pad Thai I’ve had — a brick red and muddled mess of
perfect noodles, peanuts, rough-cut green onions, chicken and cilantro
(I had mine without the sprouts) that threw off fragrant billows of hot
spice like midnight at the Hua Hin night market and ate like exactly
what it was: a rustic and thrown-together plate of some of the best
stuff on earth.
I didn’t love the fried bananas simply because
they’d been sitting awhile and (bad luck of placement) I got the last
two from the old batch just as the new ones were coming out of the
mini-fryer. Still, even they were better than some that I’ve gotten
from proper restaurants not working under the bizarre constrictions of
being in a cart in the middle of the street, and I ate them happily
enough as I walked off down the street, carrying a little bit of
Thailand in a cloud surrounding me, passing by the shoeshine man, the
half-dozen posing Elvises shilling for Fortune Valley Casino, the movie
shoot (or whatever it was) that required some poor bastard dressed like
a caveman or a barbarian of some description to sit at the mouth of one
of the alleys around California Street and be gawked at by passing
tourists while the crew set up in the murk behind him.
So Jason
Marsell? Good eye, buddy. I owe you a beer for bringing this one to
my attention. Or better yet, maybe a nice order of drunken noodles.
If only every tip I got could turn out to be as delicious as this one.
