By DCist contributor Josh Kramer
Who needs a cellphone camera when you have a pen and paper? Drawn to Flavor highlights local dishes and drinks in vivid watercolor. In these posts, Illustrator and journalist Josh Kramer tries to honor all the energy and creativity that goes into making food beautiful and delicious.
You can chart the evolution of urban Asian-American cuisine right at 1700 New Jersey Avenue NW at BKK Cookshop, now transformed from the classic American Thai restaurant that once graced the same address.
While Beau Thai was a pleasant and consistent reframing of now-familiar Southeast Asian cuisine, BKK offers a retooling of some parts of Thai food, with influences from urban and cross-cultural Bangkok: more noodles, more street foods, more of the distinct flavors that characterize the complexity of Thai cooking.
This development might be perfectly suited to the brave new food world in which we now live. For example, the Coconut Noodle Bowl at BKK Cookshop is a noodle soup topped with an egg — a familiar concept to ramen and pho eaters. The yellow curry and coconut milk broth is sweet, salty, and lightly metallic. Egg noodles, peanuts, and red tofu all provide various crunchy and firm textures within the silky broth that complement the tender chicken. Cilantro, scallion, and bean sprouts offer fresh, herbaceous accents.
Everything within the bowl made perfect sense — the only thing I found to be confusing about the dish was how to use all the utensils in concert. I eventually settled on using the spoon for the soup, chop sticks for the noodles, and fork and knife for the chicken still on the bone.
While Chinese food has been popular in the U.S. since the mid-19th century, and Indian and Thai have become quite commonplace, other Asian cuisines —including Malaysian, Filipino, and Laotian— have been slower to catch on in commercial kitchens.
But they have been popping up around D.C. for a few years—sometimes quite literally, like Burmese falooda pop-up Toli Moli—and Washingtonians have developed an appetite for Southeast Asian cuisine well beyond traditional take-out fare. While American interpretations of Asian influences are constantly shifting, I’m still enthusiastic to see what’s next. BKK Cookshop is a step in the right direction.
BKK Cookshop: 1700 New Jersey NW, (202) 791-0592.
