12 Brooklyn Paper • www.BrooklynPaper.com • (718) 260-2500 January 10–16, 2020
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Take A Delicious Survey of Thai Street
Food at iCook Thai Cook
I’m as excited about iCook Thai Cook, the
newest entrant on the vibrant Thai dining scene
in Elmhurst, Queens, as I was when I first set
foot in Woodside’s storied Sripraphai 15 years
ago. In case you’re wondering the name comes
from, it’s because Boonnum “Nam” Thongngoen’s
restaurant resides in a sliver of a space
inside iCook, a Chinese style hotpot restaurant.
Miniature tuktuks — the motorized rickshaws
common throughout Thailand — affixed
to rainbow colored slinkies dangle from the
ceiling of the narrow hallway leading into the
dining room. Little swatches of the type of gold
foil one sees adorning the reclining Buddha at
the nearby Wat Buddha Thai Thavorn Vanaram
temple pepper the walls of the corridor. Inside
lies a temple to Thai street food, complete with
a brightly colored mural from local artist Nong
Sarasin depicting a rotund Thai style Buddha
against a field of orange and yellow flowers
holding a platter. Behind the counter is an altar
with a more serious religious icon, the Emerald
Buddha.
Wow! Zaab Wing, a bowl of flappers festooned
with cilantro and dressed with a chili
lime sauce, is a great way to start your devotional
to Thai street food. The superb crunch
comes from roasted rice powder and double
frying. The mussel pancake packed with shrimp
and mussels and served with sweet chili sauce
is also quite tasty.
There’s no real way to translate yum, the
class of Thai dishes that feature various proteins
in a zippy marinade, into English, so the menu
calls them Spicy Yummy Salad. Among the 11
find liver, pork intestines, pressed pork and egg
yolk — all served with a shot glass of Millionaire
Sauce. Rather than flaunting gold flakes or
truffles, the latter features fish sauce, birdseye
chili, kaffir lime, and mint. The squidgy rounds
of pork loaf and rich bright yellow-orange duck
yolks were quite lovely. It was pretty highly
spiced already, but that didn’t deter my dining
companions and I from enriching it with the
Millionaire Sauce. Nam says the dish has its
roots in a snack she whipped up for her children
after school.
Millionaire Sauce also accompanies a bowl
of fish maw and crab meat soup. It’s a Chinese
style medicinal potage with plenty of slippery
fish maw, crab meat, shredded chicken, shiitakes,
bamboo shoots, quail eggs, cubes of chicken
blood, and goji berries. You’ll find it on the
menu under the heading Mom’s Specials.
Millionaire Sauce, Nam says, is a dig on her
husband, Pornthep Jarumpornsakul who lost
money in restaurants in Bangkok and New
York City due to dishonest business partners.
“I am sarcastic,” she says, noting the only thing
he has to show for the failed restaurants is the
sauce.
Like most Thai spots in the Elmhurst-Woodside
area, iCook Thai Cook is not pulling any
punches when it comes to chilies. One of the spiciest
dishes — clear sour curry with fish, or kaeng
chak som in Thai — can also be found on the
roster of Mom’s Specialties. Fillets of pla sawai, or
sutchi catfish, luxuriate in a bracingly sour broth
flavored vibrating with the flavors of lemongrass,
shrimp paste, tamarind, and fresh chilies. This
specialty of Pattaya is served with jasmine rice,
which tempers the heat somewhat.
“I wanted to do food from the north, from
the south, from the northeast, and the west
mixed together,” says Nam. So it makes sense
that the logo for the restaurant is a mortar and
pestle emblazoned an outline of Thailand.
Representing the northeast is a signature
papaya salad, Tom Thai Cook Pla Ra. The heap
of raw crab, fermented fish, and other seafood,
shot through with slivers of green papaya,
limes, and long beans is best ordered medium
spicy, which means plenty of red birdseye chilies.
Order some sticky rice to dredge through
the liquor pooled at the bottom of the plate.
One of the best dishes I tried — tom yum
noodle crepe —hails from Elmhurst. That’s
because it is purely Nam’s creation. Known as
pak mor tom yum in Thai, it consists of several
delicate rice crepes filled with shrimp buried
under a mountain of pork crackling, ground
pork, and sliced pork belly all united by the
flavors of tom yum noodle soup: chili, roast
peanut, lime, fish sauce, and just a hint of sugar.
Cool your belly down with the traditional
dessert bua loi. It’s rainbow of chewy rice flour
balls in comforting sweet salty coconut milk
topped with a poached egg. The recipe comes
not from Nam, but from one of her cooks,
dessert chef Daeng, who she met while cooking
at the annual Thai New Year’s festival at the
temple.
In case you are wondering iCook Thai Cook
does serve what it calls “Superbowl Hot Pot.”
Rather than a broth used to cook meats, it’s a
larger format soup served in a Thai style caldron
with a chimney rising out of the middle.
The nuer toon hot pot, beef stew and beef
tendon in a five spice broth, was perfect for a
winter’s night.
Address: 81-17 Broadway, Queens, NY 11373
Phone: (929) 522-0886
BY JOE DISTEFANO
As the Culinary King of Queens, I’m so
very fortunate to live in the most diverse
and delicious destination in all of New York
City. Really I’m not royalty though, I’m an
ambassador, and a hungry one at that. Today,
a trip to Thailand for a survey of regional
street food as presented at iCook Thai Cook,
the newest restaurant in the Little Bangkok
neighborhood of Elmhurst, Queens.
A yum of pressed pork and egg yolk has its roots
in an after-school snack.
The signature papaya salad has plenty of raw
Boonnum “Nam” Thongngoens holds court while Buddha looks on from a mural.
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