Tom Yum
Thai Breaker
I’ve always been a little envious of South East Asian countries. No matter where you go (and I haven’t even been to very many yet) it seems like they all seem to have at least some representation of each other’s cuisine. This is in direct contrast to Sri Lanka, where our influences are predominantly Indian (and South Indian at that) with a smattering of dishes from colonial Europeans and their various colonies.
Recently though, I’ve noticed more people take advantage of cheaper travel and relaxed visa regimes; travel to Thailand and start to experience more of the fascinating flavours that exist there. Thai cuisine is seeing a little bit of a renaissance in recent months, with a few new places inserting themselves somewhere inbetween the Sri Lankanized Siam House and the extremely high-end Royal Thai spectrum.
The recently opened Tom Yum restaurant though. Are they street food? I honestly don’t care because I’ve eaten some variation of everything on offer from street side stalls and from slightly more upmarket indoor seating; but street seems to be the focus of their branding at the moment.
More interesting are the subtle variations in how they prepare what’s on offer. Let’s take papaya salad, a dish (along with its cousin green mango salad) that I eat at every single available opportunity. For this purpose, I’m comparing the quite exceptional papaya salad from the Thai food stall at Good Market with the same dish offered at Tom Yum restaurant.
The finely chopped birds eye chillie is common to both dishes, along with the fine strips of papaya and slices of tomato and plenty of garlic. Texturally though, the resemblances end there. The Good Market variant offers more crunch (lots of peanut, lightly bruised green beans) while the Tom Yum variant includes dried shrimp (කුනිස්සෝ in Sinhala). The Tom Yum papaya salad also uses much less tamarind juice. Even accounting for the Good Market variant being kept in a stall for an entire sunny Saturday, the Tom Yum som tum just isn’t quite as flavourful. On its own though, it’s still a very creditable dish.
Next up, the prawn pad thai. There’s many ways that this deceptively simple dish can go completely horribly wrong but living up to their billing, Tom Yum didn’t disappoint. The flat rice noodles were soft without verging on mushy. The only criticisms I could possibly level against this otherwise well executed dish was that it was slightly cold by the time I got around to it, and I personally found it a little bland until I added nam prik from my next dish.
Finally, to round out the meal — I chose fried squid in roasted chillie sauce. This dish is not something Colombo dwelling, bar hopping Sri Lankans might favour. The vast majority of squid consumed in Colombo is commonly incorporated into a hot butter cuttlefish dish. Personally, this dish gets much much closer to the cuttlefish texture that I most enjoy — slightly chewy, but with no crunch.
The reason I picked this dish though, is because roasted chillie sauce is one way to prepare nam prik in Thailand. Nam prik is a versatile base for many dishes and also functions as a condiment. Figure out the nam prik preparation for any Thai restaurant, and it is a unique fingerprint to their region of origin, and their cooking traditions. Many dishes (including the eponymous Tom Yum soup that comes highly recommended at this place) use nam prik as a base.
What I can tell you is that the nam prik used here was almost certainly from roasted ingredients, and seemed to be home (restaurant) made — the commercially bottled nam prik is, in my experience, a lot drier and much more like the chillie paste that we usually employ in Sri Lankan Chinese dishes. This preparation, on the other hand, is oilier and much more conducive to use as a base for soups and sauces. It’s also not as hot as you might think — the flavours are mild, definitely much less hot than chillie paste preparations with similar consistency.
Overall, I’ll join the chorus of people echoing praise about the food at Tom Yum — it’s fantastic. I thought the prawn pad thai was a little bland for my tastes, but the ever versatile nam prik doubled as a great condiment on the side. Price wise, this is about what I’d expect to pay for Thai food; certainly not more expensive than the other mid level Thai places — most mains cost between LKR 500 and 700, but a few went as high as LKR 1450.
That’s the good. The bad though, was truly startlingly shambolic service that came close to setting a new Colombo low. Having had some advance notice of lengthy delays in receiving food to table, I timed my visit for an extra early weekend lunchtime. Despite being the second customer (and the first dine-in), I spent 10 minutes waiting in steadily increasing exasperation for someone to take my order. Once ordered, the food took a further 20–25 minutes (reasonable, but not super speedy), and all the dishes I ordered arrived at the same time. Mind you — I was, at this point the only patron in the restaurant. Front office restaurant service was so horribly slow that I went and got extra napkins myself. I could amuse with further anecdotes about how long it took to actually pay up but I think the message is clear. About the only thing that I could see them doing right in this entire thing was that at least the tables were numbered.
They don’t have a service charge (the menu says so quite prominently) so some shortfalls in restaurant level service are only to be expected. Having said that though, the exact nature of service provided is extremely confusing. Is it self serve? Is someone going to rock up to my table to at least take my order? What’s happening? Where’s my food? Why is the sole guy up front chatting to people while there are people waiting to order? It’s all very amateur hour.
Given a choice (which I’d rather not have to make), I’d much rather have abysmal service and great food than the opposite. With that said, it’s difficult to see how this place isn’t going to crumple like a shred of papaya at the slightest hint of a crowd. Will they get better with practice? I certainly hope so. Will they perhaps hire someone with actual service experience? That would certainly be a good idea.
There’s so much to like about this place, I have a long list of things I’d like to try next time. It’s also in a convenient (if slightly unusual) location, which adds to to the charm. The only thing that’s offputting is the service; I’d not recommend going there without plenty of time to spare, at least until they get their service sorted out.
