Congee, You're My Baby: Today Pad Thai, Tomorrow Crepes

Being a bastardized version of a chef living in a region with other bastardized versions of chefs (I, of course, mean cooks), you come across a lot of perks, and peoples. Kitchener-Waterloo is a small town, with a lot of nodes of culture, overshadowed by academics, technology, RIM, the Perimeter Institute, convoluted fatheads, and some genuinely good folk, with moderately good stories to tell. A kung-fu grandmaster comes to mind. Anyway, my point is that a lot of restaurants are in the possession of self-proclaimed cooks, who, as far as I'm concerned, can hold their own against the rest o'them chefs out there. Quite frankly, the only difference may be that piece of paper and the paycheck. Oh, and the guts it takes to open your own place and hope it doesn't sink three years down the line.

My own family is one such example. They're tough folk. They opened their own joint, and have held their own for a number of generations. And they have the Kohler sinks to prove it. My immediate family on the other hand . . . Well, let's just say, my dad still goes to China once in a while to pay his dues to the 49ers.
Luckily, when you're involved with more than one restaurant, you're involved in a lot of food and eating of it.

Thus, I bring you to yet another serendipitous food tasting occasion.

Being a "Thai" cook, I like to pretend I know what I'm talking about, humbly of course, when it comes to the subtleties of cooking a savory dish of the hamburger of Southeast Asia: pad thai. My cousins- my restaurateur cousins- love pad thai. And it just so happens that there are three Thai restaurants- food holes, I like to call them- within a 5 block radius of their restaurant (Maybe. Geography was never my thing. But they're all close, is what I'm getting at). And we've had the pad thai at all of them. None, however, come close to that of the pad thai dish prepared on occasion by the lovely woman who owns Belmont Village's Village Creperie. At least, that's what my cousin always tells me. Her name is Jean. Or so I'm told. So, long story short: I called his bluff, and he did a favour. A week later, pad thai was cooked on a Thursday for someone kinda special. And here's the crux: pad thai in a creperie? That's bogus. Not exactly. The pad thai at Village Creperie is made once in a blue moon. In fact, legend has it that the last time the owner of Vilage Creperie prepared pad thai by request was four months ago. It's not part of the menu. Well, it is. When it's made. But not really. Because, it's not a crepe. and crepes, I'm positive, are French. And pad thai, I'm positive is Thai.

So, after waiting a solid hour until the creperie closed down for the afternoon, my cousins' employee and I headed down to the Village Creperie. A place so fancy and good looking on the inside that the mere value of the placed dropped as soon as my holmly self walked in.

Ladies seem to like it. The restaurant, that is.

So, while tenderly saying hello, grabbing a seat at the bar and flirting with the already engaged waitress behind the counter, we waited for our noodles. My cousin soon followed suit.

Curiously, I had asked how the pad thai came to be, and was informed that the owner's granddaughter had had pad thai one day and begged her grandmother, no doubt a cook, to remake the same thing. So, with the internet and a little know-how, grandma soon mashed together a whole bunch of recipes and created her own signature pad thai dish. All organic. Which is something Village Creperie prides itself on. So, after paying a cool 11 dollars we were given a fancy crepe box packed with noodles covered by a tempest of peanuts. I would have preferred light snow fall, but the dish wasn't compromised by it. How could it be? It was made for me, after all. At least, that's how I like to remember it.

Now where do I begin? The dish was anything but generic. The flavours were there, a little more sweet than I would have liked, but not stereotyped by the combination of ketchup and peanut butter that accompanies pad thais in my neck of the woods. Some say, that in Thailand, they don't even know what peanut butter is! But that aside, flavours of the meal were overpowered by its tanginess. Appreciated at first, but tiresome halfway through the noodles, becoming reminiscent of something that tasted almost artificial and instant. But that may have been its only setback. Noodles were substantial, and with every bite, there was something else in the catch, whether a piece of chicken, tofu, bean sprouts, or snow pees. The only flaw may have been that it depended too much on its sour sweet characteristic, something which is good in small doses. But every dish has its own kind of flavour. That said, I can never be too harsh about someone's choice to make something a specific way. After all, all pad thais shouldn't taste the same, it defeats the fun between feuding restaurants, fights outback with cleavers, and spying on fellow cooks in their trash. If you didn't have some kind of technique or choice of flavour, trying to make or eat the better pad thai would be like watching a kung fu movie where everyone knows kung fu, but nobody ever fights. Not that kung fu is a cultural phonomena in Thailand, or France. Just imagine I said what I did, but with crepes. Or pad thai. And give the Village Creperie a try. You never know, you may go when there's a blue moon, and a whole lot of noodles in the kitchen.