Thursday, August 28, 2008

Chicken Or The Egg

Here's a brief photo blog of my lunch adventure at Dab Jae restaurant.

August is the start of the high season for the furniture industry in the UK. To keep up with the rapid increase in orders, my factory has worked 12 hours a day for 20 days in a row since the beginning of August. Finally, this past Saturday after 3 long weeks, we had cleared all of our scheduled orders.

To show my appreciation for the long hours put in by the engineers and production supervisors, I agreed to pick up the tab for yesterday's lunch. Just wish I had also picked the restaurant.





From afar, Dab Jae looks like any ordinary rural Thai restaurant. Open-air, breezy, surrounded by trees and ponds. Even the food looks normal - spicy soup, fried meat, and some curry.


But upon closer inspection you'll find something not so common - at least for me.

Here you have deep-fried Kermit the frog. If he was alive, I would be shaking his hand. I'm not sure if he would be right-side up or upside down.




Below is some sun-dried beef. Probably the most normal thing on the menu.



I didn't get a picture of the curry, but it was filled with baby muscles/ clams that you find in the ditch next to the road. I passed.

One good thing about Dab Jae is its air-conditioning system, and I don't mean the fan. If you look at the ceiling you can see a blue PVC pipe running along the roof beam. Water was being pumped through it and then, onto the roof where it cooled down the corrugated sheets. I didn't have to break out my winter parka, but it certainly cooled things down.


Finally, this spicy soup had a nice flavor, and the boiled egg yolks looked fairly standard until I realized that they weren't normal eggs. These eggs had never seen the light of day, nor had they ever had a shell. Talk about picking fruit right from the tree - these eggs were picked right from the ovary. In fact, some were still attached.

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