Restaurant review: Jay Nok brings modern Thai cuisine to Olympic Village
Jay Nok
Where:
127 West Second Avenue, Vancouver
When:
Lunch and dinner, daily
Info:
604-683-7999 or
I’ve written recently about the good folks behind second-generation restaurants like
and
(Vietnamese),
, Nammos, and Loula’s (Greek).
Here’s another.
At this one, you can eat like Parker Posey on season three of White Lotus.
Jay Nok Modern Thai in Olympic Village is a second act, following the closure of Sala Thai restaurant after a 40-year-run. It’s operated by second-generation restaurateur Bobby Kongslip and his wife Nok Khangrang. Jay Nok opened in February and carries on the family legacy. Khangrang had been cooking at Sala Thai for 13 years, after she’d been recruited for her carving skills.
Sala Thai was one of the first Thai restaurants in the city, opening on Cambie Street then moving to Burrard until the $70,000-a-month rent dealt a death blow about a year ago. In the 1980s, Kongslip’s father cooked at Trader Vic’s, a tiki lounge at the Westin Bayshore Hotel, and his mother at Sawasdee Thai Restaurant.
“It was the first Thai restaurant in Vancouver,” says Kongslip. “There were five Thai guys at Sawasdee who were like uncles to me.”
Some went separate ways and opened other restaurants, notably, Montri Rattanaraj, who ran the successful Montri’s through the 1990s while the Kongslips opened Sala Thai.
“Mom and I argue about when we opened. She says ’87. I say ’86,” says Kongslip. In the latter years on Burrard Street, Sala Thai was catering to cruise ship and tour operators. “We’d do seven tour groups some days,” he says.
Kongslip took time away from the family fold to learn the business at restaurants such as Joe Fortes and Goldfish.
The renovations for Jay Nok included gutting the former Flying Pig restaurant in Olympic Village and adding a little White Lotus feel to it.
“Everything in the room is from Sala Thai,” says Kongslip, “the art, pillows, and decor, all except for the arcade machine.”
He’s happy to never wear the black pants, tie and Thai shirt uniform he’d worn at Sala Thai, ever again.
“I’ve worn it since I was 12,” he says. Jay Nok staff are clad in Thai elephant pants.
“They’re what you wear before you go into temples so you don’t show skin. They became a fad and now everyone’s wearing them.”
The couple bought 100 pairs on a trip to Thailand, visiting the 150-acre family farm where Khangrang grew up. Her sisters helped with farm chores, but she always preferred to be cooking for the extended family.
At Jay Nok, the casual lunch menu is a shorter version of Sala Thai’s. “You order at the bar, get a number, grab your cutlery, there are no servers,” says Kongslip. The new, modernized dishes are on the dinner menu. “This is a combination of old and new.”
The new dinner dishes are Khangrang’s, who has cooked at the five-star Royal Cliff hotel in Thailand. She was a four-time national champ in fruit and vegetable carving and carved for the royal family and travelled internationally with her skills. I suspect she’s been ready to run her own kitchen for some time. Kongslip engaged his friend, Chopped Canada champ and chef Clement Chan, as a consultant to “elevate her skills, bring in new ideas, show different methods.”
Her take?
“Actually, I don’t need it. I said to Bobby, you never trust me. Now I can do it on my own. I said, Bobby, you know what? He (Clement) told me, he learned from me a lot,” Khangrang says.
Her food is indeed refined, and she likes to experiment a little. The dish she’s most proud of is Chiang Mai khao soi (bone marrow Northern curry noodle, $29), a dish usually made with chicken. Instead, there’s pork, crunchy noodles, yellow curry sauce with a not-so-Thai roasted bone with marrow in the channel. Her “pad Thai from The Palace” is ceremoniously wrapped in an egg crepe and topped with a jumbo prawn.
Khangrang’s curry sauces start with pastes from Thailand; she adds ingredients to make it her own.
“When I am in Thailand, then I do it from scratch,” she says. For a rice noodle dish, pad see-ew (24-hour short rib noodles, $33), she marinates short rib in a sous vide so it penetrates and gets deeply, deeply infused. It’s served with an egg, broccolini, gai lan and her “secret sauce.”
I would order a salad to go with the main dishes. The pomelo salad ($21) is straight from the Royal Cliff and she’s made it for the Thai king. It’s such a palate brightener. The green papaya salad ($20) has shredded papaya, carrots, tomato, green beans and peanuts. The chili lime dressing is not for beginners — the chili is commander-in-chief.
I loved the snow crab fried rice ($34), served in a half pineapple shell with extra spilled out onto the plate — in other words, there’s tons of it. And fragrant snow crab throughout. I wasn’t a fan of the hormok talay, a red curry with salmon, squid, and tiger prawns served in a coconut shell ($28) as it was thick and pasty. I asked her why the unusual texture. It is traditionally thick, she says, and made that way with a raw egg mixed with coconut milk.
“It’s thicker because you want it to smell good,” she said.
For dessert, Khangrang does a lovely mango sticky rice, arranged with care into a sunburst pattern. She soaks the rice in water overnight to get the right “sticky” and adds pandan leaf for flavour and aroma. She knows rice — it was one of the crops grown at her family’s farm, along with sugar cane, rubber trees and vegetables.
Another dessert, saku, or tapioca corn pudding, is a simple souplike dish, not as queenly as mango sticky rice. It may be just the sweet contrast you need if you’ve ordered spicy dishes?
For cocktails, the Adults Only Thai Tea, made with dark rum, Thai iced tea and cream, was a popular choice at nearby tables. Other drinks also take a cue from the cuisine. There’s dragon fruit in the Aperol spritz and basil syrup in the bourbon sour.
Thai and Japanese beer comes by the bottle plus there’s a good selection of draft beers from local breweries like Superflux, Strange Fellows and Strathcona. There’s also — a sign of the times — a very drinkable zero-proof beer from Strange Fellows.
On the short wine list, the whites, especially the Riesling and Pinot Grigio, are definitely best suited to the cuisine.
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Source: vancouversun.com