Sometimes, you have a realisation, which leads you to change the very manner in which you approach life itself. In my dictionary, I call those realisations epiphanies. I recently discovered at Koh Lipe’s Khonlay Restaurant (on Walking Street) that you can also have the food version of such realisations: a food epiphany.
What made me have a food epiphany? The dish pictured above, som tam tod (deep fried papaya salad). Why did it make me have an epiphany? Firstly, you would never expect a fried salad to be so good, and thus the extent of its excellence surprised me, even shocked me (but in a good way). Secondly, it was so good that I struggle to put it into words, but let me try. Soft on the inside, crispy on the outside tempura-esque slithers of fried green papaya, whose slight oiliness is cut through by the sour, spicy and sweet sauce on which it lies. Throw in crunchy snake beans, acidic tomatoes, earthy nuts and juicy deep-fried prawns, and you have a dish so good it shakes the very foundation of the old rule-of-thumb that som tam, gai yang and khao mun (som tam, grilled chicken and sticky rice) was always the way to go when eating som tam – well, I must say, after eating som tam tod, that perception has changed – hence, my food epiphany.
My only word of warning about this restaurant is that the service is extremely slow – so come for lunch, or an early or late dinner.
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