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by theylovezmw
1025 days ago
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It's cool to see how the Thai government has used food / restaurants as a form of diplomacy. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W09QCLmnCUU) elaborates more but the ratio of Thai Americans to Thai restaurants is high (300k pop. to 5k restaurants) because of Thai government efforts. I grew up in a predominantly white midwestern US city and even we had a lot of Thai restaurants, maybe even more than Chinese or Indian. People really liked pad kee mao, pad see ew but Pad kaphrao never seemed to catch on (no product market fit haha). It'll be interesting to see if these efforts will actually make the dish more popular - from its base ingredients (ground meat, rice, basil, and egg) it definitely seems like something Americans could get behind |
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Something I notice whenever I visit a Thai restaurant (which is often, since I enjoy Thai food a lot) is how much effort they put in making the decor represent the country. Of course, many ethnic restaurants have decoration influenced by the culture, but in the case of Thai restaurants there's a much heavier focus on the country - with flags, pictures of royalty, &c. Sometimes it really seems like one big PR scheme.
Living in northern Europe, btw. No idea if it's like this everywhere.