Diana Hubbell seeks out authentic Thai food in Berlin…

I experienced my first pang of Heimweh when I broke down and ordered Thai food in Berlin. I had just moved to the city after three years of working in Bangkok and the craving for my old favourites was fierce. I hadn’t really expected it to be good, but the watery, freezer’s worth of mixed vegetables and soggy, deep-fried “duck” was downright depressing. Other dishes were equally grim. Greasy lo mein noodles tasting entirely of soy sauce. Cloying phad Thai and bland curries. Gooey, sweet-and-sour messes rife with corn syrup.

I didn’t get it. Berlin, with all its multikulti cred and reasonable population of Thai immigrants, seemed like it should be able to do better. There were more than 5,000 Thais in the city according to a census published in 2011 and far more Germans who had spent at least a week on a beach in Phuket or Koh Samui—enough to know a green curry from a culinary disaster.

Besides, Thai cuisine has been enjoying something of a quiet revival in other parts of the Western world. Chefs such as Andy Ricker and David Thompson have been trumpeting its virtues and people are starting to take notice. Surely, the real deal was out there somewhere.

To understand why Thailand’s food is worth seeking out, it’s important to realise that this is a nation obsessed with eating. Mealtimes provide the social framework for the day, a chance to catch up over heaping communal dishes. The spaces between the conventional breakfast, lunch and dinner quickly fill up with snacks and smaller dishes—a blisteringly hot pad krapow moo (stir-fried pork with holy basil) here or a bite of sweet, wobbly pandan custard there. Street vendors hustling noodle soups dominate virtually all sidewalk space and the cities smell of sizzling pork fat and chilies. Anytime, anywhere you look, someone is eating, preparing or talking about food.

And small wonder. This insatiable population has produced a cuisine of such variety and scope that it would take two lifetimes to taste it all. The royal dishes of Bangkok err on the sweeter, milder side and feature the baroque fruit carvings guidebooks so love to showcase. Down south, Muslim-influenced dishes ditch the pork, while coconut milk from the islands’ bountiful trees lends richness to sour fish curries. Up in the northern countryside, the som tums become ever fierier, the rice turns stickier, the fish sauce ages for several years, and the curries grow thick with dried spices.

All this variety owes much to lands surrounding the old Kingdom of Siam. Lao, Burmese and, most importantly, Chinese cooking techniques have been liberally plundered over the years. Even the famous phad Thai is just a nationalistic attempt to dress up the similar Chinese stir-fried noodles, called chao mian, with a different identity. Yet somehow, in the midst of all this cultural appropriation, Thailand has mana…