Eating out: cook your own dinner at Thai Kitchen

I’ve never been a fan of restaurants where they ask you to cook your own food.

After all, if you’re paying for the food, the service, the ambience and all the overheads, surely you must expect some sort of bang for your buck?

It was not so much the idea of cooking everything myself as it was the chance to explore a new variation on Thai food, then, that got me into the Park Hyatt Dubai.

Thankfully, we weren’t asked to put on a pair of chef’s whites and a ridiculous hair net before getting to work peeling potatoes in a dingy backroom, but we were expected to dunk pieces of meat and seafood into a pot of boiling, bubbling broth placed in the centre of our table at the Thai Kitchen. So much for a relaxing Saturday night out.

Things start out well enough (without our having to do any work), as a selection of appetisers is piled onto our plates. That’s a portion of dry fried beef with a hot chilli sauce that is sweet, spicy and the perfect thing to get those gastic juices flowing; followed by soft and chewy spring rolls (frankly rather missable); a stunning, rather rich shrimp toast that we’d happily go back for; and a beautifully combined chicken salad with lashings of lime and chilli.

Just when we’re beginning to really enjoy this, a line of waiters bring out a pot of bubbling hot soup and enough raw meats, vegetables and herbs to cover the table. One of them drops in a bunch of greens and proceeds to show us how to cook ourselves supper with precise instructions and explanations of technique.

Juhm Jihm, which translates as hot pot, is apparently a choice delight from Esarn, the home province of the restaurant’s chef de cuisine, Supattra Panyasombat.

It’s a variation of Chinese-style steamboat or Japanese Sukiyaki, but in Thailand, fiery chilli sauce and signature spices such as galangal and lemon grass are central to the dish – although as with everything else nowadays, you can ask the restaurant to go easy on the spice when they’re putting it together at your table.

Each meat must poach for a different length of time, we’re told, with scallops just barely sitting in the boiling clay pot, fish and chicken a little longer and the beef necessarily sitting the longest. Then you take out whatever it is you’ve dunked in, dip it into one of three sauces presented on the side (garlic, tamarind or chilli and lime) and place in your mouth.

It’s just the one pot and soon we’re all reaching in with chopsticks, dipping, experimenting, reporting excitedly on the results of our efforts and fancying ourselves fine chefs. A chance to posture, make believe and wolf down some fabulous food --  this cooking lark, I think as we stumble out well past midnight, mightn’t be so bad after all.

The Thai Kitchen offers Juhm Jihm every Saturday, priced at Dh130 per person for a minimum order for two. Details at dubai.park.hyatt.com


 

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