If you need one, just one, reason to visit Udon Thani in Thailand’s Northeast, it would be to eat at chef Weerawat “Num” Triyasenawat’s brilliant Samuay & Sons. Since I first wrote about Num in 2018, Samuay & Sons has gone far beyond its menu of local ingredients cooked with medicinal values in mind.
Last July, chef Num established Mah Noi Food Lab with chef Curtis Hetland, of the now-defunct Inua in Japan, to put more of a spotlight on the complexities of Isan produce, such as the region’s famous fermented fish, or pla raa. With the main focus being fermentation, Mah Noi is an experimental project, which aims at using local ingredients, methods and techniques to develop new…
