The Som Tam Test: Taste the Freeland

The Test

Here's how a kitchen tells on itself. If the som tam comes out sweet with peanuts and dried shrimp and nothing else, no questions asked, that's the safe version, the one built for people who've never had the real thing. That's not a crime. It's just not the test passing.

The more common failure is actually the opposite one: too spicy. There's a lazy idea, mostly held by farang (that's the Thai word for outsiders, usually white Western ones), that Thai food is supposed to be punishingly hot, and some restaurants lean into that instead of doing the harder work of balance. Heat covers for a lot. It covers for vegetables that sat too long, a dressing that isn't dialed in, technique that isn't there. Thai food is spicy, genuinely. But spicy is one note in a chord, not the whole song.

Then there's the fish sauce question. A lot of places quietly swap it out: soy sauce, liquid aminos, something milder and less confrontational. I get why. Fish sauce is fermented fish drippings, salty and deep and funky in a way that reads as strange if you didn't grow up on it. But it's not optional seasoning. It's the base note of Thai cooking the way soy is to Chinese and Japanese food, the way a good bechamel underwrites half of French cuisine. Leave it out, or leave it thin, and you can taste the absence even if you can't name it. To be fair, some kitchens skip it specifically to keep a dish vegan, which is a real and legitimate choice depending on what you or the person across the table needs. That's different from skipping it because it's inconvenient. Either way, it tells you something about the kitchen.

Wilder Than You'd Assume

Here's the part that made me want to write this whole piece. Thailand's most famous salad has almost nothing to do with Thailand's own culinary tradition, and the real story runs through four continents and about four hundred years.

Start with Columbus. Whatever else that history is, and it's complicated, it split the world into a before and after. Before 1492, the trade routes that mattered ran the Silk Road, and Europe's most coveted flavors came out of Asia. After, everything reshuffled. The Americas got horses, cattle, and disease. Europe got potatoes and tobacco. Asia got a wave of crops it had never grown before, carried by the same trade networks. Papaya and chili peppers weren't part of the Thai culinary vocabulary before this. The earliest recorded use of either in the region dates to the early 1500s.

So the fruit and the fire in som tam are both imports, barely five centuries old. What isn't imported is the technique: pounding everything together in a mortar with fermented fish, sometimes crab. That's Isan. Specifically, that's Lao, carried by people living along the Mekong who were, at the time, just one of several distinct peoples inside what would become Thailand. Up in Chiang Mai, it was the Khon Mueang. Down along the Mekong, it was the people who'd eventually get grouped under the name Isan, and looked down on for it by the fancier court in Bangkok. The dish's own name gives it away: tam mak hoong, "pounded papaya," a Lao name, sometimes tam bak hoong depending on the dialect.

Around the turn of the 20th century, Siam pulled these disparate peoples under one national identity, partly through genuinely savvy treaty work that let it dodge the colonization that swallowed every one of its neighbors. That uncolonized, self-determined status is where the name comes from. Thai means free. Thailand, eventually, meant Freeland.

Once you have a nation, someone gets to decide what its culture officially is, and in 1908 that job fell to Lady Plian Phatsakorawong, a noblewoman at the court of King Rama V. Her cookbook, Mae Khrua Hua Pa, is the first printed Thai cookbook there is: the first written recipe for massaman curry, full palace banquet menus, a level of precision borrowed from Western domestic-science guides of the era. It defined what "Thai food" meant on paper for the first time. Som tam wasn't in it. It was peasant food, invisible to the people writing the official record. The book does have a pounded crab salad in the same family, but no green papaya version. The earliest printed Thai recipe that actually calls for papaya doesn't show up for another two decades, in 1929.

Som tam got to Bangkok anyway, the same way most real things travel: through the people who had no choice but to move. Bangkok's tricycle taxis started running in 1933, and a lot of the drivers were Isan men. Their wives sold food at the tricycle stands and the construction sites where their neighbors worked, som tam among it. One of the city's first Isan restaurants opened by the Ratchadamnoen Boxing Stadium in 1945, right after the war, when even more people were arriving looking for work. The dish kept spreading through Bangkok's growth for decades after that, especially once the boom years of the 1980s pulled in another wave of labor.

So the dish everyone associates with Thailand is, in order: foreign fruit, foreign heat, a technique from the region the capital looked down on, deliberately left out of the book that defined the national cuisine, carried into the capital by the people the country needed but didn't fully claim. That's not a footnote. That's the whole story of Freeland in miniature, a country stitched together out of people who didn't originally belong to each other, told through a salad that took decades to earn a seat at the table it eventually came to define.

Where It Passes

Tuk Tuk Thai Isan (Lakeview and Wicker Park) doesn't make you ask. Their som tam, the Tum Tuk Tuk, comes with fermented anchovies and salted crab standard, no substitutions offered as a default. This is a kitchen built around Isan cooking specifically, and it shows in the first bite.

JJ's Thai Street Food will give you the tame version if you order the way most people order. Ask for it Laos style instead. That's the move, that's the whole test in one sentence to the server, and it's the difference between a good meal and the real one.

Immm Rice & Beyond up in Uptown isn't an Isan specialist the way Tuk Tuk is. The kitchen draws from Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and Isan all at once. But order the som tum puu pla rah, the version built around fermented crab, and it passes the same test every time.

Skip the pad thai this once. Order the salad instead, and pay attention to what comes out. That's how you find out which of Chicago's 300 Thai restaurants are actually telling you the truth.