Baan Thai | 1117 Blanshard Street | Victoria

UPDATE, September 2010:  I've returned to Baan Thai several times and had meals that are vastly superior to the one described here.  I have now happily climbed aboard the Baan Thai bandwagon.  The Baandwagon?  I'm so sorry. 

I loathe buzzwords and the way they've penetrated popular language. An afternoon of coffee and biscuits in the Shoal Point Moka House can be ruined as soon as some goon drops a phrase like "Derek, we need to drill-down and start pushing the envelope". My heart beats faster, the adrenaline flows and I swell, Incredible Hulk style, to a towering giant of rage that wants to hit Chet & Derek so hard their skin flies off. Instead I sit, eat my Hobknobs and die just a little bit more inside.

"Global village" is another one that never fails to rile me, long-hair shorthand for the way telecommunications & travel have brought the many cultures of the world closer together. Not usually mentioned is that after being brought together they're split up like British children in wartime, shuffled into unmarked van and then then co-opted by people too lazy to develop personalities of their own. Growing up in Revelstoke, B.C. where ethnic food began & ended at Tony's Roma, I never learned to differentiate between one type of food and another. You ate at Tony's because his cannelloni was legendary and it was the only restaurant in town that sold anything other than hamburgers. There was never any particular value assigned to the fact that the style of cooking originated in the ancestral home of the pompadour.

Now I walk past The Noodle Box and see crowds of surly, humorless university students tucking into overcooked Asian food prepared by surly, humorless university graduates, everyone toe-top-full with pride at their culinary diversity. I cannot prove this, but it seems unlikely that deep in the hills of Vietnam, Hmong villagers sit down at meal-time to high-five one another over platefuls of hamburgers.