Michael Ginor, Ian Chalermkittichai & Todd English

Bangkok, Thailand – I won’t jump into the snarkiness that is reverberating through the digital space.  However, this post couldn’t be more timely unless I had actually gotten it together for the period of time when the Food Trip with Todd English episode on Thailand (Big Mango: Three Nights in Bangkok) was airing.  The picture above of Michael Ginor, Ian Chalermkittichai and Todd English was taken during a taping at Thip Samai for the episode.

If you’ve ever wondered how Anthony Bourdain eats without reservations and Ruth Reichl finds herself making ant-egg salads…well I probably can’t speak for all travel shows.  What I do know is that most shows have a dedicated team of producers who do some research online, reach out to tourism boards and try to make local contacts through those resources.  Once they’ve set up their contacts and sketched out brief itineraries, they’re on the road (or in the sky) for consecutive tapings that are then edited and portioned out over the course of a season.

For this episode, I joined Ian and his wife Sarah as Ian gave Todd and Michael the background on phad thai.  Just so you know, the first place we tried, one of my and Ian’s sous chef’s favorites, was on the corner of soi Ari and completely gone by the time the camera crew arrived at 10:30 p.m.  We ended up at Thailand’s most famous phad thai place on Maha Chai road.  It’s not my favorite, but admittedly the theatrics up front probably made for the best clips.

Sarah and I actually tried to sneak some phad kee mao (drunken noodles) at Raan Jay Fai down the street.  As it turned out, they needed us to be in the taping so we followed orders as silent actors.  As they rolled the film, we had to walk down the street with the guys pretending to have a light-hearted pre-phad thai conversation…and then back up and walk down again.  But we couldn’t sit down to eat just yet, first we had to look on with pretend great interest as Ian explained each ingredient for the dish and once seated wait with pretend patience for everyone’s commentary on the dish before digging in for real.  It was all done in the name of travel television and my fifteen seconds of fame.