A Pad Kaprao Specialty Restaurant

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Much of the praise heaped on Thailand has to do with its food. Bangkok is a foodie’s haven. There is every type of restaurant available from Thai to Indian to Italian to everything else. No matter your desires, there will be a restaurant, a street stall and a price structure that will work for you.

On YouTube there is a very popular food guy named Mark Wiens. He has over 9 million subscribers and generally talks about Thai street food. Recently he opened a restaurant, with some of his pals, called Phed Mark. Phed in Thai means spicy and the Mark is an allusion to the word ‘Maak’ which means very much. So the restaurant name is essentially Very Spicy.

The restaurant has gotten huge publicity on the Internet via YouTube, websites and on TikTok. It serves variations of one dish – Pad Kaprao. That’s the only dish on the menu. This is the real Thai national dish. No, the national dish is not Pad Thai as many westerners believe. It’s Pad Kaprao which is a stir fried combination of rice, holy basil, spices, egg and either pork, beef or vegetarian. Every street vendor location serves it. Our hospitals and restaurants serve it. Every Thai household makes it.

So Mark Wiens and colleagues opened up a tiny Pad Kaprao restaurant that mostly deals with take out but has capacity for ten guests.

Since the restaurant is very close to my apartment and the main hospital campus, I decided to try it out for lunch to see if all the hype was worth it. I ordered the pork version with lots of spiciness.

And the verdict. Disappointment. I thought the rice was not cooked enough, the pork was a bit too chunky, the egg was also a bit over cooked and while the spice level was at a ‘blow up your head’ magnitude, the taste was not all that wonderful.

I have definitely tasted better Pad Kaprao at various food stalls and at my own hospital. I was disappointed. I think Mark Wien’s YouTube videos are entertaining but I will stick to food stalls and our own restaurants for the best Pad Kaprao at the best prices.

By the way: I found a photo, the last one in the slide set above, of a specialty version of Pad Kaprao, along with a side of soup, that was cooked up at the hospital and served to me for lunch a number of years ago. It was delicious and different, as the chef had her own take on how it should be made. It was, without a doubt, way better than the version served at Phed Mark.

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A Short, But Mighty, Food Addendum: I mentioned, in a previous post, that KNT had prepared and distributed over 15,000 meals every day – breakfast, lunch and dinner – during the last 1-1/2 years to patients all over Bangkok. One of the dishes served at various times was Pad Kaprao. I was thinking about 15,000 meals a day. That’s a gigantic undertaking that involved everyone chipping in doing preparation, packaging and delivery. Every other hospital used outsourced food vendors to prepare and distribute meals. Our group was the only one in Bangkok that did everything in-house. And that made a difference because all the meals, every day, were prepared in the home cooking style that the group is known for. None of those 15,000 meals served every day was an institutional meal. Every one was cooked in the classic KNT way that I have been writing about for years in my Food Porn posts. So Phed Mark might make a lot of Pad Krapao that gets served to a lot of people but that’s nothing compared to the quality and numbers of meals, including Pad Krapao, served to thousands of needy patients everyday during those difficult COVID days.