Astreet food experience can be positively exhilarating when you live in sunny tropical climes.
In Scotland, however, it's most likely to consist of a fish supper or kebab eaten as you shiver on the pavement while waiting for the late night bus. But only the most ethno-centric eaters are immune to the intoxicating scents and savours of the Thai night market - the hiss of fish sauce hitting hot oil, the fragrance of steaming stock pots, the clatter of blisteringly hot woks working overtime. So if you think about it, Ting Thai Caravan, newly opened in Edinburgh, is a very logical business proposition. It attempts to capture (with some success) the essence of Thai street food, and retain its pop-up informality, but brings it indoors to give us shelter from the elements.
If you try out Ting Thai Caravan, you need to understand that you aren't going to get the customary five-star, orchid-flower, gold Bhudda, Thai restaurant routine. You won't be met by smiling front-of-house staff who resemble cabin crew from a Thai Airways advert. Nobody will be thrusting warm towels into your hands and your starters won't come garnished with pandanus leaf twisted into temple elephant shapes. Instead, you walk into a nocturnal space with exposed ducting, rough, mainly communal tables, perilous stools, and an open kitchen of thrillingly primitive equipment. All the food - save soups which arrive in bowls - come in compostable boxes. No silver place settings here.
Wandering in off a wind- and rain-lashed street, it was a welcome port in a storm, with an indie vibe that rings true next to the Asian-branded corporate offering you would get in Wagamama. The menu warms the cockles of the heart - and the chefs are actually Thai, which helps - because although it offers old familiars, such as pad thai and green curry, it introduces less usual dishes, such as deep fried egg with crispy shallot and chilli and ingredients - including krachai root, morning glory (a leafy green) and palm sugar - that just aren't going to turn up in your supermarket Thai ready meal.
Another very appealing thing about Ting Thai Caravan is that the prices are low, but not unfeasibly so, given that you might want to be sure you're eating wholesome ingredients. It's the sort of place where you can keep a tight grip on your spend.
There are ten small boxes in the £2.60-£5.20 bracket, some of which would make, for me at least, a satisfying lunch in their own right. Case in point was a reasonable portion of sparklingly fresh hake with green mango salad and a piquant, yet creamy cashew nut, fish sauce, and palm sugar sauce, for an ultra-reasonable £4.40. More substantial dishes come in two sizes, from £5-£9 tops. This isn't a restaurant where the bill is going to jump up and bite you at the end.
Fish is a strong point at Ting Thai Caravan. The hake, too often tired and soft, was firmly fresh, a cod-like steak remained moist, swathed in a pleasantly medicinal paste of galangal, coriander root and coconut, then steamed in banana leaf, while sea bass fillets came bathed in roasted chilli jam and a dressing that combined zingy lime, fragrant lemongrass and pungent ginger. There was little intrinsic flavour to the "bubble prawns", but their puffy, aerated grated coconut beer batter and hot-sweet mango salsa made up for that.
Our spicy beef salad with roasted rice was a fair old chew. You would never call it tender, but the dipping sauce it was doused in - lively and tastebud-whetting with fresh mint - compensated. A slow-cooked leg of Massaman duck retained its succulence under its sticky, well-rendered skin, and its curry paste, thickened with peanut, tasted alive with vibrantly fresh ingredients.
Drinks are great fun here. You sip them through a straw, in plastic bags tied with rubber bands, as you'd buy them in an Asian market. Mildly sweet, they are flavoured with fresh toasted coconut, lemongrass and ginger, or pandanus - the latter is an ideal way to get to know Asia's answer to vanilla.
One of the things that will take me back here is that you can eat a healthy cheap lunch that isn't padded out with starch, and that's an all too rare proposition.
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