Kiin appetite

profiles

19 Dec

Written By Antony

Kiin Thai Underground Kitchen

By Anna King Shahab

Bon Kornwit and his partner Yok Rangsiwa opened Kiin in 2018 primarily as a way to give Yok’s father Somkiat Chatthai – a chef with decades of experience – his own kitchen to cook in. Bon’s family hails from Udon Thani and he grew up enjoying Isaan cuisine – this, along with Somkiat’s Central Thailand upbringing and a love of Bangkok’s lively street food scene, feed into the menu at Kiin. In the kitchen, Somkiat is joined by chef Nitchapa Kansarithia and kitchen hand Hoàng Dúc Huy (Harry).

We love stalking Kiin’s socials not least because there’s a monthly street food specials menu that always catches our attention – it’s there you’ll find a lot of the dishes that perhaps can’t go on the permanent menu because they rely on seasonal ingredients, or they’re particularly tricky to prepare, or they’re a little leftfield for local palates and therefore may not move as well on the ol’ orders (we know we can rely on you, sweet Susans’, to order such dishes and thus prove they deserve a permanent spot!)

We sat down at Kiin with Bon on a recent Sunday afternoon as an absolute feast emerged from the tiny basement kitchen to get the backstory on a lucky eight Kiin dishes we think everyone needs to try at least once (it won’t be just once, I guarantee).

Tom yum commonly brings to mind the classic sour, spicy, and aromatic soup spiked with chunks of galangal, makrut lime leaf and lemongrass. Thai cooks also consider it more generally as an approach, explains Bon – a description for a dish that has that particular sour-spicy flavour profile.

TOM YUM NOODLES

Kiin’s tom yum noodles aren’t simply the tom yum soup with the addition of noodles. The sour profile is evident, with a little lick of heat and a bit of sweet to balance, but the soup base here doesn’t feature the aromatics. Rice noodles tangle with a tangy soup, with tender pork slices, pork balls, roast pork, and sliced fish cake, topped with crushed peanuts, spring onion, and coriander and a crisp wedge of wonton.

TOM YUM FRIED PORK WONTONS

Because it’s not something often seen on Thai menus here, you might think it’s a newfangled dish, but as Bon explains, countless noodle stalls in Thailand will also offer a side of wontons, flavoured with their house sauce, often a sauce riffing on tom yum flavours as it is here. Kiin’s take sees perfectly crisp freshly made pork wontons doused in a palm sugar, lime, and chilli sauce spiked with fried pork mince, crushed peanuts, and herbs.

BOAT NOODLES

Featuring a secret ingredient that makes them a little tricky to prepare authentically (pig’s blood isn’t the easiest thing to source here in red-taped Aotearoa), boat noodles are therefore scarce on Thai menus around town. At Kiin, a wonderfully dark, unctuous, restorative broth redolent with star anise, dark soy, and cinnamon is bolstered with deliciously thin al dente vermicelli, tender braised and sliced pork, pork liver, pork balls and pork crackling. The pièce de résistance that gives the broth a silky feel is the addition of pig’s blood at the end of cooking – Kiin buys that in frozen; fresh is impossible to get here. From the specials menu, you won’t always find this on but it’s one to look for, making an appearance a couple of times a year, says Bon. The dish is named for its origins, being sold from boats on the canals of Ayutthaya, but now widespread throughout Thailand.

KHAO MUN GAI MIXED

Thailand’s version of Hainanese chicken rice is sold on street corners all over Thailand but is conspicuously absent from menus abroad. Somkiat hasn’t got the memo, thankfully. He steams jasmine rice in chicken stock with garlic, ginger, coriander, and pandan leaves. It’s served with poached or fried chicken thigh, or in this case, both – the perfect option for indecisive orderers! Alongside is a chicken broth so good you’ll wish it was available on tap, sweet chilli sauce, and a garlicky soy sauce enriched with soybean paste. Pure comfort food.

SOM TUM TWO WAYS

After my first travels through Thailand in the mid-naughties, I sought out som tum made with the requisite unripe papaya once back in Aotearoa and found anything but … carrot, apple, cabbage and, god forbid, even swede were being substituted. (For the record, swede is the worst fit IMO, its faint bitterness and grainy texture are so wrong here … but trust me when I say kohlrabi kinda works if desperate.) That was not only because green papaya was too hard to come by, but also, Bon says, because restaurants couldn’t rely on customers ordering what was an unfamiliar dish, which therefore meant expensive produce would be wasted. Thank goodness times have ‘a changed, with restaurants like Kiin able to consistently source the right produce, and local palates having collectively expanded that bit further.

Kiin does som tum two ways. Those who are new to it may like to start with the Thai version which at Kiin sees a combination of shredded papaya and carrot, and sliced green beans and tomato smashed in a big mortar along with garlic, and a refreshing dressing of fish sauce, lime juice, and palm sugar. A two-chilli version packs a pretty good heat, you can ask for less chilli if you like.

Salty and funky enter in Kiin’s som tum pu pla ra version taking the lead role. This classic Isaan dish comes with fermented crab bashed in with the vegetables – it permeates the salad with a definitely funky, umami flavour that you’re either going to love, or … not. Bon admits that even though he’s Isaan by birth he’s not the biggest crabby fan, meanwhile my B

ritish-born dining partner is busy contentedly sucking juicy meat from crab parts. You won’t know till you try, basically.

Kiin serves som tum with a side of crisp sliced cabbage, lettuce, and steamed vermicelli – these little elements really add to the experience, a bite of the cabbage, for example, providing a crisp, neutral-sweet respite from the heat, and the noodles mopping up the juices. They also offer a som tam platter version which is an absolute feast on its own. The platter sees som tum surrounded with fried chicken wings, Thai ham, boiled eggs, preserved mustard greens, cabbage, and vermicelli. As Bon points out, that crackling, which Somkiat makes (they sell it by the bag sometimes, too) also soaks up the juices; one of the joys of this dish is nibbling on juice-free crackling alongside bits that have absorbed liquid and turned QQ-chewy.

MANGO STICKY RICE

If you’ve seen queues out the door at Kiin over the past few months, this is why. Kiin’s version of this ubiquitous fav has gone viral especially with the Mandarin-speaking community, gaining the restaurant a flood of new custom. Kiin only serves the dish in the months when we can get large and properly ripe mangoes here, as opposed to the central American imports we get year-round, which, with their depressingly absent aroma, never amount to much flavour-wise. Asian mangoes are good, but smaller and prohibitively priced, but the big Aussie mangoes that hit the shop shelves here between around September and January are what Kiin pounces on.

Nitchapa, who is a dab hand with desserts (she is also excellent with Korean cuisine, as an interesting aside) came up with Kiin’s version and, guys, it’s so good – if you can’t get it in time for this mango season ending, bookmark it for next year. Her sweetened, coconut-rich sticky rice is coloured blue with butterfly pea flower, and she cooks it perfectly so each grain of rice remains distinct. The generous serving of mango is flavoursome and juicy, and the side sauce of sweet-salty coconut cream bonds it all together. A $14.50 ticket to heaven.

PAD KRA PAO JUMBO

It features on pretty much every Thai menu in town, but rarely do you find the more traditional version of pad kra pao as is served at Kiin, where rather than being loaded with red pepper, carrot, beans, and bamboo shoots, the dish is pretty much veg-free. Roughly minced pork is the hero and lots of it, spruiked with red chilli and basil. Kiin jumbo version enables the kitchen to offer extra value by cooking a large portion of the pork mince, which is served atop steamed jasmine rice with a coupla fried eggs on top and sliced cucumber on the side. Pad krapao with a fried egg on is such a Thai classic, hawked on every corner and every market stall. There, it’s never loaded with vegetables – go get your 5+ by ordering whatever veggies you fancy on the side.

Kiin is closed for the summer break from 20th December, reopening on 19th January. Bon, Yok and family including Somkiat are travelling in Thailand – cue growing envy over their posts to Kiin’s instagram stories as they eat their way around, picking up inspiration to bring back to the Auckland restaurant in the new year (follow their flavour journey at @kiinthai). Bon, we hope that kickboxing session you booked in with Trainer Gae is memorable for all the right reasons … ouch!

Kiin Thai Underground Kitchen - 699 Mount Eden Road, Mount Eden, Auckland | 09 600 2166 | Fri 5pm-9pm and Sat-Sun 11am-9pm Bookings welcome

kiin.nz | kiinthaikitchen@gmail.com | facebook | Instagram | view in maps